Fleet Management: High-octane solutions for any small business

By Dean Antonilli, Director Business Sales, Verizon Wireless

Today’s fleet management solutions do more than track vehicles. Knowing the location of fleet vehicles is still important, but diving deeper to get a real time dashboard view of the fleet, complete with diagnostic data, is what small businesses truly need.

Fleet management solutions collect lots of vehicle data and process it to give a real time look at vehicle status. This information translates into fewer vehicle breakdowns, smarter routes that require less fuel, and geo-fencing technology that gives a fleet manager the ability to receive alerts each time a driver enters or exits a job site.

With solutions such as GPS Heroes and NetworkFleet, track vehicle maintenance schedules, driver travel and speed histories, and view a real-time map showing each vehicle’s exact location. Additionally, GPS units can be integrated into fleet management systems, providing turn-by-turn directions along the most efficient route, reducing fuel consumption. 

So what makes fleet management so different from standard GPS? Finding the most efficient route isn’t simply a matter of looking at a map. Often, the shortest route may be plagued with traffic jams, construction, dangerous intersections and other problems. This is the pay-off of fleet management-supported GPS. It allows you to spot trouble ahead of time so you can avoid it.

Fleet management solutions have a wide range of applications. Trakstar can track billable hours on construction equipment, eliminating the need for each employee to take time to complete manual reports. B-cycle bike rental service in Charlotte, N.C. uses fleet management solutions to provide real time reporting on their entire inventory of bicycles. The technology also uses Verizon’s network to process rental payments and inventory reports to ensure each rental station is equipped with sufficient bikes at any time.

Additionally, for the small business owner whose operations include delivery of products, imagine the value of knowing how long deliveries take each driver. That information is then used to streamline the delivery process and boost employee productivity—translating to more products delivered in less time.

Fleet management solutions powered by Verizon Wireless’s 4G LTE network provide fleet managers with a crystal clear window to peer into their operations. Small business now has the cutting edge it needs to remain viable in the competitive marketplace.