The market for fleet management software has expanded exponentially in the last few years. After all, if you want to gather, manage, and utilise all available data effectively, a sophisticated system becomes a paramount need.
Your choice of software has a significant impact on the efficiency and performance of your entire fleet. Therefore, you must be attentive while selecting the best fleet management software for your company.
How to Choose the Best Fleet Management Software – What to Look For
The competition and diversity in the SaaS market make it challenging to select the best software for your fleet. But don’t be concerned! We’re here to support you in making the best choice. Therefore, before selecting the fleet management software provider you want to work with, carefully go over the following items.
The Industries It Serves
Before looking for a solution for your fleet, you need to know the problems you are likely to, or already face in your niche. Once you’ve determined what you need, you can check to see if the system you like addresses all your issues.
These are a handful of the industries that fleet management software serves, along with details on their particular needs:
- Logistics: For the logistics and transportation sector, features like route deviation alerts, real-time ETAs, fuel monitoring, onboard vehicle analysis, and driver behaviour analysis are crucial.
- FMCG: Controlling cabin temperature and maintaining vehicle security becomes crucial for vehicles transporting FMCG goods. The perfect programme provides precise ETAs, load sensors, and delivery proofs via notifications or geofencing.
- Agriculture: For data-driven farming supervision of cultivated areas, the agriculture sector needs smart geofences. An added bonus is safety features like immobilisation and engine on/off indicators.
- Public Transport: A driver behaviour study is necessary. The public transportation system will be better and safer the better the drivers are! Additionally, route planning and the integration of the panic button will improve the software experience.
- Construction: Real-time emergency notifications, load sensing, engine hour monitoring, and smart geofencing are necessities for the construction sector. Your top priorities should be software strength indicators like low downtime and mixed asset management.
- Pharmaceutical: You’ll require cabin temperature controls and route optimization while managing a fleet of pharmaceutical vehicles. Transportation of medical equipment requires software support that prevents lags or downtime.
- Rental Vehicles: The management of rental vehicles is significantly influenced by features like trip summaries reports, driver behaviour analysis, onboard diagnostics, and fuel management.
The Features It Offers
If you want to improve your fleet management system, you should think about if it has the features you need to up your fleet management game.
- White Label: Why promote a different business when you can use the software under your own name? It is advisable to select a white label software solution that will handle all the technical aspects for you while still allowing the programme to be branded in your company’s name if your fleet management software is going to gain widespread attention.
- Automation: Machine learning and automation are the pillars of the future of telematics. Smart ETAs, automatic reporting, alerts, etc., therefore, have a big impact on the overall efficiency of your fleet and the user experience.
- Fuel Monitoring: Fuel management is made considerably simpler by fuel monitoring features including immediate drainage reports and real-time fuel monitoring along with accurate data. To prevent wastage and its associated effects on the environment and fleet economy, fuel monitoring is essential.
- Driver Management: Analyzing driver behaviour results in significant cost savings. Consequently, your fleet management should be able to assist you in differentiating between reckless and responsible drivers. Then, to increase productivity, you can teach problematic drivers how to drive skillfully and safely.
- Trip Management: Software enables you to schedule and maps your journeys in accordance with wise insights obtained from geographical data. You can get your drivers to quit making pointless stops and long detours by using trip management.
- Performance Reports: You can enhance the business and metric analysis necessary for your trade with performance review reports.
- Sensor Compatibility: Utilizing IoT and OBD sensors, including accelerometers and tyre pressure monitors, gives you a better picture of the performance of the car and the driver. Additionally, for cold-chain operations, cabin temperature monitoring is essential.
- Geofences: Geofences are a fantastic technique to monitor the movement of your vehicles even when you are not watching them in real time. Geofences can also be used, among other things, to monitor rental businesses and analyse driver behaviour.
- Alerts: Alerts are essential, including those for theft, geofencing, maintenance, and route deviation. You may manage your fleet with these alerts without constantly checking your fleet management system.
- Safety: Utilizing fleet management software gives you access to security features like remote immobilization, battery safety alarms, and theft alarms. It is best to make an investment in fleet management software that improves fleet efficiency and protects your consignment’s cars.
- History: The majority of software can only save 1-2 months’ worth of fleet data in their databases. However, you will require software that can retain up to six months’ worth of data history if you want thorough performance reports.
The Fleet Management Software’s Ease of Use
Are you transitioning from a wholly manual format directly to software fleet management? Because it can be challenging to get the hang of software, many fleet managers are wary of this change. As a result, you ought to select software with an intuitive interface.
The software must first be developed with user-friendliness in mind. However, it is likely to be ideal for you if the software vendor provides the following three things:
- a capable support group with outstanding availability
- providing consumers with fundamental instruction on basic problem-solving
- complete personalization based on your level of comfort.
The Performance You Can Get Trom the Vehicle Management System
Examine how well and rapidly any software gathers, processes, displays, and syncs data during software demos.
Software lags are just as bad as software crashes, and they eliminate the “real-time” quality of real-time GPS tracking systems. Give precedence to the software that experiences the fewest outages.
Additionally, you must determine how resistant to viruses and online threats certain programmes are. This is particularly crucial to prevent persistent crashes and data theft.
The Software’s Scalability
The easiest approach to determine whether a piece of software is beneficial for your company is to look at how it supports expansion and scalability.
With a small fleet of 10 vehicles, you may begin utilising fleet management solutions. You might, however, gradually build up to a fleet of 100, 1000, or even more! As a result, the software you select should have enough storage and processing power for your expanding organisation.
Your software vendor should be committed to performing R&D and delivering upgrades to address your sector-specific issues.
Summing Up
Fleet management can be made as straightforward or as complex as you want. Using the appropriate software can make your job as simple as breathing. However, compared to manual fleet management, using outdated software will only make things more difficult.
Make sure to take into account everything on our checklist before choosing the right fleet management system for your business!
