5 Key Features to Look for in a Fleet Management Solution

Pop quiz: What’s the hardest part of the logistics process to optimize? 

It could easily be last mile routing—the number of parameters that have to be factored into most delivery routes can make the process virtually impossible to get right by hand. Conversely, it might be warehouse management—it’s a delicate balancing act across the board, and it’s where the foundations of many logistics strategies are put to the test. Or is it simply gaining logistics visibility across the entire supply chain?

If you’ve picked one process, you’ve already got the answer wrong. Why? Because each of the logistics processes you could name are all intimately connected, and you can’t improve your operations without considering them as a cohesive whole. 

This is easier said than done. For starters, there are huge operational and project management hurdles that you have to overcome in order to create visibility and connectivity across a large organization with multiple moving parts. Generally, everyone has their own system and their own way of doing things, and achieving standardization feels like pulling teeth. 

There’s also the fact that information in logistics goes out of date extremely rapidly. By the time you’ve called a delivery driver to find out what their status is and then manually entered that information into a message to a colleague, the driver’s status is likely to be completely different. They’ll have completed the delivery and moved onto the next one, or they’ll have gotten completely stuck somehow and run into issues. 

But even if you can handle the transition to holistic logistics—including the last mile—from an operational process, you’ve still got to find the right software to support your transition. That’s where the right fleet management solution comes in. 

In this article, we’ll sketch out the most important things to look for in fleet management solutions, as well as how and why each feature contributes to ensuring total fleet and logistics visibility.  

What Are the Most Important Features and Capabilities in a Fleet Management Solution?

Ensuring total visibility, control, and standardization across your entire logistics chain has never been more crucial. But finding the right trucking fleet management software that can support you is a potential roadblock. There are plenty of options out there, and not all of them can provide you with what you need. 

Here are some features and capabilities to look out for as you seek to integrate the right software solution:

1. Complete Visibility and Connectivity Across Logistics

To really get visibility into logistics, you need connectivity across the board and a system that connects each piece of the puzzle to the next. From pickups to transfers, deliveries, and service visits, you need to gain full chain-of-custody tracking, digital proof of handoff, and a complete audit trail to ensure accountability at every step.

Any new piece of software you integrate should be able to support the goal of total visibility. When it comes to fleet management solutions, look for something that combines planning, tracking, execution, and documentation under one roof—all while seamlessly transferring data to and from other solutions in your tech stack. 

2. AI-Powered Chat Bots for Customer Experience

Customer experience in last mile deliveries is at an inflection point. Customers have exacting expectations, and in most industries they have plenty of options for who to buy from. If you can compete on customer experience, you can win business away from your competitors. 

One of the most exciting new ways to do that is to leverage AI-powered chat agents that can instantly respond to customer queries at all times of day or night. Obviously, no one wants to feel like they’re being foisted off onto a robot when they should be speaking to a human, so the best practice here is to ensure that the agent slots seamlessly into a larger, multi-touch customer communication workflow, with the ability to escalate to a human as needed (and provide context to that human when they jump in to help). 

If you can meet those two criteria with your AI-powered customer experience agent, you can speed up responses to basic customer inquiries like “what’s my delivery ETA” while freeing up your team’s time significantly. The end result is reduced costs associated with communication, increased customer connectivity, and smoother workflows overall. 

3. Robust Compliance Workflows

A big part of gaining true visibility comes from standardization. Think of it like a baseball box score: if everyone is playing the same rules and repeating the same process in a way that can be easily tracked and transmitted, you can get your questions about the game (or the delivery run) answered with a quick glance. 

That’s why your fleet management solution should make it easy to digitize and simplify prescriptive driver workflows for better accuracy and oversight. This starts with a highly connected driver mobile app that provides real-time updates throughout the entire process while supporting your drivers and technicians with customized workflows.

Rather than guessing at whether or not an HVAC technician or an appliance installation team performed all of the right steps, you can see from the delivery documentation that they checked each box at the right stage. This way, a quick look at your reporting shows whether you are—or aren’t—in compliance with the way you’re managing your logistics processes. 

4. Support for Predelivery Site Assessments 

This is another area where your trucking fleet management software’s customer communication capabilities are key. You should be able to send out pre-delivery site assessment checklists to customers before your drivers arrive, so that your drivers and technicians can be confident that the delivery site is in good shape for whatever delivery or service they need to perform—e.g. clearing the area around an installation site or making sure there’s a clear space to load in.

This decreases the amount of time your drivers spend on site at the same time that it decreases the odds that a delivery or service can’t be completed at all. The result is that the entire logistics process runs that much more smoothly, and you save money as a result. 

5. Intelligent, Streamlined Warehouse Loading Management

In addition to ensuring total documentation and compliance, your fleet management solution’s mobile app should enable you to integrate, simplify, and streamline the process of loading the truck at the hub or warehouse before the route starts. 

Getting an app with scanning capabilities and a checklist is easy enough. The tricky part is finding something with the built-in user roles that will enable you to keep this process within the same ecosystem—even when the driver isn’t the same person loading the truck. 

Look for something that can automatically match scanned items to orders, as well as offering support for pallet scanning if needed. This can significantly speed up both loading and unloading.

<< Learn how DispatchTrack helped BMD speed up deliveries with smarter pallet scanning—read the case study! >>

Leveling up Your Fleet Management with Connected Logistics 

If you can find a fleet management solution that offers all of these capabilities, you can do more than optimize your fleet management process—you can standardize, digitize, and ultimately transform your logistics operations into a major driver of value and cost efficiency within your organization. Not only that, but you can boost customer satisfaction while you’re doing it.