2017 Freightliner Cascadia

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.

Live Share update: share a vehicle by link and let your customer see not just the live map, but the route history for the exact days you worked their site.

Permissions decide who on your team can see and do what. Admins can do everything; everyone else gets access through groups you build, so each role gets exactly what it needs and nothing more. Here is how to set it up in the Console under Employees.

Work doesn’t stop at one team. Transfer in Fleet Chaser hands a task from one workflow to another in a single move, keeping every product, attachment, and activity-log entry attached. No re-typing, no lost history.

Unexpected downtime presents a tangible setback for your fleet. Not only is your asset now off the road, but you have to tweak your operations and allocate finances to accommodate for it.

Setting up a real job takes a few minutes — a route, products, a crew, a schedule. Get interrupted halfway and that half-built task used to be gone. Drafts fix that: while you build a task, Fleet Chaser saves it automatically, so you can step away and pick up exactly where you left off. A draft stays private and silent — no task number, no notifications — until you press Create task.

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.