Finding the Right Tools for Your Fleet’s Safety & Compliance, Operations Teams

Life in your fleet’s back office can be frustrating and filled with inefficiencies, busywork, and workarounds due to suboptimal processes and tools. But it doesn't need to be that way. Getting your back office teams — like your safety & compliance teams and your operations teams — the right tools can save them countless hours daily, improve morale, and directly impact your bottom line.

What tools should you look for to help your fleet’s back office teams thrive?

Safety & Compliance Teams

Simple UDT Management 

Your safety and compliance teams most likely spend hundreds — or even thousands — of hours managing unassigned drive time (UDT). There is no way around this daily task, but there are tools to speed this process up. Look for simple UDT management tools that allow you to perform bulk actions so that you are not working one-by-one through UDT events. Also, just like any software tool, the easier it is to use and filter/search, the better it will be for your teams. Look for solutions that prioritize ease of use and intuitive interfaces.

Safety & Compliance Analytics tools 

Simply having the data from your fleet is not enough; you need to have a single place to look for it and ways to process and present it to deliver quick insights. Your teams need to be able to sort through the massive amount of information your fleet receives to identify data points important to their tasks. For example, your safety team will be interested in critical events, such as how many times Driver A is speeding or hard-braking. Your compliance team will want to be able to identify which drivers are going into violations. 

If you don't have an easy way to display this information, your teams will be piecing this information together from several sources or, worst-case scenario, operating in the dark. Look for tools that can not only show you this information in an easy-to-read way but also alert your teams when any incident happens so they can act fast. 

Tools that track exception and exemption usage 

Proper utilization of exceptions and exemptions can be crucial to your fleet’s productivity but they can be difficult to track. If you are relying on several different tools to pull that information together, it may be very hard to actually get a full view of who is properly using these and who is abusing them. Look for tools that allow you to filter and search by the exemptions/exceptions that your fleets use so you can see who is using them and how often they are using them. 

Operations Teams

Easier Asset Tracking

Too often, fleet/driver managers are being forced to switch between multiple screens and different programs to get a full view of what’s going on with their drivers. Jumping back and forth between your TMS, telematics portal, and homegrown load tracker with ETAs is not an efficient way for anyone to work. Your back office teams deserve to get as much information about their drivers as possible on a single screen. 

Look for a tool that shows a bird’s-eye view of where all your drivers are, where they are heading, and their duty status. Bonus points, if you can, on that one screen, dive into even more detail about their load, including stops and ETAs. 

‍Operational Efficiency Tools

Are you constantly data-rich but insights-poor? Your teams need analytics tools to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement in your fleet's performance, such as asset and fuel usage, idle time, and overall operational efficiency. Having all of this in one view and not pieced together across multiple programs gives your teams more time to act on the information they can see rather than spending their hours gathering the information. 

Status Insights

Duty status information is often only visible in a single-driver view. While this might be useful in some ways, it does not give a very informative view of how a group or your whole fleet spends its time.

You should look for tools that give your driver/fleet managers insight into who spends the most time/miles in driving status, yard moves, personal conveyance, or off-duty. This information can help you identify who has more hours to spend driving, who might be wasting time doing yard moves, or if your personal conveyance policy is being broken. 

Drag-and-Drop Form Building

The best way a driver can start his or her day is by having the most accurate instructions of how to complete each load. The beauty of a fleet manager’s day is that it’s constantly changing; your team should have the tools to react properly to those changes.

One tool in their toolbox should be the ability to create or edit forms quickly and easily. If something is not working properly for the drivers, you do not want them to keep seeing the same errors or friction points throughout their day. Get your fleet managers a simple drag-and-drop form building tool so they can make these changes on the fly. 

By ensuring your back office teams have all the tools they need to do their jobs properly and efficiently, you are supporting team morale and improving operational efficiencies. Reducing busy work and recurring workarounds not only improves the quality of your data, it frees up staff for more innovation and proactive projects. 

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‍Platform Science has all of the tools that your back office teams need to be incredibly productive. From our UDT Manager 2.0 to our real-time analytics tools, we help our partners succeed from the back office to the driver’s cab. Interested in learning more? Contact us today.