Vehicle Tracking Solutions: Improving Fleet-wide Efficiency with Advanced Fleet Management Technology

Ryan Wilkinson, CTO

Today’s enterprise fleet management requires much more than mere vehicle tracking capabilities. Fleet operators require vital information at their fingertips to help them make smart decisions. Vehicle Tracking Solutions does just that—offering a unique combination of technology and knowledge to enable businesses to enhance the productivity of their entire fleet. With its groundbreaking fleet management software called the Silent Passenger, Vehicle Tracking Solutions has been helping increase the efficiency and productivity of businesses and improving delivery of customer experience for nearly two decades.

In his conversation with CIO Applications, Ryan Wilkinson, Chief Technology Officer of Vehicle Tracking Solutions provides an overview of the industry and how the company is leading the landscape with its state-of-the-art technology.

What are the challenges that enterprise fleets face today? How are you effectively addressing them?

Empowering enterprise fleets is a core focus of our company. 75 percent or more of the enterprise fleets that have approached us for a solution have previously used platforms from other telematics providers. Their initial pain point is the need for a GPS tracking system that displays truck locations or update reports. The systems that our clients have used prior are mostly legitimate and efficient solutions, but today’s enterprises want a next-gen telematics platform with more functionalities. The real challenge is the ability to access and integrate the business metrics or KPIs in their existing system.

A crucial winning approach for any organization is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Understanding that there are several approaches and that applying the right technology is critical for a business. Our solution ensures that our clients deliver highly satisfying customer experience to their clients by leveraging API integration with third-party software that’s existing in their current enterprise system.

Could you elaborate on your technology and the benefits your clients reap from your solution?

We have built a data warehouse to implement predictive reporting. We leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to help fleets make smarter decisions with insights on operational performance and efficiency. It could be about the drivers who drive fast or insights into inefficient routes and predicted savings with slight changes in routes. With platforms like Microsoft Power BI to deliver intuitive UI and UX, our solution enables our clients to view millions of data points in one screen, holistically.

We see a lot of interest in fuel management and fuel reconciliation. Typically, fuel consumption is one of the top expenses of an enterprise fleet.

Businesses approach us not just for a product, but also for the business relationship. This is where we differentiate ourselves—being more of a business partner and their consultant

We have modules inside Silent Passenger which take data from other fuel applications—like corporate fleet fuel card or onsite fueling computers that are running the pumps—compare it with our telematics data in real time, to give enterprises more insight into their fleet and telematics data. We also offer insights on fuel consumption. Many of our solution’s features are geared toward helping our clients on running their business more efficiently and improving their bottom-line. Fleets that are driving coast-to-coast, incurring toll bills from their third-party toll management providers can use our toll management solutions to gain insights into their expenses and make decisions on reducing them.

Silent Passenger also has modules that perform driver monitoring. On analyzing how our clients want their vehicles to operate on a daily basis, we work on those KPIs through our proprietary driver scorecard algorithm and generate easy-to-read reports on driver behavior metrics and scorecards that we send the fleets on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, according to their requirement.

Sometimes, an enterprise may have different solutions for each of their assets; they might have one for their trucks and their vans, and a separate solution for their trailers, and another one for their heavy equipment. There are several solutions out there that are segmented, whereas we take a different approach. We provide many different products that can track a variety of assets in a single solution. We can deploy one device on each asset, and with our broad variety of options, we can track 12 different types of assets, and all the data will be loaded back to a single cloud-hosted platform, Silent Passenger.

Fleet operators want to deliver an excellent customer experience around the clock, so we added a portal for our clients’ customers. With a module inside Silent Passenger, called SP Quick View, businesses can share specific information that we have in our data warehouse with their customers. For example, when a driver is out for a delivery, they can send a mobile-friendly hyperlink restricted for a certain period, where a customer can check the location of the delivery with a real-time ETA.

Could you share a recent customer success story?

A large enterprise fleet in North America was struggling with an increase in the number of inbound calls to their call centers around the country due to customer dissatisfaction. Increasing their workforce to respond to more calls was a costly exercise for them. We engaged with this client through regular meetings to understand their business goals, fleet goals, business initiatives, and their overall corporate objective. The enterprise fleet integrated their system with our SP Quick View through our robust APIs. The platform would communicate with their customers in real time, providing them with a mobile-friendly hyperlink, via e-mail or text message in real-time. This link could share insights into the delivery location or about their service technician en route along with a real-time ETA. Our client was able to decrease the inbound call volumes dramatically, and when they conducted a survey, they also witnessed a large number of positive customer feedback.

What does the future hold for Vehicle Tracking Solutions?

With the increase in the datasets, we are looking to leverage more advanced predictive and machine learning capabilities to provide more profound insights into different metrics and data points. We are also enhancing our solution’s features like interactions with the drivers out in the field and encouraging them with their current scores on driver safety.

Through our 16 years of working with enterprise fleets, we understand how to help businesses; we have industry best practices that we have tailored and improved over the years. Businesses approach us not just for a product, but also for the business relationship. This is where we differentiate ourselves in being more as a business partner and their consultant.