With intense urbanization, the transportation industry works round the clock to suffice the demands of their projects. Carrying goods from one part of the city to the other in order to contribute to the timely completion of rapid urbanization projects would have been impossible without transportation. Fleet transportation, undoubtedly contributes a good share of money to the transportation industry.
If you are a fleet manager, then ensuring the safety of your vehicle operators and staff is of utmost importance for you. It is a glaring truth that several lives are lost every year because of unsafe weather, road, and operating conditions. Precautions could be taken to get a more favorable reality of road and fleet safety. Hence avoidable injuries and deaths that occur due to road & traffic issues will get reduced by a significant margin.
As a fleet manager, you must have it in your knowledge the ways in which the Internet of Things (IoT) technology can help increase the safety of your operations. With proper utilization of fleet equipment and effective use of properly configured fleet management system, vehicle operators are less likely to encounter dangerous road conditions. Alongside, vehicle operators can operate their daily task more efficiently and effectively. Let’s look at the various ways in which the IoT contributes to better fleet management.
Vehicle Health Maintenance
With IoT driven fleet management system, you can collect insightful data from your vehicles through IoT sensors. This data can be used to schedule accurate and comprehensive maintenance checks. In any case, if preventive maintenance is missed, it can lead to dangerous fleet conditions on the road. The identification and idea of a critical vehicle parts malfunction or fail are a must, to avoid vehicle blowout in middle of the road.
Plus, IoT sensors can easily track and relay information on vehicle health, such as tire pressure. It is natural for tire pressure to hit a low point. When the tire pressure hits a dangerously low point, an immediate notification can be sent to the fleet managers. Thus, fleet managers can immediately help their workforce (drivers) to take preventive measures to safeguard themselves from fatal situations. Additionally, the drivers can simply fix the issue related to the fleet right on the road and then further continue with their operations.
Proper Implementation of Resources
Keeping the roads safe for all the drivers, including the drivers of the fleet is mandatory. The transportation safety officials and road crew thus believe in the data generated by the IoT driven fleet management systems. This is because those systems provide accurate data that could be utilized for designing proper business strategies. Also, the possibilities of overcoming dangerous situations become possible with IoT driven fleet management systems
In case the fleet managers detect the possibility of a storm or heavy snow at a particular time, then they can start their deliveries via fleet a bit early and accordingly. Allocating different routes early on predicting such situations gets easy. In fact, it results in driver & fleet safety through safer road conditions.
Data-driven by IoT makes the fleet managers aware of the availability of sufficient equipment and resources, necessary to safely clear dangerous road conditions or obstructions, for their drivers. Flooded roads, fallen trees, heavy snowfalls and rocky roads create complex challenges for the fleet drivers to overcome. Such situations become more challenging and dangerous to deal with when other drivers are on the road at the same time. Proper deployment of IoT strategies can alleviate some of this danger by ensuring road crews also have the necessary equipment and signal operators to safely operate the designed delivery plans.
IoT fleet management systems promise to improve the safety of both fleet operators and other drivers on the roads, noticeably. Whatever is required to safely complete a job on time, IoT provides that. For example: Be it having an updated and accurate road weather data, ensuring that road crews have the resources they need to safely complete a job, insightful analysis into traffic patterns or insightful data to increase the safety of fleet operations.
Fatal Driving Patterns
It happens several times that the drivers take breaks beyond permissive time frames. In order to make up for the lost time, they speed up. This calls in for danger not only for the goods that they are delivering but also for themselves and for everyone else on the road, who is nearby the fleet. Every fleet manager expects his/her driver to follow traffic rules through decent driving speed. In case, some of the drivers will be crossing the speed limit for the current conditions, then IoT driven fleet management system will alert the fleet manager by sending a real-time vehicle-speed limit data to their smartphones. With real-time data from an IoT system, a fleet manager can address the issue before it turns into a fatal accident.
Better Traffic Analysis
IoT fleet management systems can get into the roots of a problem related to vehicle failure and delivery delays. The system has the potential to solve those issues for goods for a fleet manager. Traffic accidents & critical road conditions are prominent reasons why frequent road accidents take place. They could be avoided through IoT smart strategies. Through superior sensor quality, IoT can smoothly detect the pace of the traffic (fast, slow or moderate). This allows fleet managers to direct the drivers to take routes that are less congested. Plus, this also helps a driver in driving on roads that have fewer obstructions. Accurately assessing and taking actions accordingly to the current traffic status, helps fleet managers in keeping fleet safe and to boost driver’s welfare on duty which lead to successful completion of fleet operations.
Helps In Detecting Road Weather Data
Harsh weather status is the frequent and common reason behind unsafe road conditions. These cause vehicle-related injuries. Fleet managers know this in their bones that it is complex to put such things under control. To see better results, fleet managers analyze weather conditions in order to determine when and how inclement weather will affect their operations. But, inaccurate weather forecasts and out-of-date road weather data put an opposite impact on the fleet operations.
With the Internet of Things, addressing such issues is not rocket science. By placing sensors on vehicles or at fixed points along roadways, accurate weather and road conditions could be identified. These sensors have the potential to collect a multitude of critical weather data, which any fleet manager can analyze to carry out successful fleet operations. IoT provides the fleet managers a complete view of the fleet. With hyper-local road weather data, fleet managers can determine whether the current weather and road conditions are safe for their drivers or not. Diverting the vehicle and equipment operators to avoid dangerous road conditions can happen just within few minutes.
On a finishing note
The nervous system of any country is its roadways. Majority of the time they connect one part of geography with the other no matter how far they are from each other. Roadways play a crucial role in our daily routine. They require remodelling and mending to carry out safe business operations. But as it requires time, fleet management cannot wait that long to process their operations.
In order to enhance fleet management capabilities, the Internet of Things (IoT) for road and vehicle safety to make fleet operations more coherent and effective. With fleet management systems designed by IoT, reducing the risk of run-off-road collisions is possible. In this modern era, it is possible for every fleet vehicle to be IoT enabled and be connected to the internet. IoT strategies are an effective technique to guide emergency service vehicles through the road within least time. With IoT, (a combination of simple cost-effective technology and internet platforms which works with complete automation) fleet management can face challenges with greater assurance to overcome them.
