Green Fleet Dashboard to Visualize Your Changing Environmental Impact

by | Aug 28, 2020 | Business Intelligence, Fleet Management

Green Fleet Dashboard – Free Marketplace Add In

The Green Fleet Dashboard is one of Geotab’s latest innovations. It is a free add in available from the Geotab Marketplace. Have you seen it yet?

This add in displays a fleet’s efforts to reduce their environmental impact. It helps fleet managers to visualize their progress with improving fuel economy and reducing emissions. The dashboard provides key metrics on fuel useage and driving behaviors, that provide quick insight into how well your fleet is performing, and flags opportunities for improvement.

Green Fleet Dashboard

Green Fleet Dashboard Features

  • Monitor your fleet’s monthly and yearly average fuel economy
  • Track monthly and yearly emissions
  • Track key performance indicators related to fuel efficient driver behavior, including:
    • idling time
    • speed
    • harsh acceleration and braking
  • Highlight best and worst performers
  • Compare your fleet’s performance with fleet industry benchmarks

The Green Fleet Dashboard add in provides you with exceptional visual information. The graphics are easy to digest and keep you focused on achieving your green fleet goals. What a great tool to stay focused on reducing your environmental impact!

Below are some examples of the charts and graphs the Green Fleet Dashboard delivers.

Average Fuel Economy

Green Fleet Average Fuel Economy
Learn More About Fuel Reduction

Fleet Idling Rates

Green Fleet Idling Rates
Learn More About Fleet Idling

Weekly CO2 Emissions - Idle vs Drive Time

Weekly CO2 Emissions - Idle vs Drive Time

Driver Behavior

Green Fleet Driver Behavior
More Benefits From Changing Driver Behavior

Fuel Economy Benchmarks

Fuel Economy Benchmarks
Electric Vehicles for Fuel Economy

Installing the Green Fleet Dashboard

To install the add in, simply log into your Geotab account and select “Marketplace” at the bottom of the main menu. Once in the Marketplace, begin typing “green fleet” into the search bar until you see the Add In listed. Click on the add in logo, then click install on the next page. Once installed, you will see the new dashboard in your Geotab menu. Easy as 1-2-3!

Just click to expand the images below.

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Search Geotab's Marketplace

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Green Fleet Dashboard Installed
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FMCSA Revisions to HOS Rules – Drivers and Dispatchers Respond

by | Aug 24, 2020 | FMCSA-ELD-DVIR, Fleet Management

FMCSA Revisions to HOS Coming on 9/29/20

For quite some time we have been hearing about FMCSA revisions to the HOS rules intended to provide more flexibility for drivers. At long last, several are slated to be implemented the end of next month. We reached out to some of our current clients to get their take on the coming rule changes, and the response was quite positive.

What are the coming FMCSA revisions?

  • The on-duty limits for short-haul operations will increase from 12 to 14 hours and from 100 air-miles to 150.
  • The adverse driving provision will extend the driving window two hours if the driver encounters adverse driving conditions. In the final rule, the definition of adverse driving was modified so that the exception may be applied based on the driver’s (in addition to the dispatcher’s) knowledge of the conditions after being dispatched.
  • In addition to splits of 10/0 and 8/2, drivers will be allowed a split-sleeper option of 7/3. Also, the qualifying period doesn’t count against the 14-hour window.
  • The 30-minute break provision will be modified to require the break after eight hours of driving time (instead of on-duty time) and allows an on-duty/not driving period to qualify as the required break.
FMCSA Revisions

What are drivers and dispatchers saying?

They all sound like positive changes that will be helpful to drivers and dispatchers.
Scott Olson

Maier's transportation and Warehousing

I really like the changes to the 30 minute break provision. Now I won’t have to take a break after sitting at a terminal waiting to be loaded or unloaded.
Mike Zeug

Driver, Maier's Transportation and Warehousing

Most Outspoken Response to FMCSA Revisions

One of our clients was dead set against ELD from the beginning. He expected it to be a royal pain with drivers unwilling to embrace the new technology, and he fought it kicking and screaming, but in the end, had to comply. After implementing and using ELD for some time, his response was utterly shocking. Monty now agrees that ELD implementation is a good thing, and that it simplifies the driver’s record keeping saving time and frustration.

Regarding the FMCSA revisions coming to HOS Rules,

It should have been done a long time ago. It moves us from making political sense to using common sense. Most important are the sleeper berth changes. It allows a driver to make better use of unanticipated situations, for instance if the highway traffic is backed up he can pull off at a rest stop to take 3 hours sleeper berth time. Since it does not count against his 14 hour window, he can make up his lost travel time after the traffic clears.
Monty Hack

Fleet Manager - Safety Director, JS Weipz

OOIDA’s Response

Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association expressed support for the final rule by filing formal comments. They say the new rules will accomplish FMCSA’s intended goal of providing drivers with more flexibility and control over their own schedules.
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Workplace Safety – Help With Managing COVID 19 Risk

by | Aug 13, 2020 | Risk and Safety, Industry Info, National Safety Council

Workplace Safety is Your Responsibility

Workplace safety is a responsibility employers cannot take lightly. Whether you have decided it’s time to reopen your business, or just move from working in isolation back to some measure of how it used to be, you need to have a clear plan in place. It is your job to assure the work environment is safe for both customers and employees.
Workplace Safety

Relying on safety experts will improve the overall safety plan and may reduce liability in the event of a safety violation injury. Unfortunately, we have learned by watching the news over the past few months that not even the experts agree all the time. So where can an employer go for sound advice? Thankfully, the National Safety Council has addressed this head on with a new free program, Safe Actions for Employee Returns or SAFER.

NSC and the SAFER Program Tools for Workplace Safety

The National Safety Council (NSC) is America’s leading nonprofit safety advocate. They are probably most well known for their Defensive Driving Course, required in many states to reinstate a driver’s license after multiple driving violations. Their primary focus is eliminating the leading causes of preventable injuries and deaths in various environments. Ultimately that includes injury and death due to workplace safety issues.

The SAFER program, assembled and updated by a task force comprised of large and small Fortune 500 companies, provides guidance for safely reopening the workplace. Taskforce members include nonprofits, legal experts, public health professionals, medical professionals, and government agency representatives. They make recommendations based on best practices and proven workplace safety strategies.

The SAFER program provides free resources and tools you can download. As the body of knowledge about the Covid-19 virus grows and changes, the resources are updated. Even better, you can register to be notified by email when new resources become available. This is great way to ensure your workplace safety policies remain relevant and up to date.

What Resources are Available?

Resources are available to assess vulnerability, survey employees, and educate using their recorded webinars. Moreover, you can download PowerPoint presentations to use at your staff meetings and attend online workshops. NSC also maintains a page that details the federal guidelines and has useful links to resources like a COVID Tracer spreadsheet. A set of 4 posters designed to keep safe practices on everyone’s mind is the only item we found with a modest price tag.

The breadth of subject matter is impressive! The information provided covers topics including creating an action plan, office operations, managing anxiety, entrance screening, and what to do if you anyone in your workplace has a confirmed case of COVID 19.

Well Done!

Fleetistics is an authorized training center for the NSC Defensive Driving Course. We applaud the National Safety Council for its leadership in helping America safely return to work!
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Usage Based Insurance, Powered by Telematics

by | Aug 5, 2020 | Risk and Safety, Data Integration, ROI

What is Usage Based Insurance?

Usage Based Insurance, or UBI, is defined by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners as a type of auto insurance that tracks mileage and driving behaviors. They further explain that the basic idea of UBI is that a driver’s behavior is monitored directly while the person drives, allowing insurers to more closely align driving behaviors with premium rates.

How UBI Works

Underwriters can now consider factors that formerly were not available. Total miles driven, time of day, geographic location, and road type all speak to driving conditions and insurance liability. Speed, rapid acceleration, hard braking, and hard cornering are behaviors known to directly impact accident risk. Obviously actual automobile usage is a more accurate method to assess risk than the actuarial methods in use. Actuarial methods aggregate accident risk based on age, gender, marital status, credit score, and driving history. Consequently UBI is a much fairer way to assign risk and set insurance premiums.

In response, telematics vendors are developing more tools to evaluate at risk driving. For example, the free Verisk Data Exchange add-in was recently introduced to the Geotab Marketplace. It is a platform that allows both customers and their insurers to access the same smart analytics that impact insurance premiums.

Usage Based Insurance App

Telematics is the Key to UBI

Advanced telematics is what makes Usage Based Insurance possible. Over the years, telematics providers and their partners have proven the value of telematics data. The information at our fingertips identifies risky driving behaviors. More important, we can use it to improve and correct them with driver training. In contrast, not acting on the information we have increases liability. But that is easily corrected as shown in the video below. Clearly the benefits that make companies more efficient and competitive outweigh any concerns over increased liability. Usage Based Insurance rates are another potential cost savings to add to that return on investment.

Usage Based Insurance Drives Driver Improvement

Improving driver behavior based on telematics data is easy to automate. Apps like Predictive Coach do all of the heavy lifting. There are also traditional courses like the National Safety Council Defensive Driving Course. A combination of ongoing and individually targeted training raises driver safety awareness and creates a culture of safety. Doing that will more than pay for itself in the long run, not to mention reducing your company liability. Proactive training increases the opportunity to reduce insurance premiums with new and innovative insurance plans like Usage Based Insurance. Ultimately the incentive to improve driving behavior for lower insurance rates will drive the success of initiatives like Vision Zero, making the roads safer for us all.

What the Future Holds

In conclusion, Transport Topics recently stated rising insurance premiums are a perennial stress for many motor carriers, many of which are now installing telematics systems with the latest safety technologies to mitigate cost increases. This is a positive trend for the trucking industry, and more carriers should fully embrace these technologies as they soon will become necessary to operate a safe, efficient and, ultimately, more profitable trucking fleet.

We agree and are here to help you get the technology in place, and use it to create positive change.
Contact us today! 855.300.0527
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How STEER Tech Can Save Time and Money

by | Jul 24, 2020 | ROI, Fleet Management

Guest Post submitted by Joshua Tohn, STEER Tech, LLC

Return on Investment – Automate Repetitive Tasks

Return on investment begins with innovation. What are humans good at? Problem solving, communicating complex issues, critical analysis, and creativity. We hire people to do hard work efficiently. The better job they do, the greater the impact on the business. So why do personnel spend so much time doing mundane and repetitive tasks? Sure they can do them, but that’s not where employees are the most valuable.

Fleet management is always looking to optimize fleet operations without compromising the safety of the team or the equipment. Tasks like juggling vehicles in a parking lot or getting them refueled are important to any fleet, but are a waste of human talent. With that in mind, it raises the biggest question of them all: If it’s a waste to have humans do these mundane tasks, then who (or what) should do them?

Introducing STEER Tech

Whether we like it or not, automation is becoming a core aspect of our world, fleet operations. Factories are installing more and more robots if they aren’t already mostly automated. Companies are on a sprint to automate as many different tasks as possible. Often little consideration is given the humans that are diminished by the new equipment. As this wave of automation sweeps over the world, we need to ask ourselves, what is our relationship to robots? Are they an attempt to replace us? Better yet, can we design autonomous equipment to be an extension of human talent? Ideally, automation should increase the return on investment in our human resources.

STEER Tech has found and leveraged the middle ground between the use of automation and the retention of valuable employees. Robots shouldn’t be designed to replace humans, but support them. Many relatively simple tasks like cleaning, parking, and transporting vehicles are necessary to the operation of fleets. At the same time, they are a waste of human talent. With the input of autonomous vehicles, fleet operators can focus on the critical work actually tied to the job.

Steer Logo

Autonomous Parking

STEER Tech creates autonomous parking kits that are retrofitted onto existing fleet vehicles. The science is innovative, but the result is simple. When a vehicle using a STEER Kit arrives at a parking lot, the driver just gets out and goes right to work. The vehicle safely navigates to an available spot and parks itself. The kit doesn’t impact the vehicle’s usability at all, it is just a couple of low profile sensors and a small computer that can be installed in less than a day.

Autonomous parking is useful for consumers, but the use cases expand dramatically when applied to fleet operations. A single operator can remotely move self-driving vehicles around a parking lot, send them to garages, have the vehicles meet drivers at the door, and report back a variety of diagnostics information, such as fuel levels and vehicle health.

STEER Kit
The STEER Kit is an extension of the employees, saving them the wasted time walking around parking lots, finding the right car with the right keys, reducing the risk of collisions and damage to the vehicles, and most importantly, turning every vehicle in a parking lot into the most vigilant and alert driver. With over 50,000 crashes in U.S. parking lots per year, having the safety net of an autonomous car will provide return on investment simply by avoiding accidental damage.

The Dollar Value of Efficiency

In the same way your GPS tracking system pays off big by helping you to reduce idle events and aggressive driving habits, savings are found when the cost of brief but frequent wasteful events add up over time. It only takes a couple of minutes to park a car, right? How much does that really cost?

First, assume approximately 260 workdays in a year. If one employee spends ten minutes retrieving the vehicle, and ten minutes parking the vehicle every day, you end up with 86 hours a year spent just parking and retrieving vehicles. Next, assume an 8-hour shift, that would add up to over 10 working days lost a year. That could easily cost the company over $1,500 per employee per year depending on salary and benefits. How many more job sites could someone visit in 10 days? How many more deliveries can be made? That is where we find substantial return on investment.

Finally take those 86 hours (or 10 working days) and multiply them by how many employees are parking and retrieving those fleet vehicles. 10 people = 860 hours. It’s easy to overlook how expensive the time spent parking cars is. Ultimately spending what could be productive hours on parking is just money thrown away. Parking a car does nothing to generate the company revenue. Certainly it doesn’t save money. On the other hand, autonomous vehicles, applied in the right way, recoup the loss without putting employment opportunities in jeopardy.

STEER Tech vehicle

The Future of Fleet Management

The world is headed toward a future of near-universal automation. We need to ask ourselves: What will our relationship with automation be? With technology like the STEER Kit, the answer is a harmonious future. Tools like this are not a far-off Jetson’s style future and they are available now. Integrating them as powerful extensions of the employee contributes to making a company more successful. Employees have more time to focus their skills and knowledge on the real work, supporting the team with every step.

The future of fleet management is one of automation. Imagine a team member steps out of the office and the vehicle they need for the day is there waiting for them. One operator can summon and send the right vehicles to the right places when they are needed. Done safely, done right, and with no hassle or delay.

To learn more about this innovative technology, email Steer tech.

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