In the logistics industry, if your warehouse is the heart of your operations, then your fleet is the blood that pumps life throughout your organization. Having fleet awareness and knowing the ins and outs of your equipment’s day-to-day activities is vital to achieving optimal workflows and processes. The best way to achieve deep fleet awareness, and gain x-ray insights, is through data collection and reporting.
If the following three items are not on your company’s fleet awareness checklist, you may need to schedule a team meeting, pronto:
Leveraging telemetry
Every vehicle in your fleet should have it. Telemetry is the number one tool to include throughout your operations if you want to capture relevant data on your fleet vehicles. For starters, it is too affordable not to have and collects critical data necessary for deep insights that are too complex to maintain with manual processes.
Telemetry devices are becoming exponentially more connected and inclusive to equipment each year. Operator behavior is now being tracked, measuring idle versus productive time, and battery health is being monitored as well, adding to the layers of awareness necessary to keep up with the competition. By infusing your operations with telemetry devices, you enable your operations to immediately begin collecting more value-added parameters in your environment.
The ability to aggregate disparate data
Having a system that is brand agnostic, or one that can aggregate data from different sources, is necessary for companies that are not fully leveraging the power behind their currently siloed data. The ability to compile disparate data from proprietary systems into one location will streamline data collection and reporting processes, connecting KPIs like utilization, cost per hour, damages, and maintenance costs, all in a single view.
Many forklift original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have proprietary data reporting systems that do a great job of real time data capture, but they don't play well with other systems, so when you start collecting volumes of data, you need to take the extra step in syncing it in a master data base. Having technicians with mobile tools (iPads, tablets, etc.) allows data to flow into your connected system in real-time upon entry, whereas paper and manual processes require the added step of entering it into the database after manual recording and collection.
Having a 3PL partner with an engineered approach
Every fleet is different. So, unless your provider has the ability to analyze your situation with an engineered approach, the solution you're going to get may not be on target with your specific goals. Your provider needs to truly understand your business and your unique processes for recording and reporting on metrics, so partnering with a 3PL that provides a consultancy approach as opposed to strictly out-of-the-box solutions is the first step toward complete fleet awareness. A partner with diverse teams, made up of various engineers and six sigma trained employees that take the engineered approach very seriously, will be able to analyze your unique fleet to optimize visibility throughout
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