How vehicle tracking systems help to achieve your fleet's sustainability goals

If your company has a vehicle fleet, implementing sustainability practices is in your best interest. These practices have been known to improve businesses economically, socially, and environmentally. Most importantly, by following them, you will be showing to your community and shareholders that your business is dedicated to limiting your impact on the environment.
 
Companies that have fleets of vehicles need to focus on strategies that help to lower fuel consumption and emissions. In turn, they will benefit from better social standing in the community. Also, reducing fuel consumption translates to significant savings!

How can you begin to define your approach to sustainability?

 
Organizations that want to introduce sustainability goals sometimes make the mistake of overestimating these targets. Be sure to set realistic sustainability goals, considering the age of the vehicles in your fleet, which routes they travel, the service each vehicle in your fleet undertakes and the impact of vehicle breakdowns and services. Keep all of these factors in mind when determining the viability of your sustainability goals.
 
You need to create a realistic project timeline to get closer to your objectives. Also, don’t expect immediate results because becoming eco-friendly is a progressive project.
 
That’s why it’s smart to break down your sustainability objectives into smaller milestones and priority areas that fall directly within your control. Structure your sustainability plan with quick wins, short-term goals, and long-term goals. This enables to track your company’s progress over time.

Launch your sustainability project with vehicle tracking

 
Vehicle tracking software can become a critical point for achieving these goals. It helps to monitor fuel consumption, driver behavior, and many other metrics that help organizations achieve their fleet sustainability objectives.
 
Here are a few tips to help you take advantage of vehicle tracking systems with sustainability in mind.
 
Optimize routes
 
GPS tracking solutions offer fleet managers instant access to information about traffic flow. This helps them to plan journeys more efficiently and minimize travel times. Route optimization also helps to reduce time spent idling due to traffic lights or congestion. By identifying these patterns, fleet managers can redirect routes to shorten their journey times, thereby reducing the overall travel time and fuel consumption. By lowering the collective mileage covered by the fleet, you will dramatically reduce fuel consumption and improve the sustainability of your business.
 
Reduce fuel consumption
 
Organizations that have fleets of vehicles should aim at decreasing fuel consumption. It’s not only a good idea economically speaking, but it also lowers the emissions. Naturally, this can’t come at the expense of completing fewer jobs. That’s why companies need to find other ways that they can cut fuel consumption without affecting their productivity.
 
Fleet managers who don’t use vehicle tracking systems can’t even realize how much unnecessary fuel their vehicles consume. Such solutions help to monitor fuel metrics and identify the source of unnecessary fuel consumption and costs.
 
Once you identify that source, you can take advantage of proactive alerts to instantly take action. Managers can also review their progress through GPS tracking reports. Most of the time, fleets can limit unnecessary fuel usage by monitoring group efficiency, idle time, and unauthorized use.
 
Rightsize your fleet
 
Another method for getting you closer to your sustainability goals is rightsizing your fleet. By maintaining more vehicles in your fleet then you need, you will increase the fuel and maintenance costs – together with your environmental impact.
 
Take advantage of a vehicle tracking solution to rightsize your fleet thanks to insights from monitoring utilization reports. Identify which of your vehicles are rarely used, should be reassigned, replaced, or eliminated to lower your fuel usage without compromising the productivity of your fleet.
 
Reduce emissions
 
Some vehicle tracking systems providers offer to deliver reports that monitor greenhouse gas emissions to help companies track their progress. Preventive maintenance is key to lowering GHG emissions and running a greener fleet.
 
A vehicle tracking solution will send you scheduled maintenance reminders to remind you that your vehicles are due for smog checks, air filter changes, oil changes, or other types of preventative maintenance that helps your fleet run cleaner and reduce GHG emissions into the atmosphere.
 

Key takeaway

Achieving sustainability objectives is challenging for organizations that operate fleets of vehicles. But with the right tools at your disposal, you can get closer to these goals.
 
Vehicle tracking systems are essential to reaching these objectives because they provide fleet managers with a wealth of insightful information that helps them to manage their fleet better, optimize fuel consumption and reduce costs wherever possible – be it economic or environmental.
 
Are you wondering how your fleet can use a GPS tracking solution to support your sustainability initiative? Leave us your questions in the comments; we want to start a conversation about sustainability practices for fleet managers.