You probably have heard of business intelligence dashboards before. They help you visualise all your key enterprise data points in a consolidated manner for decision making. Imagine this being applied to a Fleet Management System (FMS). An FMS analytics dashboard in particular gives an overview of your fleet and assets through data visualisation. By monitoring these dashboards, company management can make swifter, strategic and operational decisions in an informed manner, translating to better business performance. For fleet managers out there, FMS dashboards might just be that useful tool that you have been looking for. Continue reading to see how you can leverage data on your FMS analytics dashboard.
How to make the most use of an FMS analytics dashboard:
How to make the most use of an FMS analytics dashboard:
1. Track overall fleet efficiency
Fleet efficiency can be measured by analysing a vehicle’s total motion and idling hours. Through an FMS analytics dashboard, data that describes a fleet’s motion/idling duration will help you better understand how efficiently your fleet is being utilised.
For example, in Figure 1, we can see at one glance that the idling hours generally hover above the motion hours. This signifies that the fleet is not utilised efficiently and strategies (eg. better route planning) need to be implemented to optimise fleet utilisation.
2. Track fleet mileage to estimate fuel costs per vehicle
An FMS analytics dashboard is also able to track and consolidate the distances that each vehicle travels over a period of time, and this can help you estimate fuel costs per vehicle, which means planning for fuel expenses is made easier. Fuel expenses are categorised under a company’s operating expenses. With this, when a company does its budgeting, it will be able to forecast future fuel expenses based on data shown on the dashboard, therefore crafting a stronger financial plan.
As seen in Figure 2, the top 10 and bottom 10 vehicles that clock the greatest mileage can be identified based on the bar graphs. We can safely infer that the top 10 vehicles that cover the greatest mileage will incur the highest fuel costs and vice versa. Should there be any major discrepancies found, the management can investigate accordingly.
3. Track driving speeds to identify driver violations
Oftentimes, poor driving behaviour goes unnoticed especially when a company has a large fleet size as it can be taxing for the fleet manager to track every errant event. Some examples of driver violations include harsh acceleration or braking, as well as speeding. Such behaviour can be problematic and should not be overlooked as this could potentially lead to damaged goods, accidents and serious legal issues.
Figure 3 illustrates line graphs which show the trend of driver violations over a period of one year. This can help managers identify common behaviours among drivers. With such information, they could take further actions such as giving warnings, providing retraining or even installing speed limiters for certain vehicles. Figure 4 further shows the precise locations in which drivers violate traffic rules and guidelines, which helps managers pinpoint the potential root causes of such behaviours. For instance, the drivers may tend to make harsh cornerings in certain areas due to infrastructural or terrain reasons.
All in all, a good FMS analytics dashboard can help you with better decision-making based on data collected. Apart from tracking the location of your vehicles and assets, viewing track history, as well as generating trips, engine hours and other related reports via our current iSPOT FMS, the new iSPOT FMS Analytics provides an easy-to-view snapshot of your fleet and assets at the management and operational level. Having a bird’s eye view of your company’s operations grants you a greater awareness of how your company is performing overall.
We understand the pain of making important decisions on behalf of the company — one wrong move and it might create ripple effects. With iSPOT FMS Analytics, we can at least be sure that making decisions will not be as daunting anymore. Contact us today!
Jaelyn Chui June 21, 2022 2:56 pm
