As a business owner or fleet manager how can you actually monitor driver behaviour in the field?
Usually the only time you would know if a particular driver is not performing or is not driving safely is when a speeding or other fine is issued, or you get complaints from customers.
Other signs are lost or damaged goods or when there is damage to your company cars, vans or trucks.
Rather than wait for costly incidents and accidents to occur it’s much better to monitor and review driver behaviour whenever you need to.
That way you can discuss driving style issues BEFORE they become an expensive problem for you.
Monitoring driving styles is a challenge but the good news is that GPS tracking technology can automate driving behaviour monitoring and reporting.
GPS tracking technology – a fleet manager’s time saver
GPS tracking devices installed in your fleet vehicles can send important location and driving data automatically every 1 to 3 minutes.
You or your fleet manager can then easily monitor driving behaviour in real-time or run a monthly report on driving behaviour for each driver.
Driver behaviour statistics you can monitor
Some of the driver statistics you can monitor and other useful information include:
- Which driver – Either you have one designated driver per vehicle, or you use RFID technology with the GPS tracking hardware tracking device to identify each driver.
- Start and stops times – When the driver actually began their day, and how long they were on the road and how long they were at each stop
- Stopping locations – Where the driver stopped. So if they are ‘moonlighting’ and making private stops you’ll know
- Excessive idling – Leaving the engine running at stops
- Efficiency – Compare each driver’s day for amount of time on the road and stopping times. Obviously the benchmark depends on whether you have delivery, pickup or service people on the road.
- Speeding – Over a set speed
- Fuel consumption – Is a particular fleet vehicle consuming a lot more fuel that other fleet vehicle when driving similar total kilometers in a week or a month. Is fuel being ‘stolen’?
- Harsh braking – When their vehicle braked suddenly over a certain G-force threshold
- Harsh acceleration – When their vehicle accelerated quickly over a certain G-force threshold
Fleetminder Live Tracking System
The fleetminder tracking solutions incorporating the Live Tracking system allows you to run reports on various driver behaviour statistics.
These include:
Efficiency
This report can be run to show how many kilometres the vehicle has travelled on one day or over a date range:
Idle time report
This report that can be run to show when the vehicle was idling for long durations. The minimum idling threshold can be set to say 10 minutes, or any other threshold time.
Speeding report
Here’s a report that can be run to show when the driver was speeding. Usually set to 110km as the upper limit for SMS text warning alerts.
Other tracking reports
Besides the above driving behaviour reports you can obtain many other reports from the fleetminder Live Tracking system:
Summary
Of course, whilst monitoring driver behaviour is not something you or your fleet manager needs to review on a daily basis, you can certainly inspect any ‘problem’ drivers whenever you need to.
Also monthly reports on each vehicle and driver are available using this technology to check fleet efficiency.
Using smart technology like GPS fleet vehicle tracking with driving monitoring will decrease your fleet costs and improve safety for your fleet and the public.