Strategic implementation: from planning to integration
To make significant improvements to your fleet and driver management, you need to start with a carefully designed plan and then ensure gradual implementation, together with all the necessary integrations. Let’s start by drafting a plan.
How to create a driver management plan
First, we will show you a story. FM Conway, a company providing infrastructure services, implemented a delivery driver management solution to manage over 1,000 vehicles that cover 16 million miles each year. The solution offered AI dash cams, monitoring in real-time, route planning, tracing driver behavior, and predictive maintenance insights.
After implementation, FM Conway was able to cut down accident rate by 21.9%, decrease defect rate in vehicles by 56.1%, and increase their income by £212,000 by mere cost savings from downtime and emergency repairs. None of this would be possible without proper planning.
A driver management plan, or journey management plan, ensures safe and efficient transit for business travel by addressing route planning, hazard recognition, fatigue control, and vehicle safety, step-by-step. The integrated approach consists of communication protocols and emergency plans to minimize risk and enhance fleet operation. Here are the main steps.
1. Preparation and drafting a roadmap. This consists of several interconnected components:
- Route planning — when you chart the optimal route by drawing destinations and calculating alternate routes, considering traffic flow, weather, and delivery time needs.
- The risk assessment stage is when you assess when and where your fleet faces busy areas, unexpected vehicle breakdowns, or any other potential constraints. Design mitigation strategies for each of the evaluated risks, for instance, changing departure time or distributing additional protective equipment.
- Fatigue control requires the use of rest break schedules and avoiding long hauls during drivers’ low-energy hours. Also, outside the fleet management driver behaviour real-time tracking, remember to set maximum daily and weekly driving hours as policy.
- Vehicle maintenance that includes pre-trip checks and ensures all vehicles qualify for safety standards and have current maintenance reports. Also, make sure vehicles are stocked with mandatory emergency equipment like first aid kits, reflective triangles, and communications equipment.
- A communication plan that expects communication channels between drivers, dispatchers, and management for check-ins (or in times of emergency). Set procedures for relaying delays, accidents, and route changes with designated contact people.
- Training that ensures all drivers are drilled on safe practices, driving techniques, and proper vehicle operation for different road conditions. Include emergency response training that addresses accident procedures, breakdown procedures, and basic first aid.
2. Planning for the workflows that happen during the journey. This should also contain numerous actions on your checklist:
- Pre-departure inspections should include reviewing all vehicle inspections of brakes, headlights, tires, fluids, and safety equipment before each trip.
- Journey log as a part of your driver tracking software and workflow should maintain accurate records of departure time, planned stops, actual routes traveled, and any deviation from the original plan. Maintain a record of rest stops, fuel stops, and checkpoint checks to ensure accountability and compliance monitoring.
- Real-time monitoring should define GPS location and provide communication abilities to trace driver and vehicle locations throughout the trip. Keep a regular schedule contact, and be prepared to provide immediate assistance or route changes as needed.
- Emergency response should be presented by firm protocols for dealing with accidents, vehicle failures, medical emergencies, and adverse weather conditions. Ensure drivers know who to call and what to do first in each emergency case.
3. Ensuring the right post-journey workflows. After a driver’s trip is ended, you should also consider some necessary next steps for digital delivery services:
- Journey data analysis should include fuel consumption, travel time, occurrences, and route effectiveness to see what areas should be improved. Then, cross-reference performance against planned controls and update procedures from lessons learned.
- Collecting feedback should give you a bird’s eye view: make sure you hear from drivers about road conditions, vehicle performance, route issues, and suggested modifications, and from clients on how their delivery went and how well the product condition was. Finally, use this information to enhance future planning and fix recurring issues.
After the plan for efficient drivers management is ready, you should focus on the integrations that make it possible.
Integration with fleet management, telematics, HR systems, and delivery platforms
The integration of a delivery driver management app and other solutions into a single ecosystem boosts efficiency and safety outcomes.
- Integration with telematics and fleet management systems allows you to track GPS location in real time, monitor your drivers' behavior and condition, and estimate planned and predicted maintenance. When mixed, these abilities let you plan better routes and make data-driven decisions to conserve fuel expenses and delivery time.
- When linked to HR systems, your driver management system improves driver scheduling, keeping availability and certification in check. It also tracks how your drivers comply with hours-of-service regulations and informs performance evaluations with telematics-confirmed performance metrics.
- A sync with delivery platforms moves it further by providing customers with real-time delivery status alerts and improving order management at every step with handoff and emergency updates.
The benefits of this fleet driver management integration extend far beyond individual system improvement, creating real impacts across all business operations. Companies achieve increased efficiency through stacking these integration benefits.
A fully connected system isn’t an easy task for an in-house team. This is where COAX brings 15 years of experience to the table. We help make your offerings efficient by linking you to appropriate parts of your infrastructure or outside systems via robust APIs, and we know each connection should be as unique as your business needs.
For courier delivery fleet management, we link your system with GPS tracking, IoT sensors, and WMS tools, for truck driver management, we integrate load distribution algorithms and ELD to make sure you scale your operations quickly and efficiently, and for global freight with complex multimodal operations, we will sync your route planning with precise estimated time of delivery calculators — any integration is possible to help you reach your goals.
Driver motivation and retention strategies
The Independent Drivers Association’s Research Foundation recently defined that nowadays, the average driver turnover rate in large companies is almost 90%. This leads you to a thought: what if you drill your staff on the new technology, provide regular training, and spend extra for certification, but they still keep leaving you with a shortening fleet and wasted investment?
Here’s what you can do to keep your drivers in your company.
- Reward and recognize. To develop a culture of appreciation, plan a recognition system to celebrate the achievements of your drivers. A monthly "Driver of the Month" program with monetary awards is a good idea to drive loyalty and fair, healthy competition.
- Set definite career pathways. To make your employees want to commit to you, show them specific and promising advancement opportunities. For example, companies like UPS have driver upskilling training programs where experienced drivers can transition into supervisory roles, and programs to stimulate women truck driving careers.
- Help them reach a work-life balance. One of the biggest drivers of dissatisfaction in the industry is long absence from home and families. You can solve it with flexible scheduling options and home-time guarantees, for instance, when regional carrier drivers are promised home every weekend or flex shifts that they pick on their own.
- Give incentives for good performance. Drivers management should come together with drivers motivation. Reward your drivers for their contribution to business success — set bonuses for fuel efficiency and reaching safety benchmarks, and promote drivers based on regular positive customer feedback.
- Don’t just throw technology into their faces. Show them (by training and examples) how your new systems benefit their job. Provide simple hands-on training on AI and telematics route planning and monitoring, using electronic logs for schedules, and mobile communication tools that can be used on the go.
- Help them feel heard. Drivers often feel isolated on their routes, and to fix it, you should set a secure, two-way communication system to collect regular feedback. Arrange regular meetings, create driver advisory groups, and conduct short biweekly job satisfaction checklists for them to fill out. Is a driver’s schedule too tight, or have they outgrown their position? Try your best to respond and solve their problems.
- Promote experience sharing. Skilled drivers are the best teachers for newbies, so encourage knowledge sharing via mentorship programs or team-building exercises. Another good idea is to create buddy systems that assign veteran drivers to new ones, or organize driver appreciation events where they feel more like a community.
These actions will help you lower employee churn and turnover, and introduce new technology, benchmarks, and practices in a more natural and welcomed way.