By Diane Silcock
FLEET managers have an onerous task when it comes to managing a fleet of vehicles. Missed schedules, lower driver safety, higher fuel costs, and poor driver performance, are just some of the issues they face daily. Adopting a digitised and automated process, simplifies fleet management ensuring that managers are kept fully informed around all matters affecting their fleet.
Webfleet South Africa – part of Bridgestone Mobility solutions – specialises in fleet management solutions which are geared around improving efficiencies in business and driving down costs, especially diesel costs.
Sales director, Justin Manson, says, “Depending on the solution the customer opts for, the system provides information to the fleet controllers and managers around where the vehicle is, how it is being driven as well as feedback to the drivers on their actual driving performance. This could be driving events such as speeding, harsh braking and cornering, and idling too long.”
From a dispatching perspective, the control room is connected directly with the drivers. Using an in-cab device, the driver’s entire trip sheet for the day can be optimised by the Webfleet platform, navigating the driver to each stop and taking traffic and road conditions into account. In-cab, the driver will receive an audible alert with a visual, in real time, advising transgressions such as speeding, for instance.
The Webfleet platform is indepth and the OptiDrive element which has a strong focus on safety, generates a driver scorecard. Drivers are measured on KPI’s such as driving events, fuel consumption, constant speed, coasting, gear shifting, wearing a seatbelt, and unsafe following distance. At the end of a trip, the driver can access the OptiDrive indicator on the driver terminal to see exactly what the score is. This alerts the driver to where they went wrong, where they scored well or not so well, and what improvements need to be made.
This serves to empower the driver and boost their confidence, having goals to work towards, and there are no surprises at the debriefing.
“Recently added to OptiDrive is the fleet overview component,” says Manson, “which takes the various KPI’s into account providing fleet managers with a very nice graphical display of the performance of their entire fleet with the ability to drill down into the details.”
Webfleet goes the extra mile when it comes to road safety and recently launched its annual Road Safety Survey, aimed to gather valuable insights and feedback from professionals in the industry. “We present our findings through various forums and platforms and take two to three key aspects that we believe are hot topics and focus on those over the next 12 months. It’s our intention to start conversations around road safety, share the data with customers, industry associations, and our partners at different government entities.”
