In a world where efficiency is everything, finding a means to categorise and organise things becomes the order of the day. When you are a fleet manager or system administrator dealing with a countless number of vehicles or machinery, it can be a tiresome task, especially if you deal with each vehicle on a one-by-one basis.
To resolve this, GEOTAB’s grouping solution allows you to organise your fleet as per your preference and necessity. Examples of this can be:
- Grouping per region (e.g. province, city, town, etc.).
- Grouping per department (e.g. Sales, IT, Accounts, Admin, Maintenance, etc.).
- Grouping per type of vehicle (e.g. Passenger, LDV’s, Heavy Duty Vehicles, etc.).
- Grouping per type of machinery (e.g. Rigs, Graders, Excavators, Wheel Loaders, etc.).
The following screenshots indicate how to group a vehicle:
Log onto your database and go to the vehicles tab to view the list of vehicles in your fleet.
Select the vehicle you would like to group.
Select the groups tab, which will list any available groupings the vehicle may already have.
Click on the drop-down box of the “Select Groups” option and choose the particular group you would like to allocate the vehicle to. If necessary, you may have to click on a parent group in order to view the sub-groupings underneath it.
The benefits of grouping one’s fleet can be summarised as follows:
- Fleet managers/administrators can restrict access to lower level employees to selected vehicles.
- Regional managers can easily access only vehicles under their supervision, and not be overwhelmed by the company’s entire fleet.
- Allocating system and driver settings to a large set of vehicles, or different types of machines/vehicles, becomes quicker and more systematic.
- Pulling reports for specific vehicles or machines can be done simply by filtering the group, rather than individually choosing the vehicles from your list of vehicles.
- Through colour coding of zones and vehicle groupings, one can track when a vehicle from one group crosses into the zone of another grouping. This can track when vehicles are making unnecessary long trips and help ensure better fuel economy through quicker route taking.
Managing your fleet need not be the day-to-day hassle it appears to be. By simply allocating groupings to your vehicles, one can take the task of dealing with hundreds of vehicles, to easily just dealing with one or two groups.
Author: Stuart Munien, Sim Card Administrator – GEOTAB AFRICA
