2022 Volkswagen Taos

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.

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.

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.

Idle fleet vehicles draining money, drivers taking hour-long detours to lunch, traffic jams derailing schedules, maintenance issues snowballing into bills with multiple zeros… If you’re nodding along to these fleet management issues, you’re not alone.

Finding useful data and utilizing it properly is a stepping stone towards running an efficient fleet. However, many fleet management systems are unoptimized, and crucial data either gets lost or underused. With fleet management software, working with fleet data is incredibly easier and more straightforward, eliminating manual work and boosting business efficiency.

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.

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.

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.