Telematics and Fleet Management: The Business Intelligence Differentiator

We’ve written before on the topic of why we feel that telematics is failing the trucking industry, and how that failure stems from one simple fact: Most service providers offer little more than just dots on a map to their fleet customers, which denies fleets critical operational insights and the ROI that can be driven by those insights.

At CyntrX, however, we pride ourselves on knowing our customers – and giving them the capabilities needed for them to truly understand not just where their fleet vehicles are, but also how efficiently they’re operating as well as how they’re being operated. Leveraging that understanding can provide crucial business intelligence (BI) to a fleet, because it’s actionable – and thus can help to drive business and tactical decisions that will provide true ROI.

Idealease: A Customer-Focused Company
Our partnership with Idealease, the premier commercial truck leasing and rental company in the United States, is driven by those capabilities. We work closely with Jerry Ring, the Director of Business Intelligence at Idealease, as he works on a daily basis to ensure that the needs of Idealease customers are being met – and in particular, their fleet management needs.

“At Idealease, we want our customers to focus on their customers,” said Ring.  “They didn’t open a bakery because they wanted to manage a fleet of trucks.  As such, they shouldn’t have to manage a fleet of trucks in order to succeed as a bakery.”

Indeed, Idealease sees continually improving their service offerings as key to its success – and that’s because improving their service offerings allows them to help their customers focus more on their core business, and less on fleet management.

Empowering Customers with Fleet-Focused Business Intelligence

“Several years ago, we partnered with CyntrX to add telematics to all our National Account units.  As the technology grew, we worked closely with our customers to find out what was most important to them regarding managing their fleet.  Beyond their ability to deliver their goods, they were constantly challenged to reduce their operating costs along with keeping a focus on safety.”

And the key to reducing operating costs and increasing safety? The business intelligence that’s derived from CyntrX’s telematics capabilities, software, and services.

Here’s Jerry Ring again:

“We at Idealease now partner with our customers to provide them actionable intelligence in a handful of Key Performance Indicators.  As they continue to focus on their customers, we take the CyntrX data and transform it into easy to read, actionable steps to improve upon their KPI’s.   Because we utilize CyntrX across all our National Accounts, we can provide the customer a view of how they are doing against similar fleets with the same equipment.  We find this to be much more powerful visual versus us simply telling them where we feel they should be.”

Because these kinds of insights provide actionable business intelligence, and because Idealease has such a strong focus on the success of its customers, the work isn’t over at this point.

The Business Intelligence Path to Success

Indeed, in order for customers to truly gain ROI from the telematics BI, the work is often just beginning.

Once Idealease has shown their customers where they currently stand with their fleet and driver performance, they then offer them a plan designed to get the customer to focus on continual improvement within their fleet.

“We have fuel economy calculators that show how small changes can lead to hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in fuel savings alone,” said Ring. “And we also show customers a path to changing driver behaviors and habits, where needed. Changing those habits can help create the significant improvements in safety and operational costs that we want to help our customers with by reducing rentals, lowering accident rates and insurance costs, and improving fuel economy, uptime, and driver satisfaction.”

These changes, should the customer choose to implement them, are concrete. They significantly reduce idle time on the vehicle, which has a direct impact on fuel economy and the added benefit of reducing wear and tear on the engine.  Lower idle times also result in lower maintenance and breakdown risk, and increase the customer’s uptime. Likewise, the ability that CyntrX telematics affords Idealease to keep in communication with the truck and identify any potential service concerns ahead of time also helps to increase customer uptime.

The CyntrX / Idealease partnership has repeatedly proven to be a win for all involved, from Idealease to their customers and on down to the drivers themselves. If you’re already an Idealease customer and are not leveraging the power of telematics-derived business intelligence, contact Jerry Ring at JerryRing@idealease.com and he’ll be happy to work with you on getting up and running.

But even if your fleet is wholly owned, or leased from an entity other than Idealease, CyntrX still has you covered. You can request a free, no-obligation demo at any time, and we’ll work with you to understand your needs and show you how CyntrX – and the powerful telematics business intelligence and fleet management solutions that we can provide – can help you quickly get on the road to true fleet ROI.