Sabina Martin had heard from drivers working for a fleet operating in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that they would pass their buddies that work for the same company along their routes.
“There are a lot of overlaps in terms of their origin and destination … Surely that doesn't seem efficient,” Martin, vice president of product management for Geotab, said during a keynote at the Geotab Connect 2024 conference held in Las Vegas last week.
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The tech provider introduced its new routing and optimization solution during the conference – a solution that has helped the fleet reduce total hours by 32 and reduce the number of overlapping territories from 21 to one.
“With this solution, you can create and optimize your route plans; you can minimize driving time or minutes late time, or you can decide to pick a balance of both; you can even input success factors or constraints like if there are times that customers don't want you to arrive or if you want to allow drivers to work overtime,” Martin said. “You can invest this time and money (savings) into additional drivers or other things for your feet and business.”
For a driver who has 10 stops to complete in one day, there could be upward of three million routes to choose from. The solution allows fleet managers to isolate the most efficient route based on data insights, including customer needs like requested arrival windows, traffic data and available fleet resources, helping businesses control costs, increase productivity and uptime and improve customer service.
The optimized routing increases on-time arrivals up to 98% and reduces mileage by approximately 15% to 30%, allowing for fuel savings or range preservation in electric fleets.
“I've had conversations with customers over the years trying to understand what is your success metric or your North Star, and they have told me it's their NPS (net promoter score) for customer deliveries – how likely is that customer to recommend my delivery service to another fleet,” Martin said. “You need to be world class; you need to be on time and meeting expectations. If I order a package today, and it tells me it's coming tomorrow, I expect it to come tomorrow. If not, I'm pretty disappointed. The same thing happens for a food delivery fleet servicing a supermarket on the other end.
“But being on time is so nuanced. There are so many factors to take into consideration. Do you have the right drivers? Are they available? Is your vehicle healthy? Which route do you need to take? And who knows about the unknowns you might hit along the way,” she added.
The dispatch module – which shows the dispatcher in red which drivers are late and in green which drivers are on time – allows a dispatcher to identify at-risk visits and reassign an appointment that’s at risk of being late to a driver in green that’s available.
Fleets can use route optimization, which mathematically weighs business priorities when routing, considering continuity of care, timelines and distance traveled. For longer trips, the long-range planning application aids in minimizing driving time, and the territory planning application enables users to visualize their service areas and manage resource allocation to prevent route overlap. The appointment application enhances scheduling capabilities, offering more accurate appointment arrival windows. To further streamline operations, the solution includes dispatch and real-time notifications, improving visibility and communication and optimizing task assignments quickly. A status interface is incorporated to facilitate direct communication between customers and frontline agents to ensure service expectations are met.
Geotab GO Anywhere
Beyond tracking trucks or the appointments drivers are assigned to, Geotab is now offering its first asset tracker.
At the user conference, the company also rolled out its Geotab GO Anywhere asset tracker, a hardware solution designed to improve how companies manage and monitor assets across a range of industries, including transportation, shipping and supply chain, to minimize the financial impact of underutilization and lost equipment – a growing concern for the trucking industry as cargo theft ramps up.
CargoNet recorded 692 instances of cargo theft, primarily through shipment misdirection attacks, resulting in over $31.1 million in stolen shipments across the U.S. and Canada in the third quarter of 2023. Meanwhile, Geotab reports that up to 30% of companies don’t have an appropriate structure to identify the assets they own and therefore have no ability to track what they have or where they have it.
“We have 28 asset trackers integrated in the Geotab ecosystem, yet customers have approached us asking for a low-cost, secure, reliable solution for simple track and trace to be able to identify those assets in the event of them getting lost or recover them should they get stolen,” Martin said.
Fully integrated with MyGeotab, GO Anywhere enables viewing of all assets and vehicles in a single platform. The piece of hardware has a rugged design and extended battery life (up to 10 years).
Martin said the device collects data frequently and checks in with MyGeotab once a day, though check-in can be increased to up to three times per day.
“Because of that data collection, at the end of the day, you can review the trip on the map to see what happened for simple track and trace,” she said. “Coming soon, if you want to recover an asset in the event of a theft, you can turn on asset recovery mode, which will increase that check-in rate to every five minutes.”
Martin said Geotab will introduce a new feature later this year that allows customers to track which vehicle is hauling which trailer. The device is available in the U.S. and Canada for now but will be offered to other markets in the future.
