What are the benefits of using a single fleet management system over multiple bits of software? asks Jack Carfrae.
YOU’VE A job to find any major component of road transport without an accompanying piece of software. Tracking and camera systems, weighing devices, maintenance, admin, even trailers can arrive with telematics coming out of the box.
Add all of that up and you don’t need a particularly large fleet to be staring at multiple feeds or screens and, anecdotally, that happens a lot. Smaller companies, in particular, may juggle numerous bits of IT, potentially because they use some of them on an ad-hoc basis or want to avoid the additional cost of an umbrella fleet management programme to serve up their gaggle of data in one place.
That’s perfectly understandable, particularly during what is at best an iffy-looking economy, but it isn’t necessarily the best option. ‘The transport industry likes to keep itself tied to Excel for some reason,’ said Tim Griffiths, operations and product development director at fleet and workshop management specialist r2c.
