How to increase fleet and driver productivity with Frotcom?

In the last issues of the Roadmap newsletter, we’ve been providing readers with an updated overview of the Benefits of Frotcom:

- Comply with legislation
- Control your fleet operational costs

This month, we'll be shifting focus slightly, and moving from savings to improving performance and productivity:

Increase productivity

With your company operating in a very competitive market, you will want your drivers to be able to carry out as many tasks as possible - without infringing legal or recommended restrictions or acceptable driving behavior. At the same time, you want to keep your vehicles available, avoiding downtime and unproductive routing. In a nutshell, what you need to focus on is:

• Use the right vehicles and drivers: Road transportation requires choosing the right vehicle from your vehicle pool and a driver that has enough driving time left to be able to proceed to the next service without exceeding their available driving time for that day, week, month, etc. Planning ahead the logistics of both road vehicles and drivers will contribute towards lower maintenance and payroll expenses. It’s great, if you already have route planning software and it works well for your company. You just need to make sure that information is sent to your drivers and communicated to Frotcom, using the available API (application programming interface), so that Frotcom is able to monitor the execution of planned jobs. If you still do not have route planning software and the size of your fleet and complexity of its operations already requires such planning, just contact us.
• Use dispatching and communication tools: Once you know which driver to assign to a service, you’ll want to do it in a way that is effective, error-free and traceable. You need a dispatch tool. Frotcom provides the right tool, the Workforce Management module, with which you can notify drivers of new services, sending them all the necessary information, and then automatically create the processes to monitor the execution of those tasks. Drivers will use an onboard tablet to follow through the execution of tasks, informing the office of each stage of execution. Navigation and customizable forms are included as well, so that you can receive all the information tracking every milestone of the delivery, including documentation. For a more lightweight solution, you can also use Frotcom’s Integrated Navigation module, which allows you to send messages and destinations to onboard Garmin navigators. This offers an alternative for some companies wanting an entry-level solution for job dispatching.
• Integrate with other software: In order to optimize your productivity, you may need to integrate Frotcom with other software solutions used in your office, e.g. route planning, ERP, invoicing or human resources. By integrating Frotcom with other software, you ensure that there is no need to retype information, thereby reducing resources needed and inevitable human error. Frotcom will do its best to advise you on which software provides the best match to our fleet management solution.