There are more aspects to transportation safety and efficiency than what we see in front of the steering wheel. The dashboard provides limited insights into only a slice of a vehicle’s operation, ignoring crucial context about the full journey. Leading-edge technology now allows much deeper visibility into what is happening across an entire trip, both inside and outside of the vehicle cab. This provides fleet managers with the comprehensive intelligence needed to truly transform fleet oversight and performance.
Driver Monitoring Systems
Dashboard cameras have been used for years to capture video only after collisions or other safety events. But new in-cab monitoring solutions focus on the driver, providing constant driver monitoring to promote safer habits and prevent incidents before they occur. The people at Idrive explain that AI dash cameras can track indicators like distraction, fatigue, and cell phone use by analyzing the driver’s face, eyes, body language and driving behaviors. Fleet managers identify dangerous trends and can then coach drivers on following safety protocols.
Video Telematics
While driver monitoring provides insight into the human actions inside the vehicle cab, video telematics solutions capture the full 360-degree view of the vehicle’s entire trip. High-definition cameras mounted around the vehicle, combined with precise GPS tracking and sensor data, generates a visual timeline of the truck’s journey along with integrated analytics on critical operational factors. This creates an immersive, data-enriched record showing exactly what happened at every moment of a delivery. Fleet managers gain increased visibility and granular detail into real-world routing, parking, loading and unloading events, traffic patterns, and driver decision making to holistically optimize fleet oversight.
Managing Safety Beyond the Steering Wheel
Both driver monitoring and video telematics solutions move far beyond dashboards to provide expansive visibility into fleet vehicles. This allows fleet managers access to definitive data revealing what is taking place throughout trips across the fleet. With traditional approaches, there are often mismatched perceptions between management and drivers in identifying root causes after adverse events, but video intelligence provides irrefutable visual evidence. Additionally, the layers of data produced enable proactive assessment of systemic trends, issues and inefficiencies that can be addressed before problems arise. Managers also gain insight to better understand the realities drivers face so improved training, policies and support can be implemented.
Leveraging Intelligence for Savings
The granular visibility provided by both driver monitoring and video telematics allows fleet managers to pinpoint areas for potential savings across the organization.
For example, risky driving behaviors like speeding, rapid acceleration or hard braking exposed through the data directly correlate to higher costs because of fuel inefficiency and increased maintenance needs. Managers can quantify the rampant expenses tied to dangerous habits and reinforce protocols for smoother, safer driving standards.
Additionally, the detailed timelines generated by video telematics can identify wasted time across the delivery journey, like extensive wait times for warehouse loading/unloading or other bottlenecks. This allows streamlining of scheduling and staffing, outlining infrastructure changes needed, and highlighting where driver time can be recouped for more deliveries.
Conclusion
There is a entire world of action happening across fleet delivery trips beyond what dashboard gauges can show. State-of-the-art monitoring solutions open up this world so managers can oversee operations from the driver’s seat to the delivery dock. The comprehensive visibility and intelligence gained allows meaningful improvements across safety, service, sustainability and efficiency reflecting the true realities of the road. When implemented as a tool to enable drivers rather than simply monitor them, the results compound across both management objectives and driver experience for better performance all around. The time has come to see beyond vehicles’ dashboards in managing modern fleets.
