This Fleet Management System Boosts Your Business

A Greener Business

“We help reduce carbon footprints by optimizing routes and reducing fuel usage,” says Pankaj Sharma, vice president of marketing and product at NexTraq. The company’s fleet management system automatically sets the most efficient route for each driver, saving energy, time, and money for your business.

Driving fewer miles means less air pollution. NexTraq also notifies the fleet manager if a driver leaves a vehicle idling. “If a vehicle is just sitting there, especially in colder climates, that is a lot of wasted fuel,” says Raymond Peabody, director of marketing at NexTraq. NexTraq allows fleet managers to address wasteful behaviors so they can economize fuel usage and increase energy efficiency.

Steinocher takes advantage of NexTraq’s services to help his business go green. “We utilize the components within NexTraq, such as idling alerts, speeding alerts, and proper maintenance, to try to reach a zero-carbon footprint,” Steinocher says.

Sustainable Maintenance

Without proper maintenance, vehicles could be releasing excess pollutants or using too much fuel. NexTraq sends alerts when routine maintenance is due and when a check engine light is on. Buying an electric vehicle isn’t the only way to lessen your environmental impact, Sharma says. Instead, it’s about maintaining your current vehicles.

“We help vehicles run better and cleaner and also help our customers get more and more miles out of their vehicles,” Peabody says. Automatic alerts let you address maintenance issues right away. NexTraq’s fuel management feature not only helps you save more money at the pump, it also helps analyze your fuel spending.

Boosting Productivity

NexTraq makes workforce management easier, too. You can easily assign and schedule jobs for specific time periods. “It’s a simple drag-and-drop solution,” Sharma says. “You pick your job and assign it to the driver. Once you assign it to them, you know all the locations where the driver needs to go in a particular day.”

The one-click route optimization button realigns your routes to the shortest distance possible. NexTraq’s system takes account of how long the driver will be in a particular location as well as the traffic in the area. Their software routes for you automatically, which saves time and boosts productivity. NexTraq also provides an ETA for the customer so they can be prepared for the technician’s arrival.

NexTraq allows you to dispatch workers right away. And all of the driver’s jobs automatically pop up on their mobile app for employees, NexTraq Connect, so they can easily access their daily schedule and see everything that needs to be completed. Through the app, drivers can access notes and details associated with each job. With NexTraq, employees can even clock in and out from their smartphone with the time and attendance feature, helping to reduce miles and fuel consumption spent driving to and from the office.

Driver Safety

Driver safety also plays a role in day-to-day business operations. “You don’t usually think about driver safety as a part of productivity, but at the same time, if you have one incident you can negatively impact your whole business,” Sharma says. NexTraq makes driver performance more transparent. Fleet managers can monitor driver safety and what NexTraq calls the ABCs of driver performance: acceleration, braking, and cornering. If someone is speeding, managers can turn on immediate alerts.

"Cell phones have been a main pain point for the industry overall for accidents, so in order to help prevent them we have a distracted driving solution,” Sharma says. NexTraq’s distracted driving solution gives fleet managers the option to disable mobile devices while a vehicle is in motion, decreasing the risk of accidents. With this feature, drivers can focus on driving without the distraction of answering calls or texts.

Steinocher uses NexTraq to monitor his technicians’ driving safety skills and measure their performance. “NexTraq has a dashboard that helps us take a look at driver scorecards and monitor them,” he says. “Without that scorecard it’s tough to motivate workers to perform better because they don’t know what their batting average is.”

NexTraq also offers training modules to enhance fleet performance. Fleet managers can assign training modules if a worker is struggling with a particular driving skill, such as aggressive cornering or hard braking. The fleet manager will get an alert if the driver has not completed the training module, which also helps hold drivers accountable for improving their driving.