Telematics is an interdisciplinary field of technology that includes telecommunications, electrical engineering, infomatics, computer science; but at its core refers to the transmission of information.
It can be many things for vehicles, but in mostly used to refer to the devices that report data or information to or from a vehicle, such as location, vehicle status, fuel level etc. – anything that sort of information that you’d like to know, but don’t necessarily have eyes on all the time.
It can also include things like Power-takeoff activations, tyre pressure, cold unit temperature, door status, and much more. The key is the transmission/reporting of information.
What is the timeframe for ROI?
The bottom line is you can only improve what you are tracking – how else will you measure improvement?
Telematics can help to save substantial money in many ways, such as utilisation, fuel consumption, and driver hours. It can also help provide significant one-time savings on things like insurance claims, vehicle theft, or unauthorised operations.
The timeframe in which telematics provides ROI varies wildly depending on the fleet. It is quite common for telematics to provide such substantial time and cost savings that it pays for itself and then some.
Cheaper Maintenance
It’s a bit like managing your health—prevention is better than the cure. Maintenance often happens only once something breaks or becomes a problem and is ignored otherwise. Sometimes, ignoring things ends up being extremely costly and sometimes irreversible.
Things break – we know that. What we don’t know is when will they break. But, when you’ve been around for a bit, you get a good idea of when it’s likely to happen. Truck has done 50,000km without service? Probably a good idea to book a service.
When you start to have a better grasp of how your vehicles and machinery are used, you can better plan when and what maintenance needs to be done, keeping everything operating in good condition and removing unplanned disruption.
Telematics gives you the data you might only receive in-cabin in a digital sense—you can see remotely all the data necessary to determine if or when a vehicle needs maintenance.
Combined with a fleet management solution like Webfleet, this telematics data is reported centrally, building digital logs for review, and facilitating things like automated alerts for when a service is coming up based on intervals such as distance travelled or hours.
When you have accurate monitoring, you know ahead of time when something is likely to break; so you can amend it before it does.
Risk Management
The biggest factor for risk, danger, and challenges within managing vehicles is the human element. It’s easy to forget that vehicle operation is a license activity; not everyone can drive a vehicle – you need a license.
Telematics can aid by monitoring and reporting who is driving a vehicle, where and when it’s being driven, and more. All these datapoints can help better manage fatigue, improve road safety, and can also be used to reduce the cost of claims and insurance.
Advanced telematics also helps with monitoring unauthorised activations or driving; with alerts for when a vehicle crosses set boundaries, and man down, crash, or roll-over alerts in the event of an incident.
Removing human errors in information
Relying on accurate human entry of information. It’s human to make mistakes, and an innocuous one can be extremely expensive. A comma instead of a decimal can have huge implications down the line – ordering 1000.00 litres of fuel instead of 100,000 – that fleet won’t be going anywhere.
Telematics digitises a huge amount of data entry, ensuring all figures and tracking are always accurate—extremely important for things like payroll and fuel consumption.
Faster data frees up time
When data is automatically and remotely transmitted, you don’t have to wait for drivers to submit the logbooks on a Friday afternoon or manually the odometer readings to make sure it all matches. It’s all done for you – there’s no wiggle room, it just gets done.
This means you don’t have to chase things down and can focus your efforts on the things that matter, require your expertise and input.
What data can be collected to make a fleet safer?
Telematics is renowned for providing information to help improve safety of fleet drivers and other road users. Accidents are often preventable—it’s the small events in the lead-up that often result in an incident: fatigue, inattentive speeding, distraction, worn tyres. Some of these things can have a bigger impact than others, but they are all preventable.
Advancements in telematics can let you know when it’s time for a break – vehicle in motion for more than 2 hours? Drivers can receive an alert to stop, revive, survive. Approaching 50,000km on the same set of tyres? Operators know it’s time to rotate tyres.
Telematics also helps to provide insight into how a driver drives, such as speeding. Most advanced devices feature accelerometers, tracking things like harsh steering or harsh braking; some newer devices can also scan the road to monitor for things like driver distraction or lane drifting.
All this data is sent to a central reporting system, like Webfleet, so drivers and fleet managers can see how they are driving, challenge assumptions, and ensure safety.
Webfleet also features driver aids that can provide real-time in-cabin feedback to the driver as the event occurs, helping to challenge things such as casual speeding, eating and driving, or no seatbelt use.
Webfleet also helps facilitate things like a pre-start checklist or vehicle inspections, encouraging routine for drivers to follow the process.
It’s all about risk mitigation and preventable causes; again, good data and knowing helps ensure you are aware and can take action.
What features of telematics can help a fleet work out what vehicles are ideal right now for swapping over to electric power?
Electric vehicles require a different mindset for many operators – most notably the shift in infrastructure. Instead of tracking at a depot or or bowser, how do you correctly track the charge or power draw for an EV?
A good data framework is the key to unlocking the returns offered by an electric vehicle.
Webfleet, as an example, can assess an EVs battery state, where it charges, how long it charges, how much it charges, and most importantly when it charges.
Combining all that data gives you an accurate insight into price per kW for an EV.
Webfleet also supports historical data assessment – it can look through the known journey data of tracked vehicles and recommend if it’s a suitable vehicle for electrification. This uses metrics such as common routes, general route distances, average driving distances, utilisation, and more, to see if a vehicle is suitable to be electrified.
Is it advisable to start with a few of the most beneficial features, and if so, what are they?
The amount of information that can be sourced from telematics is vast and can sound overwhelming for the uninitiated. Many telematics users say they don’t use all the information they get.
Great telematics solutions today are platforms – they can capture almost anything, and that availability gives you organic use-cases.
Often businesses use telematics initially for vehicle tracking – knowing where assets are is hugely important, but then it grows, soon it expands – who is driving a vehicle, what consignment does it have, what job is assigned to it, where is it going, how long has it been since its last service, and more.
The best advice is if you have to do it with paper, or it requires a few different platforms or systems, it can usually be done through your telematics.
Platforms like Webfleet are just that – platforms. They can support and plug into a wide array of business processes, removing a lot of manual middle-work.
The first top three features of telematics are usually:
- Location tracking & security devices like trackers & dashcams
- Odometer & Fuel usage/consumption data
- Driver hours and time on the road
Why is telematics worthwhile for small fleets? And, how simple is it to install and subscribe for a basic system, one that will bring the key benefits of safety, fleet planning, and cost savings?
It is absolutely worth it. If you’re a small operator, the simple peace of mind that comes from always knowing where your $50,000 asset is at any time can be huge. As one Webfleet telematics customers recently said, “Knowing where my vehicles are—that helps me sleep at night.”
Tack on things like activation alerts or zoning, and it can make a world of difference for asset security.
Telematic devices can have varying levels of installation—it depends on what you want to capture. At the simplest level, a device like our LINK245 is self-installable; plug it into your vehicle’s OBD2 port, and it’s all done. No cabling, bolting, drilling, etc., is necessary. It’s plug-and-play and provides all the tracking and activation data you may need.
The most common piece of telematics we see on top of vehicle tracking is dashcam footage. With rising insurance premiums and incident rates, having a clear picture of what happened involving your vehicles is hugely important. It can be the difference between winning a claim or losing and seeing premiums rise.
