By RAM Tracking on 21 Feb 2023

For SMEs, ensuring you have a well-functioning fleet of vehicles is essential for your business. However, with the expectation for a more environmentally friendly fleet that follows sustainable practices rises, you must ensure that your fleet becomes not only more efficient but also more eco-friendly. A very easy way to achieve this is with real-time fleet monitoring. Through real-time insights you can make informed decisions that will help you reduce your fuel consumption, emissions and costs.

What is real-time fleet monitoring?

Vehicle tracking is a technology that utilises GPS technology to monitor where each vehicle within your fleet goes as well as their current and historical status throughout a period of time. The information that is gathered is then provided to the fleet manager through a central dashboard on a web app. This allows a company to then make informed decisions based on the data they receive.

How can this be used to improve efficiency and reduce emissions?

With vehicle tracking in place you gain the ability to proactively optimise your routes which helps you to reduce the amount of fuel that is wasted to cover the same area.You proactively optimise your routes by looking at frequently travelled routes and look into the areas that have heavy traffic or they take a longer route when different roads could be taken to make the overall distance a driver travels much shorter. This will help you to reduce your fleet's fuel consumption and emissions as well as helping to improve your overall efficiency.

You can also take data in to help reduce your fleet's idling time and improve their driving habits.You are able to track speed, acceleration, periods of idling and instances of rapid acceleration and harsh braking to pain a picture of your driver's behaviour. This allows you to do 1:1 coaching to help improve driver behaviour. This can result in significant fuel savings and reduced overall emissions. 

Real-time fleet monitoring can provide an SME with a range of benefits like:

• A reduction in fuel costs: proactively optimising your driver's routes allows you to bring down the amount that you spend on fuel through reducing wasted petrol from idle time or reducing the distance they have to drive whilst covering all of their jobs still.
• Improved customer satisfaction: real-time updates on the current status of a delivery or a job allow you to not only improve customer satisfaction by providing accurate ETAs on when a driver will arrive on site but additionally, it helps to improve overall trust.
• Increased efficiency: by looking into the various driver's idle time as well as their driving behaviour, you can utilise this to ensure your drivers are using best practices behind the wheel, such as maintaining speed and not stop-starting where possible, to ensure that you maximise your fuel economy. 
• Reduced environmental impact: all of the points we have covered come together to ensure that you don't waste fuel, you can reduce your emissions and more. This helps your business reduce your environmental impact whilst improving your sustainability credentials.

Conclusion

The demand for environmentally sustainable practices is growing, even as far as as vehicles in the UK requiring to be electric by 2030 and hybrid vehicles phasing out by 2035. 

Not only will a vehicle tracking system allow you to move towards these eco-friendly practices but additionally, you gain a range of benefits ranging from reduced fuel costs to better management of resources. 

If you're an SME and you are looking into ways to ensure that your fleet is eco-friendly whilst maintaining maximum efficiency, real-time fleet monitoring is a smart investment to achieve this all whilst improving your business' bottom line.