A Q&A with Santa, and Fleet Manager Mrs Claus, of North Pole Inc
Having the greatest military in the world also means maintaining the greatest military in the world. Money alone does not keep every truck and transport vehicle in top operating order. It takes hard work, vigilance, constant training and above all, discipline.
That’s why the different branches of the military conduct regular truck rodeos –or competitions– for the soldiers of motor transportation companies to show off their vehicle and combat skills. Teams are pitted against one another or the clock to assess their abilities getting around obstacles, loading, securing and unloading various cargoes, doing repairs and other activities that ensure readiness under demanding and stressful conditions. Truck rodeo competitions may sound like fun for these crews, but the reasons behind them are deadly serious.
Of course, there are protocols for maintaining all this equipment. Soldiers’ lives could and do depend on trucks and other heavy equipment the military uses to carry out its mission. Ensuring tight maintenance schedules requires adherence to a standard operating procedure (SOP). Considerations need to be put on priorities and focus, or what needs to be maintained and when, and how those variables change given the mission at hand. The SOP then must be communicated down the chain of command.
The entire process is personnel intensive and the fleets are very large, which begs another question. How can the operators of these fleets master year-round management off all these assets and maintain their superior reliability and reduce associated costs? Vehicle Analytics using GPS fleet tracking, is how.
Fleet tracking: Managing your entire fleet from centralized locations offers efficiencies to augment the protocols already in place. Onboard telematics devices (commonly referred to as GPS fleet management software) give each asset a level of intelligence. Those big problems caused by small, undiscovered issues now can be prevented through early detection.
Saving Manpower: Certainly, the effort put into creating and adhering to a maintenance schedule benefits from in-the-moment information. Imagine all the manpower dedicated to simply scheduling maintenance for tens of thousands of transport and personnel vehicles. If telematics reduces the time personnel spent on dispatching and scheduling, what other high-value work could those people that were once dedicated to scheduling be doing instead?
Priorities and focus: Knowing what vehicles to use for different applications becomes easier when commanders have the most up to date information on what assets are available to them. GPS fleet management offers the fastest way to see where assets are and what they’re doing in real time, and real time intelligence is the best for strategic decision-making.
Trend Data: It’s not just immediate data that’s useful to crews and their commanders. Rolling that information into long term trend views offers the ability to weed out inefficiencies in how assets are used, get them to where they need to be faster, save fuel and over the long haul, build a stronger fleet.
Truck rodeos put the workhorses of our military on display and confirm force readiness. Adding telematics for fleet tracking adds another layer of intelligence crews and commanders use to perform at an even higher level while delivering cost, time, equipment and manpower efficiencies to keep the greatest military in the world ready for anything.
To see how Teletrac Navman caters fleet management for government fleets visit http://www.teletracnavman.com/areas-we-serve/government.