RealTime Vehicle Tracking – Historic Reporting.

Staying competitive, productive and cost-efficient in today’s fleet management and operating environment means every second counts! Consequently, GPS vehicle tracking has proven to be a vital tool in the daily pressure to meet a full job sheet of delivery schedule slots. The essential application is realtime vehicle tracking, which keeps fleet operation centres constantly in touch with the location and schedules of their drivers and vehicles.

The ability to have as much information as possible at your command about road conditions, vehicle availability, delivery changes, fuel use, running efficiency and driver handling means getting those important split second decisions right everytime. Some of the first fleet tracking systems could only report their information when the fleet GPS tracking device was returned to base, which in today’s challenging economic climate, would put a company at a serious cost and operating disadvantage.

Real time information is reported back to a company’s central computer system in optional, pre-set intervals, from between every 10 seconds to every 60 seconds, according to the customised commercial vehicle tracking system and the supplier.

However, still a critical part of any modern vehicle tracking solution is historic reporting. This vital tool provides a complete detailed report on a company’s entire fleet journey history, from which a full report on any fleet vehicle on any specific day can be selected for inspection.

The data is displayed as a ‘snail trail’, continually plotted on a map within the vehicle tracking web application. The snail trail clearly shows an entire vehicle journey and behaviour history, marking, amongst other useful driving characteristics, excessive idling points and exceeded speed limits.

The ability to record and keep a complete breakdown analysis of an entire vehicle journey history and behaviour in realtime is, of course, invaluable as incontrovertible evidence, if and when required. There are always likely to be situations where contentious issues will arise involving speeding tickets, driver/staff whereabouts, unauthorised vehicle usage and insurance claim backup.

Snail trail recording are standard vehicle tracker applications available for both realtime and historic reporting, and must now be considered an essential fleet management tool, supplying essential information no modern transportation organisation can be without to provide the required standard of customer service.