How to manage your vehicle fleet with fireTMS?

Managing a vehicle fleet in a transport company involves much more than just assigning a vehicle and trailer to an order. The entire process also includes checking the availability of vehicles and drivers, monitoring transport operations, analysing costs and ensuring the profitability of every kilometre. In practice, this means working comprehensively with up-to-date data, which is possible thanks to fireTMS. With our system, you can manage your fleet in an integrated way: from entering vehicles into files, through planning and scheduling, GPS monitoring, to cost reports and fleet profitability analysis. How does vehicle fleet management with fireTMS work in practice?

Fleet management in practice: what challenges do transport companies face?

Owners and managers in transport companies face many challenges on a daily basis that can negatively affect the company’s financial results. Fortunately, these can be remedied by implementing modern solutions such as TMS systems.

What does fleet management look like in a transport company?

Fleet management in a transport company involves control over vehicles, drivers, orders and costs related to order fulfilment. This includes, among other things, scheduling work, planning routes, mileage control, fuel consumption analysis, monitoring timeliness and assessing the profitability of individual orders. 

Each of these elements has a direct impact on both the company’s revenue and margins. The lack of ongoing control over the fleet results in downtime, empty mileage and difficulty in determining the real profitability of orders. This applies to small businesses with a few vehicles as well as medium and large companies. The only difference is the scale of the challenges that arise in everyday work.

The most common operational problems of companies without TMS

In practice, transport companies that do not have a TMS system have to face several serious challenges on a daily basis:

• lack of access to real-time data,
• scattered information (separate orders, GPS, settlements),
• difficulties in planning vehicle availability,
• no comparison of planned and actual costs.

Without a centralised fleet management system, even if a company only has a few vehicles, it is difficult to make decisions based on actual data. That is why it is so important to implement a comprehensive transport management system.

All processes and data in one place: fireTMS as a fleet management centre

The implementation of a TMS system allows you to organise fleet management processes and significantly speed up work, while minimising the number of errors. How can the system change your daily work? Let’s take a closer look at this issue based on fireTMS.  

Centralisation of information about orders, vehicles and drivers

fireTMS integrates operational and financial data in one place. All information about loads, orders, vehicles, drivers and customers is collected in a single system. This gives the user easy access to the data without having to switch between systems. This allows for the verification of information both at the order level (customer, cargo, transport information, financial data, including revenue, costs and margin) and at the fleet level, broken down by vehicle. 

Automation of information flow and reduction of manual work

The fireTMS system also allows you to update transport statuses and order cost data based on integration with GPS telematics. In addition, information about order fulfilment is immediately forwarded to the customer via the Customer Panel. This allows the dispatcher to reduce the amount of office work, focus on route planning and optimisation, and thus analyse and reduce transport costs.

Consistency of operational and financial data

One of the key benefits of using fireTMS is the linking of transport operations with financial data. This means that information about vehicle mileage and route, delivery time and costs is available in a single system. On this basis, fireTMS automatically generates reports on the profitability of both orders and vehicles. This allows you to quickly and effectively assess the efficiency of your fleet and make key decisions on an ongoing basis, e.g. about replacing or purchasing new vehicles.

Effective vehicle and driver management

Among all the operational data and processes that are collected and handled by fireTMS is the management of vehicles and drivers. This allows you to check both current and planned task utilisation in the system at any time and optimise fleet utilisation.

Quick overview of workload: vehicle and driver schedules

fireTMS provides two schedules that give you a quick overview of both vehicle utilisation and driver workload. This allows dispatchers to make better decisions when assigning vehicles and employees to orders. This avoids overlapping order deadlines, sub-optimal vehicle utilisation and other planning errors.

Reserving available vehicles and eliminating downtime

Among the errors resulting from the lack of an efficient TMS system is the underutilisation of part of the vehicle fleet. The schedule allows you to visualise which vehicles are in constant use, which leads to faster wear and tear of parts, and which have longer downtimes, meaning they are not earning money. This facilitates the planning of subsequent orders, and better utilisation of the fleet translates directly into increased revenue.

Real-time monitoring of the fleet and order fulfilment

Planning is a very important part of the vehicle fleet management process, but it is equally important to check whether orders are being executed in an optimal manner, in accordance with the plan. That is why fireTMS also allows you to monitor transport, respond to any deviations in real time and compare the projected margin from orders with the company’s profit.

Integration with GPS telematics systems

fireTMS is a system integrated with numerous GPS telematics. This allows you to track the current location of vehicles and, on this basis, determine the status of cargo transport, and in the case of advanced telematics, transfer data from the meter to the system. This means that employees do not need to use additional platforms to read GPS data and receive information directly from the route on an ongoing basis. 

Tracking actual routes and monitoring deviations from the plan

The Actual Routes function, combined with integration with GPS telematics, allows you to set a transport corridor of a specific width. Thanks to this, the system immediately notifies the dispatcher if a vehicle is outside theplanned route, thus enabling quick contact with the driver to clarify the situation. This type of solution reduces time losses or excessive fuel consumption and effectively controls the execution of orders. Information about the actual route and the number of kilometres travelled is also collected in the order view. This allows you to immediately compare how closely the planned costs matched the actual costs.

Faster communication with the driver

An important tool that is not directly related to fleet management but affects vehicle utilisation and driver working time is the fireTMS Driver mobile application. Installing the application on the driver’s company phone allows you to conveniently communicate with the driver on the road via chat and send subsequent orders from fireTMS to the application, which reduces the need to return to base to the minimum required.

Fleet cost and profitability control in fireTMS

The last process related to fleet management that can be optimised with fireTMS is fleet cost and profitability control. The system provides automatically generated reports on this topic, which not only allows for quick response and immediate decision-making, but also provides insight into how the estimated costs of order fulfilment compare to the actual costs. 

Comparison of planned and actual costs

The integration of fireTMS with GPS telematics allows for the regular delivery of transport cost data from the route. On this basis, the system compares the estimated costs assumed at the order planning stage with the actual costs, including the number of kilometres travelled. The differences between the plan and the actual performance are visible in the order and in the reports on turnover, customers, costs and profitability, which allows for a quick analysis of whether and to what extent the execution of a given order brought the expected profit.

The Fleet Costs report allows you to analyse expenses related to vehicle operation. The user can check what costs a given vehicle or group of vehicles generated in a specific period. The Fleet Profitability report, on the other hand, allows you to assess revenue, cost and financial results per kilometre. This is a key tool in making decisions about optimising vehicle utilisation.

Reducing empty mileage and improving margins

Analysis of data on completed orders and mileage allows you to check how many empty kilometres vehicles have travelled and identify areas for improvement. Fleet profitability can be improved, for example, by using the fireTMS truckMatching tool, which allows you to plan additional loads on transport routes and increase the profitability of vehicles and, consequently, the entire fleet.

Summary: real profits from fleet management with fireTMS

Today, vehicle fleet management requires not only good work organisation, but above all access to up-to-date and consistent data. fireTMS combines all fleet management processes in one system. As a result, the transport company gains:

• a centralised database of orders, vehicles and drivers,
• tools for real-time fleet monitoring thanks to integration with GPS telematics,
• efficient scheduling and better vehicle utilisation,
• comparison of planned and actual costs,
• reports on fleet costs and profitability to support business decisions.

In practice, this means less downtime, fewer empty kilometres and greater order profitability. fireTMS allows you to manage your fleet in an orderly, transparent and data-driven manner, which translates into a stable situation for your company.

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