In the fiercely competitive and fast-changing world of cargo logistics, optimizing fleet operations is as crucial as it is hard to do.
Sounds like stating the obvious? Try “understatement of the year”. At least that’s what dispatchers the world over have been telling us for quite a while. Even with a multitude of digital tools to help them out, the number of hoops they must jump through each day – juggling between coordinating with drivers, dealing with exceptions to pre-planned schedules, organizing maintenance schedules, and managing customer expectations – is flat out mind-bending.
This is all about to change with SCALAR, our pioneering fleet orchestration platform. If you run a fleet of vehicles, read on to learn how orchestration can help you overcome pressing challenges where traditional fleet management systems fall short.
With nearly every cost in the book spiraling upwards, every snap decision you make can directly affect your bottom line. But, amongst decreasing margins and heavy competition, staying within budget without compromising customer satisfaction commands some hardcore computing skills: you need to ensure vehicles aren’t just road-ready and on the move – but that they’re also optimally loaded, always on the most efficient and economical route, and always on time no matter what. And there are all these hurdles standing in your way:
You can’t avoid downtime altogether – scheduled visits to the mechanic are essential for smooth and reliable fleet operations. We even have a fancy name for it: preventive and proactive maintenance.
But how do you proactively prevent or minimize unplanned downtime? Sudden faults and unexpected breakdowns still happen all the time. And when they do, they’re an absolute nightmare to deal with. Plus, there’s no telling how long a repair will take or how much it will cost. That’s because you can’t have true preventive maintenance if you cannot accurately predict what is about to happen with your vehicle and solve problems before they occur – at least not without the right telematics and software tools.
Constant regulatory changes and compliance requirements significantly increase the risk of violations. Failure to comply with safety standards, service times restrictions, emission rules, or regulations for dangerous or sensitive goods, can lead to hefty fines and penalties, not to mention accidents or missed deliveries. And it will certainly damage your reputation with customers and drivers alike.
Reducing carbon emissions and running an eco-friendly fleet is no longer a nice-to-have. The law requires it, consumers demand it, and upper management is keeping an eye on your progress. Of course, minimizing fuel usage comes with its own set of challenges. But add electrification to the mix – and in come issues like range, charging times, vehicle weight, and other complexities that your fleet management system may not even support. This makes the task of optimizing shipments and routes a real headscratcher.
Driver safety and cargo security are like two sides of the same coin: leaving one of them vulnerable puts the other at risk. And with it, your business is also at risk. Think higher insurance premiums, litigation costs, schedule disruptions, repair expenses, and a huge blow to your people and your brand.
When it comes to effectively mastering all these challenges, existing fleet management tools are starting to show a number of limitations, such as:
One of the main problems is that, traditionally, fleet management systems collect data that then needs to be acted on manually. This means that, for instance, a change in schedule due to a problem on the road will not be resolved without human intervention – leaving you to basically manage your fleet one exception at a time. (And we all know exceptions are the rule in road transport!) An honest miscalculation on your part or failure to respond instantly can seriously disrupt your entire operations.
On top of that, it means you’ll be spending a good portion of your time sifting through vast amounts of data – often fragmented, non-standardized, or inaccurate data – from a multitude of tools and sources looking for patterns that could help improve performance or safety.
More importantly, traditional fleet management systems usually lack the intelligence that allows them to properly read and understand data on the fly. This is of paramount importance especially when monitoring truck and trailer health to avoid unplanned downtime or minimize time spent at the repair shop. Case in point: although traditional fleet management solutions can help you keep track of maintenance history and scheduled maintenance visits, they cannot detect – much less predict – say, a leakage in one of your trailers in order to send it to the mechanic instead of out on the road. So you’re still stuck with unplanned downtime, longer stay at the repair shop, plus higher costs for diagnosis.
And let’s not forget, while all this is happening, your customers now demand real-time updates on their shipment’s status and whereabouts. This holistic, integrated approach to transparency is usually missing from the tools available today.
To address these challenges and uncover new efficiencies that are still untapped today, the next generation of fleet management solutions must incorporate orchestration capabilities – meaning the ability to automatically execute every aspect of fleet operations in real-time, regardless of fleet size, vehicle type, or the complexity of the situation. Meaning you’ll no longer have to lose your sleep over unexpected breakdowns, cost controls, and compliance issues – nor spend your days putting out fires, managing client expectations, and burying yourself under mountains of data.
Leveraging 35 years of fleet management expertise and ZF’s unique insights into the workings of the various vehicle components – we are, after all, the world’s largest producer and supplier of vehicle systems – we’re building the SCALAR fleet orchestration platform to do all those things for you.
Here’s a glimpse into the very near future:
All this under one simplified and unified experience. Where real-time means real-time, scalable means unlimited, and user-friendly means “as-easy-as-googling-stuff”.
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