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Top 10 Signs your ‘Telematics’ Project is Failing: Sign 3

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This week we’re focussng on the third area that could cause your project to fail.

1.       The Project starts with “a couple free devices”

Frequently the technology vendor will show up and say “how about we set you up with a few free boxes?” Sounds great, right?  Maybe not.  While it may be attractive from a project startup cost standpoint – it’s potentially the start of a project that goes nowhere.  Right from the start this approach focuses on “the device” not on the people, process, and measurable results. If the goal of the initiative is to improve the driving culture – how are we going to do that on a couple drivers with a couple free boxes? What will these drivers think of their supervisors? Why were they singled out? How is does this initiative support the organizational goals for the fiscal year? Generally, this approach is more about the supplier getting in your door, then it is about your likelihood of sustainable organizational and financial results from an initiative.

Driving Safer and Smarter…

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GreenRoad’s VP of Product Marketing, Karen White, has recently contributed to this great Trucks at Work blog post on smarter and safer driving.

The post covers some interesting thoughts from a couple of different sources concerning the ever-pertinent topic of “safe driving.” How do fleets get drivers – raw newbies and seasoned professionals alike – to keep striving for safety improvements day in and day out, despite the ups and downs built in to any human endeavor?  As noted in this space time and time again, driving is an act taken for granted by most of us – and taking something as fraught with danger as operating a motor vehicle at high speeds for granted leads to all sorts of trouble.

“We need to look at the thousands of decisions a driver makes every day”, says Karen White, SVP of Product Marketing at GreenRoad, “not just the ones that result in a speeding ticket, fender bender, or fatality.”

Click here to read the full post.

Introducing Fleet Elite

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This month, I’m very pleased to announce an exciting new program: the GreenRoad Fleet Elite.   In a nutshell, Fleet Elite recognizes GreenRoad drivers who have demonstrated sustained excellence in driving performance and safety.  It’s an easy-to-implement recognition program, administered by GreenRoad and designed to help you motivate and retain top drivers.

Here’s how it works.  Each year, GreenRoad sets the criteria for Fleet Elite membership.  In 2012, drivers are eligible if they sustain an overall safety score of 5 or less for the full calendar year, with at least 500 driving hours logged.  Each quarter, you’ll get a progress report showing how your drivers are tracking toward Fleet Elite status.  At the end of the year, we tabulate the results, and we announce the new inductees.  There’s no extra paperwork or administration on your part; we provide the materials to promote the Fleet Elite program, keep track of the metrics, and provide the awards.  Each Fleet Elite member receives a formal certificate of achievement and a GreenRoad Fleet Elite pin, badge or license plate (depending on what works for your organization.)  Most importantly, drivers earn the prestige of being part of the GreenRoad Fleet Elite, an accomplishment that becomes part of their professional credentials.

Anyone can participate in Fleet Elite – provided that your vehicle profiles meet our eligibility criteria.  If you are a GreenRoad customer, talk with your account manager today to find out whether you’re eligible – and join us in recognizing the best drivers on the road.

Top 10 Signs your ‘Telematics’ Project is Failing: Sign 2

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Following on from last week’s post, we look at the next area that could cause your project to fail.

2.       Ambiguous project requirements and goals

Take control of the project. Assign a project manager who collaborates directly with key departmental stakeholders from Risk & Safety, Operations, Human Resources, Fleet Management, and Finance to define specific detailed project requirements that have tangible, measurable, ROI.  While this seems obvious, many companies will skip this stage and go right to applying a solution to jump start a project.  In-vehicle technology solution providers are constantly soliciting their services to companies with fleet vehicles. This is not a commodity market and not all solutions are equal. The impacts to your employees, culture, and financial return vary significantly from supplier to supplier.  Don’t assume requirements (such as project controls, management dashboards, application functionality, data, enterprise integration, measurements, policy, and workflow) are met.  ‘Telematics’ and other similar projects tend to fail and the companies usually encounter over spending, project restarts, rework, and/or unmet expectations. Many of you reading this – have a “trash heap” of in-vehicle technology past projects.

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What is Change Management?

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Mark Hampson, GreenRoad’s internal expert on driver change management and risk reduction has recently completed an informative whitepaper on the topic that is now available for download.

Change is always with us, it’s a fact of life. But, how we manage change determines success.

Making change happen successfully involves moving an organisation’s people and culture.  This is usually not easy, but today there are tools like GreenRoad that make it possible.  There are two ways of dealing with change:  1) reactively, by responding only when you need to, usually too late, or 2) proactively, by planning ahead.

By adopting or thinking about GreenRoad you are already in the proactive camp.  You realise that you don’t have to accept the status quo and you know it’s possible to help your organisation improve driving standards.  How do you get your drivers to change their behaviour using GreenRoad and how do you manage that change?

Unless your entire organisation from senior management down is committed to the change, it will fail.  Successful change management is about finding ways of taking people with you.  This white paper provides some guidelines to help you on that path.

Click here to download the full Change Management whitepaper.

Top 10 Signs your ‘Telematics’ Project is Failing: The First Sign

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There are many reasons that could cause your well intentioned foray into in-vehicle technology to fail.  I will be examining the top ten signs one by one in this weekly blog post on greenroad.com. 

1.       You named the project “The GPS Program” or “The BlackBox Project”

What’s in a name? Maybe everything if from the name employee’s decide what a project is an how it will affect them.  Every project that a company invests time and resources into gets broad organizational exposure. You hear the hallway grumbling about “this or that project” that the company has underway. The name of the project can have serious impacts on what the organization thinks the project is and how it will effect employee’s (and management) personally. Let’s be clear – GPS stands for Global Positioning System and is a technology component that is becoming a standard in everything from vehicles to mobile devices. Like a clock on a microwave, or on a coffee maker or DVD player – GPS is simply an input into adding location information to the things that we value. Imagine if your company embarked on an extensive upgrade to your information technology infrastructure to benefit employees and customers – and named the project “The CPU” project.  Pick a project name that creates excitement for your company and meaningfully represents the results that you are seeking everyone to participate in achieving. The “Driving Excellence Project”, “Driving Performance and Safety Program” or the “Drive Green Initiative” – for example.

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GreenRoad Product Update: Trip-Splitting

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When it comes to developing a product roadmap, it’s not always new features that top the priority list. We also incorporate feedback from customers about how we can make their lives easier. With that in mind, we rang in the new year with a trip splitting enhancement that is already getting cheers from our bus customers.

If you have multiple drivers sharing a vehicle, you’re probably familiar with this problem: Driver 1 keys in, Driver 2 takes over the bus and forgets to key in… and two trips in the real world become one trip in GreenRoad (with Driver 1’s score either benefitting or suffering from Driver 2’s performance!) But now, it’s easy to split trips in Central- so that you have complete and accurate records for each driver. Just click “Trips” under Fleet Management, enter the date range that contains the trip you want to split, and click “Submit”. Then find the trip, select it, and click “Split” above the trip list. Enter the first and second driver, select the split time, and confirm. Poof – you have created two trips. See? That was easy.

We have a full and exciting product roadmap for 2012. Stay tuned for more to come.

The Myth of Engine Control Module (ECM) Integration and Fuel Consumption Data

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What is the question that we get asked most by customers and prospects? Well, there are many, but a common question that highlights a growing concern with ever increasing fuel costs is “how do I accurately measure my individual vehicle fuel consumption?”

With the advent of On Board Diagnostics (OBD) in the 1980s the problem was solved, right? OBD, in an automotive context, is a generic term referring to a vehicle’s self-diagnostic and reporting capability. All vehicle manufacturers conform to SAE J1979 and the OBD-II standard has been mandatory for all cars and light trucks sold in the United States since 1996, and the EOBD standard has been mandatory for all petrol vehicles sold in the European Union since 2001 and all diesel vehicles since 2004.

Problem solved! We just connect to the vehicle OBD port (they all have one) and read the fuel consumption data, right? Wrong…..it’s not that simple, it’s complicated and fraught with pitfalls. Continue reading →

Changes in the Industry

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Tanya Roberts, GreenRoad’s SVP of Marketing, has recently contributed her expertise to an article in Food Logistics on the future of traditional vehicle routing technologies.

With the ongoing emergence of cloud computing solutions and online data, industry experts believe the traditional approach for vehicle routing will soon become obsolete. This new Web-based approach makes it easy for companies to seamlessly and instantly stay connected to their data.

“These technologies are coming together to form a new approach we like to call the ‘connected fleet,’” says Tanya Roberts, SVP of marketing at GreenRoad. “With this new trend of the connected fleet, managers now have eyes in every vehicle, and on every driver.”

Click here to read the full article.