Fleet management is a huge word and often used incorrectly. With the advancement of technology, this jargon becomes even more distorted. As a fleet management and technology company, lets try to be clear on what it exactly means and clear the misrepresentations.
As technology adoption increases among fleet managers, technology companies naturally increase to feed these demands. However, one must be clear that fleet management and technology belong to two different domains. The current situation of using these two terms have strayed and becomes a tool of labelling and marketing purposes.
Let me elaborate.
To deep dive into fleet management will provide an entire set of domain knowledge and likewise technology has its own set of understanding to acquire. Technology is used only as a compliment to enable fleet management such as tracking device and its software to monitor vehicle movement and status.
In the current market for vehicle telematics, many companies have labelled themselves as fleet management companies. This is where the misconception begins. In the industry of vehicle telematics or tracking, many of these companies are technology companies which support the fleet management industry. The use of technology which includes the Global Positioning Systems (GPS), G-sensors, User interfaces and other vehicle communication devices are merely methods to retrieve information to support fleet management decisions and business operations.
The next question is to understand what a fleet manager does? As a fleet manager for the past decade, it is critical to first understand how underlying and core purpose of the different vehicles. Is it a vehicle provided to the staff for welfare purposes, is it a tool for trade where staff use it for deliveries or sales which directly benefit the business?
A fleet manager then ensures that the correct vehicles are being purchased and that the usage complies to the company policies. Next, the maintenance regime and running costs should be well managed till the end of life (EOL).
During the course of managing the fleet, traditional methods have been manual and tedious. With technology advances, the work becomes more productive and quality of analysis becomes better when correctly used.
So with the increasing number of vehicle tracking and telematics companies globally, it is critical to identify correctly if the ‘fleet management’ company is in fact a technology company. Literally, if your core business is your right hand and technology is left, both hand will work together to make a success.
My point of this article: “Your left hand is not your right hand. Same, same, but different”.