ELD Use Cases: Above and Beyond
With AOBRD sunsetting in December of 2019 in favor of ELD, the clock is ticking for fleets that still need to make the move to ELD. There’s plenty of good reasons to make the switch from AOBRD to ELD sooner rather than later aside from compliance, chief among which are the financial and management gains that can be had from ELD -- and here’s a look in a little more detail about how you can use ELD to realize some of those gains.
Fuel Receipts
Fuel is the leading cost center in any fleet -- and managing what needs to come after the fuel hits the tank is challenging. One of the biggest challenges is reconciling fuel receipts and supporting documents for IFTA purposes, which is time-consuming for both the driver and the person in the office who is tasked with compiling all the data to file.
But with a strong ELD solution, it doesn’t need to be that way. Our new IFTA integration, which is incorporated into our ELD application on the driver-side and into the platform on the backend, helps our customers by simplifying the entire process:
Allows drivers to use their devices to take pictures of their receipts, and then enter the relevant information – gallons, total cost, odometer reading, etc. – directly into the app.
Receipts and the data are stored in the portal.
Fleet managers can then run a Fuel and Mileage report from their portal.
The Fuel and Mileage report available to the fleet manager allows the user(s) to filter fuel types, date ranges and units of measure and then export to a PDF or spreadsheet for ease of use.
A line-by-line breakout of important information is provided to the fleet manager. State, fuel type, total miles, and taxable miles are all displayed – as are the taxable gallons of fuel, along with the taxable gallons you’ve already paid and the amount, if any, that’s due.
It’s a win for both the drivers and fleet managers, and money is saved in time and in ensuring that the proper tax is paid to the proper entity.
Payroll
After fuel, driver payroll is another leading cost center for fleets -- and like managing fuel receipts and taxes, figuring out payroll for drivers can be complicated. With the proper integration, however, ELD information can be used to help figure out a driver’s pay. For several of our customers, our developers used Xtra, our business intelligence tool, to integrate with our ELD application in order to pull driver information to be used in payroll calculations.
Every fleet will be slightly different, of course, but here are a few of the fields that can be pulled via ELD data to help complete the payroll reports for our customers:
Driver’s first on-duty event of the day
Instances when the driver’s off duty for thirty-minute breaks
Driver’s next on-duty event after break
Driver’s last off-duty event of the day
As mentioned, your fleet might have slightly different information it needs to pull in order to calculate driver pay. But with ELD and CyntrX Xtra, we can meet your needs and help to make your driver payroll runs both more efficient and more accurate.
Salesperson / Driver Exemptions
Among the exceptions to the ELD HOS regulations are those that pertain to a driver-salesperson. For example, a driver salesperson has revised hour-and-day driving limits, with 60-hour/7-day and 70-hour/8-day rules in place. But there are also qualifying conditions that must be met for a driver to be considered a driver-salesperson -- such as the requirement that no more than half their time can be spent driving.
Fortunately, our ELD solution has the driver-salesperson exception built-in, which is a great value-add for fleets with driver-salespersons: One of our national customers, a Direct Store Delivery (DSD) company, has realized an approximate 400% ROI by utilizing this feature and others built into our ELD solution.
Need more information on other exceptions? You can find the FMCSA’s Interstate Truck Driver’s Guide to Hours of Service here.
Rental Fleet Management
Managing ELD for your own trucks, being driven by your own drivers for your own operations, is one thing. But what about companies who own large rental or for-lease fleets?
Again, the ease and simplicity of our ELD solution provides time and cost-saving convenience for our customers. Many of our partners decided to equip specific rental trucks in their fleet with the CyntrX ELD hardware in advance so that they can ensure an easy transition of the truck(s) from lessor to lessee. The lessor also has the added benefit of odometer reads without having to contact the customer or send an employee out to the truck for verification. Customer service is improved, billing/invoicing is more accurate, and the lessor’s maintenance team can monitor the trucks health via fault code monitoring.
It’s a simple and elegant solution to what might otherwise complicate rental fleet management. And to further the convenience, if the drivers or lessees are already CyntrX customers, there’s no additional work to be done: They can simply pair their existing ELD tablet with the new truck and be one their way as quickly as they would in a truck of their own.
Transfer Drivers
Similar to the rental fleet management scenario described above, fleets that need to make use of transfer drivers also see their operational challenges eased via our ELD solution.
Because our ELD application is easy to use, and the hardware it runs on is portable, drivers can easily move from one truck to another by simply signing in and pairing their device with the new truck. And it’s just as easy for the driver at their end of their shift, when they can quickly retrieve all of the required ELD information. It keeps trucks rolling when they should be -- and thus generates savings both in driver time and in costly idle times.
CyntrX ELD Use Cases: Same but Different
At CyntrX, we work with a wide variety of national, regional, and local fleets. And because we know and work with each one of our customers individually, we know that every fleet has its own unique needs -- and we pride ourselves on meeting those needs and helping them to use ELD as a true, ROI-generating solution.
If you’d like to talk about the particular needs of your fleet, we’re always happy to do that. You can contact us at any time -- and if you’d like to get a free demo of the CyntrX platform, and how CyntrX Xtra can be used to take your fleet to new operational levels, you can request that right here: