1997 International 4700

Most "fleet management software" was built for long-haul trucking or service vehicles — construction is the asset-mixed reality in between, and most vendors treat it as an afterthought. Here are the four capabilities that actually matter for a construction fleet, starting with dispatch, plus an honest vendor-by-vendor look at how Samsara, Motive, Fleetio, Verizon Connect, Tenna, and Fleet Chaser handle each.

Imagine it’s a Monday morning, and your fleet of 100 construction vehicles is ready to hit the road. You’ve got a bunch of active job orders, and one of them is pretty critical: your concrete mixer truck needs to be at a construction site by 8 a.m. sharp.

Most dispatchers still drag tomorrow's jobs onto the board every morning. Schedule Automation removes the ritual — set a rule on a workflow once, and planned tasks promote themselves onto the active board when their start time is near. It reacts when plans change, and you can still promote any job by hand in one click.

The most critical components of a fleet are the drivers and the vehicles. It is important that good driving behavior is monitored and encouraged, and fleets are kept safe.. Dash cameras make it possible to catch irresponsible driving early, provide concrete evidence in the event of an accident, and, most importantly, avoid them.

Operating a fleet requires greater-scale management to ensure performance optimization, expense reduction, and efficient cost distribution. Without outlining a budget that keeps track of every expenditure and point of resource consumption, financing and running a fleet business becomes very complicated and unproductive.

Managing multiple companies can be a challenge, especially when you constantly need to log in and out of different accounts. Previously, Fleet Chaser users were limited to managing just one company at a time. If you worked for more than one company, switching between them required logging out and logging in again, which was time-consuming and inconvenient.

A construction dispatcher fields the same four calls all day — where are you, did you finish, when's the truck coming, which site. None are emergencies, but together they burn about two hours. Here's where the time goes — and the first call to move off the phone.

Keeping your trucks on the road means keeping your business running. A single defect can pose a major setback to your fleet, sacrificing time, money, and customer satisfaction. “Prevention is better than cure” applies here pretty much. That’s why extending the lifetime of your trucks boils down to preventive maintenance: knowing what type of issues are likely to arise and addressing them early on. Take a proactive approach to your truck’s upkeep and find out how to avoid the five most common breakdown causes.

Fleet management requires the handling and analysis of numerous metrics and variables, which can quickly get out of hand and clutter your desk with piles of hard-to-access information. Compiling reports, communicating with employees, contractors, and drivers, etc., should be intuitive, all laid out in a simple, visual way. This is where fleet management software comes in.