Create efficient routes to save time and money

Distributors face multiple challenges every day – high volume of customer orders to organise, rising fuel costs, drivers and vehicles to manage, changing road and traffic conditions, and tight time windows. These scenarios combine and create an overwhelming situation.

Market Motion’s expert route analysis utilising Omnitracs’ next gen technology will take all of these challenges into account and works to find the best possible route plan to reach a fleet’s business goals each day. Fleets with optimised routes often save time and money while providing better service to their customers.

Reducing transportation costs

Driving fewer kilometres means less fuel and reduced wear and tear on vehicles

Improve customer service

Ensure all of your customers receive their customer on time and in correct time windows

Better resource utilisation

Add more stops to your routes and reduce overtime or even reduce a vehicle

Increase driver safety

Ensure drivers are compliant with working hours and reduce dwell time

Determining the best type of route optimisation for your business

Before deciding exactly how your business can benefit from route optimisation, it helps to know the difference between two primary routing methods – standard and dynamic.

Standard routing is a key solution for customer service. Each route will have a specific set of stops in a specific orders, guaranteeing that your customers will always have their product delivered at a specified time, often by the same driver.

Dynamic routing is on the other end of the spectrum and is best if your business’ main goal is cutting costs. Customers lose the predictability of standard routing, but you reduce miles and improve efficiency.

A route optimisation solution helps find a happy medium between these methods to not only please customers, but also improve your bottom line.

Routing methods guide

The two main tyes of routing – standard vs dynamic each have their pros and cons.
Which is the best for your business?

Download

Roadnet Anywhere daily route planning

The post What is route optimisation? appeared first on Market Motion.

The real question you should be asking yourself is, can my fleet run properly without it?

Imagine this scenario. You are coaching your son’s junior AFL team. You work hard to teach them the fundamentals, coach them, and give them the ability to play the game. On game day, the kids are ready, the field is set, and it’s time to play ball. Then, you walk into the concession stand and lock yourself in the storage cupboard since you know the kids are ready and you trust their ability and desire to win will result in a victory… of course, no coach would ever do that. A good coach needs to be involved in the game, giving instructions, changing plays, and engaging his players. But many fleet managers don’t do this.

Yes, most of us do go into the field and engage with drivers, and often managers and drivers exchange many phone calls throughout the day to solve problems, but these interactions will never show you the game as it’s happening. That’s where having a robust fleet telematics system comes into play.

A new tech solution to old fleet management problems

Every day, you send out a fleet of expensive vehicles filled with expensive products to your customers as safely and efficiently as you can. You hope nothing goes wrong, but surprises happen.

Service delays, traffic congestion, and accidents all impact performance. Most importantly, customer expectations are not met when your daily plan goes wrong. The data you need to make decisions is limited and arrives too late to impact events in a meaningful way.

What you need is real-time data.

Stay in the game with real-time analytics

Fleet telematics provides real-time data that helps you understand vehicle usage and create programs to keep expenses at a minimum when surprises happen. It also helps you on a micro-level, like reducing idling and improving vehicle maintenance programs.

The value for vehicle-centric improvements is clear, but that is only half of the opportunity. The ability to use telematics to immediately impact driver behaviour is another important aspect. Often, adding telematics will automatically reduce mileage as drivers becomes aware their days are being tracked. Drivers are more likely to stay on their route and are generally safer when they know somebody is watching. Telematics acts as your eyes to manage your fleet and people in real time.

How Roadnet Telematics can help you

Roadnet Telematics provides higher situational awareness by letting managers know where every driver and vehicle is in real time. You can use this data to understand and change behaviours to root out unnecessary costs.

The telemetry data provides evidence to understand what really happened after a service failure, accident, or off-route event. Without telematics, investigating and resolving these issues is tough because there is little information available. With telematics, all the data you need is there. The right data helps protect you and your team from unsafe behaviour, false legal claims, and unjustified expenses.

Real-time, analytical data is one of the driving benefits of fleet telematics. Having this data enables you to:

• improve management of fleet resources
• reduce fleet fuel costs by reducing vehicle idling
• capture useful information for proactive maintenance
• reduce fleet costs by making your vehicles last longer through safety and maintenance improvement
• validate reported safe driving incidents

But you won’t need to stay in the office to watch the information pouring in. Instead of forcing your managers to collect data and analyse reports, Roadnet Telematics gives you the right information when you need it so you can focus on execution. With this data, you can monitor multiple driver activities to develop protocols and policies for improving key metrics. Performance data can be used to identify opportunities to reduce fleet operating costs and track performance against your new policies.

Tracking KPIs that matter

Capturing fleet management key performance indicators is crucial. Without it, you lack the data you need to make informed decisions that impact your bottom line.

Roadnet Telematics is powered by GPS, allowing managers to locate stolen vehicles, track vehicles 24 hours a day and know immediately when there is unauthorised vehicle usage. GPS tracking improves daily route adherence, routing metrics, and the routing process (such as service times and geocode validations).

Now you can capture actual arrival, departure, and driving times, which let you optimise departure based on traffic congestion, delivery windows, and frequency of visits.

Roadnet also empowers you to save fuel by ensuring that routes are optimised and scheduled routes match actual activity. Telematics data helps you do this by integrating this information into your routing process.

Can you afford to function without it?

Let Roadnet Telematics be your catalyst for change. Given the competition of operating a fleet in today’s world, the question isn’t why don’t you have telematics — it’s how can you function without it?

Roadnet Telematics makes sure your efficiency programs are executed intelligently. It helps every company have the most cost-effective operation, giving you the data to make the right decisions, rapidly drive out bad performance, and track your vehicles in real-time. Be aware or beware.

Call Market Motion on 1300 558 381 to get started with Roadnet Telematics today!

The post What are the benefits of Telematics? appeared first on Market Motion.

Once data is collected and combined, there are 4 ways in which this data can be processed. These are descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. The first two still involves a lot of human input, which means studying what actually happened. However, big data is playing a huge role in the predictive and prescriptive features. Predictive means getting a chance to use data to support decision making and prescriptive allows companies to see how big data can help prevent similar instances in the future.

Hence, not only is it important to know what to do once big data is collected, but the serious effort should be put into finding innovative methods of collecting big data. With the help of this data, actionable KPIs can be set through an informed and holistic approach. This helps monitor discrepancies and use quantifiable data to make decisions. The four main considerations when setting your company’s KPIs were discussed in the webinar we held recently.

Setting actionable KPIs

Different businesses vary in size, employees, and stakeholders. Because all of these factors vary quite a bit, KPIs should be set based on your business or company strategy – namely what the business wants to achieve. For example, is the company’s main focus is cost, service, safety or somewhere in between? When there is a question of savings involved, do you invest these savings back in or take out? A good way to plan this is to get opinions directly from the customers and discuss the findings with the stakeholders.

‘Plan’ along with ‘actual’ data

It’s always good to have a plan in place. For example for a transportation company, they might have one of their KPIs set to a certain number of kilometres travelled a day. However, having an idea of the actual data and then comparing that with the planned data to see where there might be a shortcoming is a good way to analyse where you stand regarding output. Telematics or mobility devices are important operational execution tools that can help you bring that data together.

There are four major steps to this; firstly, strategic and proactive planning, this involves setting goals according to where you want to be current as a company. Analyse the customer base and human as well as equipment resources to see where you are and where you want to stand, you can even have deadlines and timelines.

The second is tactical planning, which involves planning the tactics behind achieving the goals above. Thirdly, the operational execution that involves actually going ahead with the plan and the last is data and analytics which involves collecting data and analysing it based on the four features discussed in the beginning.

As mentioned before, a simple time study can go a long way when you want to find areas for improvement in your company.

Tips for performance measurement

1. Avoid too many measurements. It’s important to understand that while having large sums of data can help make informed decisions, it is imperative that the measurement that takes place is simple and easy to read. Take a lot of measurements, yes, but simplify the areas of measurement.
2. Work with quantifiable terms, which are ratios or averages. This helps take the fluctuations out of the equation. Examples of these could be stops per kilometre, kilometres per route, cost per dollar of sales.
3. Set benchmarks and track progress. Once you have made an improvement decision, it is important to track the changes and hence, see where you stand after a certain period. This can be done by setting benchmarks for comparison. Longer term trends help with creating a more informed variance and hence, you can set what an appropriate variance is and ultimately, reducing the variance between the actual and the desired value.
4. Analyse all parts of a route. Suppose you are looking to decide what an appropriate variance between the actual and the planned value is. To do it, it is important to take into consideration all the various parts of the route.

Tools that provide advanced visualisation

Once you have decided on using big data to make informed decisions and set KPIs across your company, is it important to find ways to analyse the data easily. This can be done by using graphs and other layouts that easily highlight important factors and allow you to study large amounts of data easily. It’s important to use tools that allow for advanced visualisations and also where you can visually drill down to the root cause. Also, consider products that are integrated with your software.

The post Tips for setting actionable KPIs – Data & analytics basics appeared first on Market Motion.

Back then, just one percent of all information flowing over any type of network flowed of a new thing called “the internet.”

Today, in something of a repeat of that mid-’90s experience, forward-thinkers in the trucking and logistics industry are telling us that within a relatively few years — perhaps less than a decade, given the increasing speed at which technology is advancing — the industry will be heavily reliant on blockchain technology, a different way of communicating and conducting digital transactions over the internet.

Of course, because blockchain technology is only a decade old, it is most closely associated with the trading of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and still is not very widely understood. The common response to such projections is often scepticism.

But those who are sceptical about the future importance of blockchain — and the speed of its approach — within the trucking and logistics world need only visit the website of BiTA, the Blockchain in Transport Alliance. There, they can see the names of the industry heavyweights who already are working together to establish the technical standards that the industry will adhere to when blockchain inevitably catches up with and replaces today’s conventional, server-based method for managing virtually every aspect of the business.

Thus, it’s important to understand just what blockchain is and how it works.

What is blockchain?

For starters, blockchain does not equal cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been pioneers in the use of blockchain as a peer-to-peer transaction management technology, but blockchain has almost endless potential uses beyond serving as a cryptocurrency exchange platform.

It’s best to think of blockchain technology as a method for allowing all parties — two, three or 300 — to work together in a decentralized system to keep a shared, infallible ledger rather than depending on one central party keeping just one ledger. In a single ledger transaction — like buying an item over the internet — the seller keeps the ledger while the buyer gets, at best, an emailed receipt. If the seller makes a mistake and charges the buyer too much, or applies the purchase price to the wrong item, the buyer really has no proof of that error. He or she is left to depend on the goodwill of the seller/ledger owner to make good on the deal. But if you apply blockchain in that situation, both the buyer and seller would have an identical ledger on which that transaction is recorded. That eliminates the need to merely “trust” the other party in a deal because both have perpetually identical records of it.

To do a transaction this way, blockchain technology skips the server-driven world through which nearly all digital transactions currently take place and allows computers to communicate directly with one another. And it’s not limited to a two-way conversation. Blockchain transactions, in theory, could have a limitless number of participants.

And that makes it well-suited to the trucking and transportation industries. Whole fleets of trucks equipped with blockchain-enabled monitoring and data communications systems can be linked for almost simultaneous data transfers. Trucking firms, technology vendors, product manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and even, in the case of delivery of products ordered online, consumers can all be included in the blockchain so all of them will be able to see where a product is in the supply chain at any given time.

Blockchain in action

Other potential uses of blockchain technology in trucking and logistics include:

Vehicle maintenance, quality assurance, and performance history. Massive amounts of historical operational and technical data — from individual trucks to whole fleets — can be managed more effectively, and at a much lower cost, meaning firms can avoid breakdowns and get the maximum performance from their costly assets.

Capacity management can be enhanced by dynamic optimization, which is the blockchain-enabled ability to locate available hauling capacity as it opens up through the day rather than waiting to allocate loads to available capacity overnight.

Payments and pricing transactions are sped up and made more secure by the nature of blockchain’s distributed ledger. Using paper, or even conventional internet technology creates time lags between when physical movements and exchanges of goods take place and when those transactions get processed and communicated to all parties involved. Since all those parties in a blockchain environment would instantly see any transaction or movement of goods, the possibility that those goods could be stolen or that a bad actor could commit fraud, are virtually eliminated.

Legal compliance, including tracking drivers’ hour of service via electronic logging devices, would be made virtually tamperproof, readily available, and yet still secure.

So, while the term itself still may sound foreign and foreboding, especially because of its early association with cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology is not something for those in the trucking and logistics industry to fear. Rather, it’s something to begin learning about and becoming comfortable with — it’s a part of the industry’s future.

Omnitracs is a proud member of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA), a consortium of the foremost leaders in the trucking industry forging a path toward industry standards in blockchain use. All companies within BiTA share a unified mission of developing a standards framework, educating the market on blockchain applications, and encouraging the use of said applications through exemplary implementation.

Republished with permission from Omnitracs.

The post The future of trucking in blockchain. Are you ready? appeared first on Market Motion.

Infoworld.com provides one of the simpler explanations of the Internet of Things that we’ve seen. The tech website says that IoT is “an environment that gathers information from multiple devices (computers vehicles, smartphones, traffic lights, and almost anything with a sensor) and applications (anything from a social media app such as Twitter to an e-commerce platform, from a manufacturing system to a traffic control system).”

In IoT, “Internet” refers to a network or the internet, and “Things” refers to any physical “thing” that exists in the world, from appliances to objects to people. When the two are connected via sensors and unique identifiers, we can extract meaningful information.

For example, the Nest thermostat is a “smart” thermostat that learns the owner’s behaviours and, after time, sets temperatures based on that data – along with information collected from sensors as to whether the owner is home or not. With the Nest app, owners can adjust temperatures from a device anytime, anywhere.

When we talk about the Internet of Things in relation to fleet management, the “things” are vehicles and the people who drive them. When vehicles are given sensors, we can manage and control them through web applications. With Roadnet’s MobileCast, GPS technology gives transportation managers real-time information about routes and drivers. So, while a homeowner could use the Nest app to see if the thermostat is pumping costly heat when he or she is away from home, a transportation manager could use the MobileCast app to check in on drivers and make sure trucks are on time and not making costly off-route stops. Both the homeowner and the transportation manager can get this information from their smartphones, no matter how far away they are from the action.

Telematics solution also applies to the Internet of Things. Telematics devices installed in trucks can give managers insight into driver behaviour, adherence to laws, speeding, idling, and more. The telematics device is the sensor that detects and communicates information.

Before goods are even put onto trucks, they too relate to the Internet of Things. Logistics managers are using RFID technology to chip pallets in order to control and track products. An article from Inboundlogistics.com says that cloud-based GPS and RFID technologies are “the backbone of IoT as it relates to the supply chain.”

Before long, the Internet of Things will be a huge part of our daily lives. In the transportation world, this is good news for managers. The more technology advances, the more meaningful data can be collected about operations so that improvements can be made.

Republished with permission from Omnitracs.

At Market Motion, we are committed to using the latest technology to arm our clients with as much data about their operations as possible. Call us on 1300 558 381 to discuss.

The post What the Internet of Things (IoT) means in fleet management appeared first on Market Motion.

Every day you send out a fleet of expensive vehicles filled with expensive products to your customers as safely and efficiently as you can. You hope nothing goes wrong.

Service delays, traffic delays, and accidents all impact performance. Most importantly, customers expectations are not me when your daily plan goes wrong. Without fleet telematics, the data you need to make decisions is limited and arrives too late to impact events in a meaningful way.

Stay in the game with real-time analytics

Fleet telematics provides real-time data that helps you understand vehicle usage and creates programs to keep expenses at a minimum when surprises happen. It also helps you on a micro-level, like reducing idling and improving vehicle maintenance programs.

The value for vehicle-centric improvements is clear, but that is only half of the opportunity. The ability to use telematics to impact driver behaviour is the most important, yet most overlooked value of this technology. Using telematics will assist in reduced kilometres driven as drivers become aware their vehicles are being monitored. Tracking vehicles will ensure drivers stay on their route and practice safe driving practices. Telematics acts as your eyes to manage your fleet and people in real time.

Understand how your people drive

A true awareness of what your drivers are doing with their vehicles can’t be achieved without data, without a tool to manage your drivers in the field. This is why telematics is so important.

Telematics technology improves fleet management by giving a manager the ability to engage in their daily operations, for a single vehicle or the entire fleet. It lets you gain a comprehensive understanding of how your people drive, improving efficiency, route plan adherence, and safety compliance.

How fleet telematics can help you

Fleet telematics provides higher situational awareness by letting managers know where every driver and vehicle is in real time. You can use this data to understand and change behaviours and unnecessary costs.

The telemetry data provides evidence to understand what happened before an accident, before an off-route event or after a service failure. Without telematics, investigating and resolving these issues is tough because there is little information available. With telematics, all the data you need is there. The right data helps protect you and your team from safety, false legal claims, and unjustified expenses.

Tracking KPIs that matter

Capturing fleet management key performance indicators is crucial. Without it, you lack the data you need to make informed decisions that impact your bottom line.

Fleet telematics reduces speeding, harsh braking, harsh acceleration, and harsh cornering. Additionally, since your drivers will be safer, accident claims and overall insurance costs will also decline. It’s powered by GPS technology, allowing managers to locate stolen vehicles, track vehicles 24 hours a day and know immediately where there is unauthorised vehicle usage. GPS tracking improves daily route adherence, routing metrics, and the routing process (such as service times and geocode validations).

Now you can capture actual arrival, departure, and driving time, which lets you optimise departure based on traffic congestion, delivery windows, and frequency of visits.

Fleet telematics also empowers you to save fuel by ensuring that routes are optimised and scheduled routes match actual activity. Telematics data helps you do this by integrating into your routing process.

And none of these options can be easily accomplished without fleet telematics. This is the catalyst for change. Given the competition of operating a fleet in today’s world, the question isn’t why don’t you have telematics — it’s how can you function without it?

The post Fleet telematics – A new tech solution to old fleet management problems appeared first on Market Motion.