Building a fleet management system, quickly.
Simple A to B routing is embedded in our everyday life, whether that’s getting to a new destination or finding the quickest route to work. But for fleet operators, there are more complex challenges at hand. Including how to streamline the fleet management system.
Some of these challenges involve optimising routes, adding numerous waypoints for drop off and collection, assigning jobs based on vehicle requirements or customised customer drop off time windows (e.g. deliver between 5pm - 7pm), all within the driver’s scheduled start, break and end points.
In addition to this, the customer experience has evolved to the point where there are clear expectations of an ‘Uber-like’ experience. This means that delivery companies are expected to give a timely and accurate ‘Estimated Time of Arrival’ or enable parcel tracking visualisation.
The entry level for businesses looking to build a fleet management system is high cost and resource intensive. This leaves small businesses to build and operate tools to manage their fleet using inefficient methods or spend beyond their means for an efficient system. And as the customer base grows, the fleet capacity also needs to increase, meaning that businesses are faced with further fleet management challenges.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics “Survey of Motor Vehicle Use, Australia” 2020 report, across Australia, there was 19,768,518 estimated number of vehicles on the road last year and freight vehicles (comprised of light commercial vehicles, rigid trucks and articulated trucks) made up 20.4% of these. With so many commercial vehicles operating across the country, it’s only recently that technology has caught up with this fleet challenge.
HERE Technologies has built an all-encompassing Tour Planning API to solve the ‘travelling salesperson’ or ‘last mile delivery’ challenge, out-of-the-box.
The HERE Technologies Tour Planning API supports both job planning and re-planning, empowering businesses to dynamically assign jobs based on driver capacity, vehicle properties, customer drop off time windows and traffic situations - all ‘on-the-fly’ and using only the components that best suit your business needs.
The Tour Planning API addresses three main questions that businesses should address to overcome the workload of planning and re-planning for their fleet management system:
How can I manage job allocation?
Using the Tour Planning API, a fleet management system can visualise driver times, existing job allocations, job delivery windows and use this information to optimise tours through linking customer-defined job requirements to driver times.
As new jobs arise during the day, operators can input new jobs within the API without disruption, based on a driver’s current location.
How do I plan for jobs based on vehicle capability?
Depending on the nature of the business, some job loads may require different vehicle properties such as refrigeration required or load size capacity.
Understanding which jobs have special property requirements and matching these with vehicle operating parameters, such as existing job allocations and locations can all be visualised and coordinated within the Tour Planning API, saving you time and costs that would be used building these components from scratch.
What is the most efficient route for each driver?
HERE Technologies can provide to-the-minute traffic insights and toll information across Australia. The HERE Technologies Tour Planning API utilises this information and can help operators visualise traffic conditions and pair this information with constraints such as the height and weight of a vehicle, or delivery window, to dynamically optimise a driver’s route throughout the day.
Setting your fleet up for success
If you’re just getting started building a fleet management solution and want to leverage existing enterprise API components to fast track the build of a food or parcel delivery application, Next Mile Location Technology can help you set up a solution that’s tailored to your business needs.
Next Mile Location Technology is a HERE Technologies distributor in Australia and New Zealand and has the tools and expertise to help you get started. Reach out to the team to have a chat today.