Working in this industry, you have to commit to constant development and keep track of current trends in fleet management. Technological possibilities are growing, and so are customers' needs, which requires both creating entirely new solutions and improving those already in use. Which issues will the industry be dealing with in 2020? What new fleet management trends may appear on the market? In today's article I will try to answer these questions.
1. A turn towards new knowledge: the development of AI and Big Data
We like to get exactly what we want, without having to search much to get it. This state of affairs is exploited in many fields. Music players compose playlists for us based on the tracks we have listened to so far, and VOD platforms suggest more films and series matched to our interests. When we look for a restaurant, Google Maps can determine how well a place matches our preferences based on our ratings of the places we have already been to.
Our online activity is constantly tracked, and algorithms use it to guess our tastes. This may be seen as an excessive invasion of privacy, but the fact is that by collecting data, websites and apps can serve us relevant content. Unfortunately, acquiring data is one thing, and using it for the benefit of both the company and the user is another. Until now the telematics industry has focused on acquiring data while neglecting the potential it contains.
In my view, 2020 may bring a turn towards taking a fresh look at this data and drawing new conclusions from it. It will be a year of connecting facts, looking for similarities, identifying trends and predicting likely scenarios. The industry will start adopting statistical methods to deliver new knowledge to customers in a constructive and accessible way.
2. Mobile solutions
The future undoubtedly belongs to mobile solutions. Their growing popularity has been visible for a few years now. Today, in a sense, we carry the internet in our pocket: we use it not only at our desk but also on the tram, in the doctor's waiting room or on a cigarette break at work. From our smartphones we can not only browse websites but also listen to music, chat with friends, make transfers and shop. We value mobile solutions for their lightness, easy availability, convenience and speed. Today it is hard to imagine Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Messenger or even the bank where we hold our account not having a mobile app. More and more often, the smartphone or tablet is becoming the work tool in many industries, including the fleet industry.
Although many mobile telematics apps already exist, in my view users will need them to an even greater extent. The most important thing seems to be access to all the key information about the company, such as notifications, fleet utilisation statistics, analysis of expenses and the progress of tasks assigned to employees. Next comes the development of tools for organising communication between the office and the vehicle. This branch includes a convenient text messenger, the ability to assign jobs, navigating the driver to their destination, reporting damage to the vehicle or load, and even journey authorisation or declaring the driving mode.
3. Route planning and cutting journey costs
The optimal route is the one with the lowest total transport cost. In fleet management, time is not always money. Sometimes it is distance, and at other times the commercial value of the point to be visited, e.g. the profit from a delivery to a given customer. Depending on the nature of the business, different parameters define the optimal route. The travelling salesman problem and its more advanced form, the vehicle routing problem, are, judging by signals from the market, issues that the transport departments of many distribution and manufacturing companies still struggle with today. Sales departments also lose out on suboptimal routes. It may happen that, for lack of the right tools, they do not even know that the representative from region A visits customers in region B, which is served by another representative. The same applies to large cities and conurbations where more than one representative works. Three representatives are assigned to cover Warsaw, for example, but the city is not divided into territories and all three sit in the same traffic jams crossing the city from one end to the other. Dealing with this problem requires a bird's-eye view: a solid tool for planning routes and optimising them iteratively. In my view the fleet industry is a natural incubator for these solutions, and in 2020 their development will become one of the priorities.
4. Managing shared cars: carpooling and car sharing
As an advocate of process optimisation, I try to eliminate waste at every turn, and reading the Navifleet system's reports on the use of my own private car sometimes keeps me awake at night. These reports show that my car serves me for an average of 3.4% of the time in a month. That means that for 29 days a month the car sits idle. To grasp the scale of this phenomenon, let's look at data from the CEPIK vehicle register. According to the statistics, at the end of 2017 there were 19.9 million category B licence holders in Poland, and in 2018 600,000 more, as many as 20.5 million. If we safely assume that only one in ten licence holders has their own car, it turns out that at least 2 million people own a passenger car. Probably at least some of them are drivers like me, using the car only occasionally. There is great potential here for using shared cars, which from the perspective of someone who travels rarely are cheaper to use. The fundamental question seems to be: if the car is shared, who changes the tyres, brake pads or oil, and who washes and refuels it? The solution is a vehicle booking system that lets you reserve a car for your exclusive use, open or lock it with a mobile app, report problems encountered or servicing needs, and possibly confirm that the car has been washed with a photo. If we add driving style scoring and abuse detection, it turns out that by reducing the size of the fleet we do not reduce its mobility.
5. Automation of repetitive processes and data integration
Another trend that will reign in 2020 is the further development of automation of repetitive processes. The fleet industry has been developing in this direction for a few years now. Settling business trips or keeping vehicle mileage records are good examples of the first steps in this direction. The next was automating the download of DDD files from digital tachographs, where it was enough to instruct the telematics platform to download DDD files regularly. The scale of the savings? To find out, let's calculate how much time it takes to handle this process centrally for fifty drivers. At around 20 minutes per manual data download, we can conclude that this time amounts to two whole working days!
We can expect that the process of creating all the summaries, reports, statistics and lists that look identical every time, and whose preparation takes a huge amount of time, will soon be automated. Optimisation of a company's internal processes through telematics will go beyond HR and payroll departments and extend to planning, production, warehouse and transport units, including as real-time logistics support systems. The synergy of telematics, ERP and CRM will become even more apparent, and the benefits of communication between the company's various IT systems will be very clear. In my assessment, road construction and freight forwarding in particular are in for a major boom and a rise in operational efficiency.
6. A virtual driving style coach and corporate UBI
Probably everything has already been said about the impact of driving style on journey costs. From the economic perspective of the business, the biggest drawback of reckless or unskilled driving is higher fuel consumption. According to research, up to 5% in trucks and as much as 14% in cars. The scale of potential savings is fairly easy to determine and very tangible.
Far less obvious and harder to monitor is the risk of a road accident and all its consequences, including claims settlement, downtime and even injury. Although road safety has improved significantly since 2004 (51,000 road accidents and 5,700 deaths) (31,700 road accidents and 2,900 deaths in 2018), even today one person dies on Polish roads every 3 hours on average. Careful, skilled driving will not always prevent an accident, but it can significantly reduce the risk of one.
The third argument that, in my view, will increase our interest in economical driving is concern for the environment and the harmful impact of pollutant emissions on the surroundings we live in. We must be aware that, besides exhaust fumes, road traffic generates noise and abrasive particulates (tyres and brakes).
At present, safe driving is still underestimated in the fleet industry. Yes, there are solutions that measure driving style, but they are usually insufficient: they either focus on extremely negative driver behaviour (braking, acceleration) or put their centre of gravity in a gamification-based incentive system. More specialised solutions, in turn, can be hard to use. I believe that only experienced driving style coaches, who can interpret the streams of information about driving style and draw constructive advice from them, benefit from them. Perhaps in 2020 fleet management companies will take an interest in this issue, and a really good driving style scoring system will finally emerge?
To sum up, 2020 will certainly bring a continuation of the trends of previous years: above all the development of mobile solutions and options related to data automation. But I am also counting on new proposals in the area of improving driving safety, route optimisation and greater use of the potential of AI and Big Data.
