How to Improve Last Mile Delivery with Smarter Telematics

Data is destiny. And when it comes to fleet management and logistics, the more data you can leverage, the more effectively you can manage costs, keep customers happy, and ensure safety on the road. That’s why, especially for larger fleets and delivery businesses that cover a wide geographic area, telematics and logistics management are two sides of the same coin.

The trucking and transportation industries have long benefited from telematics solutions that enable fleet managers to manage their operations more efficiently. By offering important data and insights, telematic systems combined with fleet management solutions empower fleet operators and managers to improve workflows and processes and get the most out of their assets.

From the outside, however, there can be some confusion about what vehicle telematics can and can’t do for your fleet. In this post, we will discuss how telematics works and its potential benefits.

Understanding Telematics

What is telematics? Technically speaking, telematics combines two disciplines: informatics and telecommunications. It refers to the process of remotely transferring data over long distances. These days, it is widely used in various industries to improve efficiency, communication, and customer service.

In the transportation industry, telematics for trucks is being used to collect data using the mix of sensors, GPS fleet tracking technology, and onboard diagnostic codes. The data collected usually includes driver behavior, vehicle location, vehicle activity, fuel consumption, and more. This data is then transmitted back to a central dashboard to allow fleet managers to keep track of the company's assets remotely.

Fleet telematics systems have two components: a GPS tracking device and a fleet management software solution. The telematics device is usually installed onboard the truck, with a receiver and SIM card that can connect to a cellular network. The data collected and transmitted then offers insights into the fleet's performance, which fleet operators and managers can leverage to improve driver performance and safety, minimize waste, and simplify fuel tax and ELD compliance. 

The Benefits of Telematics for Trucks

The right telematics system enables your fleet to simplify driver management, asset management, and operations—all with an eye towards increasing profitability. Below are the major benefits of telematics for trucks:

Minimize Fuel Wastage and Reduce Operating Expenses

Tracking drivers in real-time allows fleet managers to spot vehicle idling quickly and identify drivers who tend to idle more than they should. You can also visualize vehicle utilization rates data for each driver, so you can rank drivers and provide scorecards.

Fuel is one of the largest expenses in any fleet, and monitoring idling and coaching drivers as needed can help cut down fuel wastage. The result is decreased fuel bills, which will then help lower operating costs.

At the same time, the added visibility that real-time tracking provides can help reduce operating costs even further. How? By reducing the costs associated with failed deliveries and reverse logistics. Simply put, when you can see the entire last mile unfolding at a glance, you can identify potential delivery exceptions and work to manage them proactively.

If you notice that a truck isn’t where it’s supposed to be, and is thus not going to make its next stop on time, you can call the customer and arrange a new delivery window later in the day. In doing so, you make sure that the customer feels taken care of and the driver doesn’t have to haul that particular order back to the warehouse at the end of the day. The result is that last mile logistics is much smoother overall. 

Improve Fleet Safety

Safety is one of the top priorities of any fleet operator and manager. After all, even minor collisions or road accidents can present serious issues with six-figure implications—and the implications of a more severe incident are considerably more than that. 

Luckily, modern telematics systems and fleet management software can help you improve drivers' road behavior and increase road safety. Telematics systems offer fleet operators and managers data on drivers’ safety scores, allowing them to identify drivers in need of coaching. The telematics data collected by the system helps managers customize training and coaching plans per driver as needed. This has the power to improve the fleet's overall safety.

Streamline Payroll and Compliance Management

Managers can automate and streamline payroll management with a fleet management solution to minimize errors and clerical work. The right telematics fleet management system helps manage payroll more effectively by providing fleet managers with data on vehicle usage and fuel usage on the state-by-state basis. From there, you should be able to generate reports on fuel tax payments broken down by geography, such that you’re able to get those payments processed without a mountain of manual bookkeeping effort. 

Power Preemptive Vehicle Maintenance

Telematics also helps fleet managers identify vehicle maintenance-related issues before they cause breakdowns or other issues. In this way, you put yourself in a position to schedule preventive maintenance and thereby extend the useful lives of your assets. 

Telematics technologies enable fleet managers to catch vehicle maintenance problems early on via real-time alerts. This helps you identify potential issues quickly, safeguard CSA scores, and ultimately save your company money.

More Seamless Communication

Your fleet management solution should also help you streamline communications and increase connectivity between back-office employees and drivers. Combine streamlined communication with real-time tracking of vehicles and drivers, and you can instantly empower your team to provide customers with a more accurate estimated times of arrival (ETAs).

In this way, ensuring smooth communication and real-time monitoring of drivers is crucial for meeting customers' demands. Modern delivery customers want to track orders on their own and feel confident that the orders will actually arrive during the promised delivery time windows. The right technology helps you do exactly that.

Increase Productivity and Efficiency

Telematics for trucks helps fleet managers and other back-office employees see vehicle locations via GPS. Real-time monitoring and location history provided by telematics can help you identify the quickest and most cost-effective routes, cutting down fuel expenses and speeding up deliveries.

Most telematics systems also have geofencing capabilities, which can be used for both reducing detention time and tracking driver performance against delivery schedules. All these features enable fleet managers to enhance drivers’ productivity and overall fleet efficiency.

In this way, telematics helps fleets increase productivity, improve fleet safety and communication, and reduce costs. This makes telematics and fleet management solutions a sure formula for gaining a competitive advantage.

How Telematics Software Does and Doesn’t Make the Last Mile More Efficient

All that being said, not all delivery organizations have a strong need for this kind of tracking. Those that don’t typically send drivers out on multi-day routes, for instance, may be able to get enough visibility from other sources. For businesses that have a strong use case for telematics software, however, it can be a game-changer—as long as it’s paired with the right last mile routing and management technology. 

No solution exists in a vacuum. If you’re using telematics to track something that you haven’t first optimized to ensure efficient routes with accurate ETAs, then you’re still going to spend every delivery run putting out fires. By the same token, if you can see truck locations but not delivery statuses, you may not be getting the full picture of each delivery. 

That’s why it’s so crucial to make sure your telematics solution is a connected, integrated part of your full delivery and logistics software stack. The best case scenario is to have strong data integration between telematics and last mile delivery management, with live data flows between the two systems. When you make that happen, you can be sure that you’re getting the most out of both systems. 

Here are some other features and capabilities to look out for in your telematics software to help ensure great deliveries from end to end:

Cloud-based technology

Telematics software collects tons of data, which many physical servers and in-house IT teams can't handle. A cloud-based solution offers an easy workaround for that problem. This kind of deployment also does not require heavy maintenance work from the in-house IT department since the providers will be the ones to handle patches, upgrades, version control, and malware prevention. 

Cloud-based telematics systems are also more easily scalable, since businesses can choose to upgrade or downgrade features as needed. Perhaps most importantly, cloud technology makes data integration between different solutions much easier, helping multiply the impact of each solution. 

Total real-time visibility

As mentioned, GPS tracking is one of the most common features of telematics software. This feature offers many benefits to the fleet manager, dispatcher, and driver. It allows dispatchers to send the right driver at the right time according to the location of each truck of the fleet. When you can integrate this with real-time delivery status updates, you can get even more value out of it. 

Comprehensive data reporting

A must-have solution offers fleet managers comprehensive data on driver performance including location, speed, and harsh braking, and more. An advanced solution offers detailed and organized ways of presenting actionable driver reports. Ideally, you’d also be able to automatically report on things like fuel taxes and hours of service and easily export those reports as needed. 

Fleet operations are complex. Without the right technology, fleet managers are at risk of being blind to the crucial aspects of fleet operations. The right solution can offer real-time visibility and communication, seamless compliance, improved fleet safety, and cost savings—the trick is just to make sure this technology is integrated effectively into your larger last mile delivery process and technology. 

Want More Delivery Cost Optimization Tips? Read The Last Mile Cost Reduction Playbook: