As long as companies need to deliver goods from point A to point B, commercial transportation services will stay in high demand. But high demand also means that competition in the fleet management market gets tougher.
Anyone who’s been working in the industry knows how challenging it is to cope with the ever-changing auto market trends, new legislation, and growing costs. The good news is that proper use of advanced tools and technologies can help your business manage risks, reduce costs, and grow key metrics sustainably.
Building fleet management software can become your secret weapon in a highly competitive environment. Want to know how to create a fleet management system? This article will give you the answer. Let’s dive right in!
What is fleet management software? A definition for innovative companies
Fleet monitoring solutions help businesses organize and coordinate the work of vehicles via a centralized and integrated system.
SaaS solution providers offer a wide range of features and tools within fleet management solutions. The standard set of features for vehicle fleet management software includes:
- Vehicle dispatching and scheduling
- Database management
- Route planning
- Vehicle inventory
- GPS tracking
- Cargo optimization
- Maintenance scheduling and optimization
Key fleet management software features
In the years following the COVID-19 outbreak, fleet management technology got an unprecedented boost. This was mainly a market reaction to global supply chain and logistics vulnerabilities highlighted by the pandemic.
Today, the fleet management program market share is expected to reach $67 billion by 2029, with European and North American businesses remaining the trendsetters.
The list of major fleet management software market players includes Geotab, Verizon Connect, CalAmp, Trimble, and Omnitracks. But what has changed is that the post-pandemic boom of fleet management technologies has enabled numerous startups and growing businesses to challenge these market giants.
The highly competitive landscape forces emerging companies to search for groundbreaking technology solutions. At the same time, market leaders are eager to reaffirm their status by implementing huge projects with other industry stakeholders.
For example, Geotab has integrated its advanced fleet management app into several vehicle models by Ford, which were then introduced into the American, Canadian, and several European markets.
Another prominent use case was the recent expansion of the CalAmp iOn platform to the UK market. CalAmp aimed at providing local fleet management companies with the ability to make effective real-time decisions that can substantially increase the bottom line.
These cases help you understand the dynamics and trends of the fleet management app market. Yet the picture would be incomplete without outlining the key challenges that industry stakeholders are struggling with.
Challenges of modern fleet management software development
To begin with, we must distinguish between two types of modern fleet management challenges.
The first type involves challenges that fleet management software helps to deal with, while the second type refers to challenges of adopting or developing such solutions.
Let’s start with the first type of challenge. The three key issues that a fleet management system helps to resolve are balancing drivers’ safety and productivity, managing costs, managing and optimizing resource use.
Balancing drivers’ safety and productivity
High safety standards are not only a legal requirement but also a prerequisite for effective cost management and sustainable fleet repairs. That’s why companies fleet run regular training programs and update guidelines to make sure people, vehicles, and cargo are protected.
With custom software development, you can balance safety and productivity in the best possible way by monitoring and analyzing the technical state of vehicles as well as drivers’ performance monitoring indicators to prevent the potential negative impacts of overperformance.
Cost management
Costs associated with fleet management are growing from year to year. And now that the world is facing record-breaking inflation, effective cost management becomes even more decisive for industry players.
An advanced fleet management development process enables businesses to integrate and track costs (fuel prices, insurance fees, labor expenses, salaries, staff training, etc.) in one place. Moreover, advanced custom solutions even allow for adjusting a company’s pricing policy right after a particular cost factor changes.
Resource management and optimization
When it comes to reducing costs, optimizing organizational resources is the first thing to do. Yet in practice, ineffective route planning and poor adaptation to new circumstances continue to result in lost profit for numerous companies.
In this regard, optimization powered by a tech-savvy fleet management app can become a game-changer. Imagine that cargo delivery terms are changed by the client when the truck is already on its way.
If you’re using an advanced solution, it would immediately propose the best route for the driver to deliver the cargo to a new address or suggest a substitute order to minimize or prevent financial damages.
Now, let’s switch to the second type of challenge, including those associated with custom software development. The two biggest challenges here are:
- Lack of expertise and miscommunication. Lack of expertise is a typical case when an in-house team of developers is required to design a solution without running profound preliminary research or consulting with specialists who have real-life experience in the domain. Even if an experienced third-party product development company is involved, clear and structured communication is essential to implement the project effectively.
- Lack of project clarity. The vision always comes first. After the decision is made to develop or adopt a fleet management app, it’s critical to elaborate a clear and comprehensive vision of the project’s scope, goals, success criteria, stages, and timeline, as well as stakeholders’ responsibilities. Otherwise, even the best-in-class development team will not bring the expected result.
Core fleet management system features
Custom fleet telematics and location-based services are the core technologies behind advanced fleet management software.
Telematics (telecommunications + informatics) is an umbrella term for the process of transmitting, storing, and receiving data from devices over a network. A GPS fleet tracking system is based on an IoT sensor or a black-box style computer with GPS functionality, transmitting data in real time or at set intervals.
Around 15 percent of vehicles now come with telematics installed as standard, and there are estimated to be 100 million telematics units in operation around the world.
There are many advantages of incorporating video telematics for a fleet management app:
- Ensure employee safety by instantly detecting breakdowns, unsafe driving, or accidents
- Get day-to-day data on vehicle use
- Monitor a driver’s compliance with schedules, routes, and operating standards
- Optimize fuel consumption
- Use accumulated data to create an accurate preventive maintenance schedule
Location-based services enable fleet managers to collect and operationalize even more valuable data gained from on-board sensors. For instance, you can connect external open-source APIs to your in-house system (say, an API that provides real-time geospatial data) and feed that data back to on-board systems for smoother operations.
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If you want to tackle fleet management challenges in a genuinely sustainable way, add these fleet management system features to your list of requirements:
- Data-driven dispatch management dashboard. Get a 360-degree view of your fleet distribution and current vehicle locations, programmatically create optimal schedules, improve routing, and manage available orders. Assign drivers to specific vehicles based on comprehensive profiling and current availability. Bonus point: add automatic scheduling for standard orders.
- Real-time routing. Connect location data to your system to review your asset locations, calculate and optimize ETAs, and send instructions to drivers.
- Vehicle inventory database design. Collect comprehensive data about your fleet: usage per selected period, average fuel consumption, service availability, and planned maintenance. Ensure that your licensing and registrations are always up to date. Receive automatic notifications for RUC, WoF, and CoF due dates.
- Scheduled maintenance. Streamline warranty management and repairs and mitigate downtime. A predictive maintenance system that takes into account custom fleet telematics and location data can notify you about vehicle failures before they occur and reduce maintenance planning time and costs.
- Geofencing. Gain additional visibility into your operations. Automate mundane processes such as timesheet verification for drivers, reconcile client accounts faster, prevent vehicle theft, and receive online alerts whenever your vehicle reaches an important destination: depot, customer site, etc.
- Proactive driver management. Ensure that your drivers take timely breaks by clocking driving time automatically. Remotely assess the behavior of individual drivers to reward safe drivers and penalize those who speed. Gain more insights into how your workers operate, match that information with additional data about fuel consumption and traffic conditions, and have your analytics system suggest the next steps for optimizing your employees’ performance monitoring.
- Real-time business intelligence and reporting. Leverage big data analytics to crunch all incoming information and translate it into actionable business insights. Uncover low-value processes, gaps in asset use, and small things worth optimizing for big returns.
- Fuel monitoring. Collect real-time and historical data on your fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Using analytics, turn that data into actionable steps towards greener driving.
- Custom integrations. Make sure your software seamlessly integrates with other back-office products and customer-facing apps.
By choosing to create a truck fleet management app with location-based functionality today, you also prepare your business for the arrival of (semi-)autonomous trucks.
Autonomous trucks will roll out in four waves
Source: McKinsey – Distraction or disruption? Autonomous trucks gain ground in US logistics
Why develop a custom fleet management program?
Probably, one of the best ways to answer why you should do something is to list the benefits it might bring you.
Here are the major benefits associated with using custom fleet management software:
- Advanced route planning. Route planning powered by connectivity and analytics can increase operational efficiency up to 25%. Assess the pros and cons of choosing certain roads based on real-time traffic data, toll costs, and current weather conditions.
- Preventive maintenance. Trim costs and eliminate operational bottlenecks due to breakdowns with preventive maintenance. By knowing which parts are soon due for replacement, you can optimize your maintenance supply chain and ensure that everything is available in the right place for immediate installation. This can improve your fleet availability by 10% to 30% and reduce inventory management costs.
- Enhanced fleet planning. More comprehensive data means you can project the demand your fleet can handle at any given period. Plan better usage of all your assets, reduce your fleet size, or switch to asset sharing whenever you want to bump up your capabilities.
- Non-negotiable security and compliance for drivers. Your new system can proactively mitigate the risk of accidents by managing drivers and penalizing them for unsafe behavior. Receive instant alerts when one of your vehicles is on the road with an open door or violates a geofencing zone. An integrated software suite can also help you control vehicles remotely (if needed): for example, to start the engine on command.
- Service level improvement. By leveraging real-time traffic and weather data, your enterprise can get more accurate ETAs, divert trucks from congested roads, and make sure that drivers maintain pre-developed routes and schedules.
A custom fleet management software development process might differ from case to case depending on the business requirements. In most cases, if you opt for building your own fleet management solution, the process includes the following steps:
- Select a vendor or a partner company specializing in fleet management software development.
- Form the project team, which typically includes engineers, UI/UX designers, testers, managers, and other roles. A dedicated project team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities is also established on the client’s side to ensure smooth project implementation.
- Align the detailed scope and timelines for vehicle management software development.
- Design a minimum viable product (MVP) that can be tested by the client in a controlled environment.
- Adjust the solution based on user feedback, preferences, and issues revealed during testing.
- Finalize the ready-to-use fleet management program that can be employed in real life and scaled by the company.
What to focus on during custom fleet management software development
If you want to know how to build fleet management software sustainably, beware of the challenges. As we’ve mentioned, miscommunication and a lack of project clarity are the most typical challenges that can undermine effective fleet management system development.
In practice, this means you should share a comprehensive vision of the project’s scope, timeline, and implementation flow with your development partner.
So, how can you develop a fleet management system?
Start project planning by writing down a comprehensive list of requirements. Follow a top-to-bottom approach, breaking down larger categories (e.g. analytics dashboards) into individual user stories.
As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some result >.
To get a comprehensive set of user stories, schedule discussions with different staff members and ask them to share their product ideas. Reverse engineer features from various products already on the market.
Watch demo videos, review user manuals, and browse product descriptions to get a better sense of what popular solutions can do. Finally, schedule a consultation with a development team experienced in fleet management program software. Tap into their knowledge to refine your list.
Also, do not disregard the importance of communication both with the software provider and inside your team. Make sure all stakeholders are on the same page in terms of communication flow and transparency.
Another thing you should keep an eye on is project budgeting. Protect yourself from unforeseen costs by factoring in these expenses for development of a fleet management software and tracking solution:
- Software integrations, licenses, and premium APIs. There are always open-source alternatives if you need to cut costs. Ask prospective partners for tech stack recommendations prior to signing a contract.
- Legacy architecture re-platforming. Implementing new tools and services may require structural changes to your old systems.
- Data transmission and storage. Custom fleet telematics and LBS software will dramatically increase your need for data storage and processing. Account for cost increases for cloud-based services as well as new roaming and connectivity fees for mobile data (cellular, satellite).
Rising data requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) applications
Source: McKinsey – Unlocking value from IoT connectivity: Six considerations for choosing a provider
To remain competitive, fleet management companies need to accept new technologies. Postponing your decision to digitalize or upgrade your IT systems is sabotaging your future success. Web-based location services paired with commercial transportation technologies offer new opportunities for fleet managers, from creating better routes to optimizing fuel costs and individual driver performance monitoring — and even future-proofing your business for smart mobility. The question is not how to build fleet management software but whether your fleet company will benefit from the upcoming innovations or struggle to play catch-up.
Get in touch with Intellias specialists to receive more information about incorporating the latest telematics and location-based services into your fleet management system.
