Telematics devices have transformed the fleet and transportation industries in the last ten years. Geotab, a top global telematics provider, has increased its market share by about 40% since 2020, and has more than 3 million commercial fleet subscribers alone.
Solutions like these are incredibly impactful from a risk and safety perspective. But as these are traditionally operational products, gaining access to the right risk insights proves to be an extreme challenge for safety professionals.
In our recent webinar, our experts discussed a handful of challenges that telematics devices present, from messy, overwhelming data, to difficulties benchmarking and comparing this data across different systems. System fatigue alone is a widespread problem that many teams face, where it takes too much manpower, time, energy and just too many steps for safety managers to maximize the true value of this data long-term. Over time, a team’s engagement and overall buy-in tends to drop off.
To overcome these challenges, we share six strategies that revolutionize how fleets can leverage their telematics solutions to elevate their safety programs.
There are three steps businesses can take to successfully clean up their telematics data.
Because of the large volume of data that telematics devices produce, safety managers must find a way to identify the events or behaviors that are most likely to cause safety issues. Combing through various email alerts and reports makes it difficult for teams to remain consistent and focus on the right things.
Dive Deeper in Our Free Guide: 6 Telematics Challenges and How Leading Fleets Overcome Them
As these devices evolve, they will likely provide more data that isn’t attributed to the driver’s actual behavior behind the wheel. This may include sensor information about an attached trailer, a door opening, etc. It’s important to ensure you can easily pull out and identify the behaviors that can be utilized to help improve driver performance, avoiding the data isn’t attributable to crashes or other safety-related events.
Establishing consistent terminology and logic is a critical factor in successfully leveraging telematics within your safety program. This ensures that your team is consistent when calculating things like speed, mileage or trips – avoiding any personal bias toward how the data is translated.
In order to avoid system fatigue, it’s important to set your team up for success to ensure that they’re more likely to interact with the data consistently. One of the best ways to do this is by making sure that all alerts, insights and interventions are occurring in one spot, removing the need for your team to log into multiple systems and compare data coming from disparate devices.
While it’s impossible to predict a crash, you can predict who is more likely to be involved in one. By having access to the right insights, companies can better pinpoint these drivers and intervene before an expensive claim occurs. Between behaviors, violations and claims, your company can leverage this indicating data to understand where your risk truly lies.
There are some very tangible benefits of telematics data that can transform your fleet safety program. By implementing these strategies, you can:
To dive deeper into the issues that telematics solutions present and the strategies above that work to combat them, download our guide, “6 Telematics Challenges and How Leading Fleets Overcome Them.”