Fleet FAQ? Data-Driven Fleet Management

Q. During the COVID pandemic, our telematics solution has been really helpful in getting through our day-to-day challenges. How can I use our data to anticipate our response if there’s a new surge?

A. You can also use your data to help anticipate what could happen to your fleet in the event of a surge. For example, you can use your data to help keep your vehicles up and running with predictive maintenance in order to avoid unnecessary downtime and help ensure that vehicles are ready to go in the event of a surge in demand.

The variables that relate to predictive maintenance are complex and can include: component life cycles, driver behavior as well as weather and road conditions. While it’s impossible for an individual to track and correlate all of these variables manually, a telematics solution can help to predict when a component may fail or routine service may be required far in advance of a catastrophic breakdown. This can help to provide an opportunity to pull the vehicle for service—thus scheduling and minimizing downtime without affecting your ability to serve your customers.

In addition, in times where operations might be temporarily scaled back or even ramped up, it's more important than ever to leverage your telematics solution for improved visibility and to help make strategic decisions to adequately fit vehicles to their changing business needs and help ensure the safety of drivers. For example, by identifying the 10 most and 10 least utilized vehicles in a fleet, Geotab's Asset Utilization report is specifically designed to help fleet managers identify which vehicles should be rotated to help better manage vehicle downtime. This report helps to enhance asset management by providing fleet managers with greater visibility into their fleets and deeper insights into how their assets are being used, which is especially important during these volatile times.