There was a time when walking to school was the safest option for children. Parents were afraid to send their children to school on public transport. The children used to only attend nearby schools because they could walk to school, and parents felt safer. Schools and institutes have become more spread out as cities got larger. They offer transportation to pick-up and drop-off.
Parents want to offer their children safety and security while they commute. This is the number one priority for schools. The fleet management system streamlines the process of transportation.
What is a Fleet Management System (FMS)?
The fleet or transportation management system allows schools to manage their entire bus fleet management seamlessly. It automates all tasks, including scheduling a driver, picking up the child, routing changes, or changing the timing.
School ERP Management solutions streamline transportation and make administrative tasks more manageable. This integrated end-to-end management system helps to manage all the transportation-related information such as vehicle number, allocated driver, the route, and more. The system also includes a payment gateway that makes it easy for parents to make payments. You can view the payment history and see who has paid what dues.
Benefits of a Fleet Management System
1. Schools can Plan for Driver Schedules
Schools can keep track of drivers and their schedules using fleet management software. It provides transparency for parents regarding the driver and keeps them updated about their child. Schools can see the driver's schedule and make any necessary changes. They can also find other drivers available for the same time slot if a driver is unavailable.
2. Modify Bus Routes More Efficiently
Schools can schedule and modify routes efficiently using the fleet management system. Bus routes can change depending on demand. This allows school administrators to alter or delete routes and assign new ways.
New students are added to schools every acedemic year. They may also require bus services. Fleet Management ERP solutions can make it easier to change bus routes and also helps to build up relationships with parents and faculty.
3. Simple Fee and Payroll Management
The integrated payment system for transport management makes it easy for parents to pay fees, collect receipts, and review the history of previous payments. Schools are updated about managing salaries for bus drivers, conductors, dues of students, and other details.
4. Parents Receive Regular Alerts
Parents can keep track of their child's commute using the transportation system. They can also be kept informed regularly about delays and pick up/drop at the exact location at any time.
5 Ways Fleet Management Helps Your Company
Transport is the movement of people, goods, and animals from one location to another. There are many modes of transportation: air, rails, roads, water, cable, and pipeline, as well as space. Transport management is vital because it allows trade between people. This, in turn, creates civilizations. Logistics Management and supply chain can be described as the science and art of obtaining and distributing products and materials in the right quantities and at the correct place.
This includes both inbound and outbound movements and internal and external ones. A logistics company is one of the essential agencies you need for your export and import business operations. These companies can help you move your goods to an international destination or a local location. Your business models can reap the benefits of choosing the proper Fleet Management and Logistics services. These are just a few of the many benefits:
Lower Delivery Costs
Fleet management and logistics services have invested heavily to offer a complete and integrated delivery service. It can be very costly to maintain and service trucks, motorbikes, and communications systems. This could also be a good use of money. It may be more efficient to focus your capital on your core value proposition.
Better Change
A delivery company is a good option if you deliver large quantities of goods. This can significantly reduce your working capital requirements. Your delivery partner also has logistics and warehousing capabilities. In this instance, integrating them into your supply chain could result in significant cost savings directly impacting your bottom line.
International Reteach
Reputable courier companies will have established relationships with major international logistics companies, ensuring seamless delivery.
Improve
Sometimes, you need a difficult job done quickly or a package shipped to another country. Professional delivery companies will do the job right.
Dealing International Customs
International shipping can present problems. You may need to pay taxes, duties, or other fees, as well as restrictions on materials. The company that provides courier services will be able to determine what you should do depending on the border you cross. This will save you time delivery and energy, as well as reduce the chance of being penalized.
Optimizing the logistics of your company should result in visible improvements in profitability and overall profit margins.
Fleet Management System Key Features
Transport Planning Features
The first step in the transportation process is to create a transport request. This will include details about the shipment and a quote. The shippers offer loads to carriers, who then plan the cargo distribution and capacity.
Management of Orders
All parties involved in a FMS can access order information, from drivers to planners to customers. These features allow users to manage and view transport requests.
Order Entry: Order entry can be either manual or automated. It involves filling out all necessary details, such as commodity weight or setting up the current location and destination. A system can often generate a route and assign a driver and transport, as well as calculate the estimated time of arrival. This order is automatically sent to the scheduled transportation if you have an integrated warehouse management system.
Order Overview: Order planners and drivers can view their daily workload on a dashboard that displays created orders, including their routes and assigned transports. Drivers can also access all documents automatically linked to the corresponding charges. Planners can keep track of all truck locations and changes in scheduling by monitoring the status of orders as drivers make them.
Tendering
Fleet Management System can automatically tender your shipments. You can access the list of carriers to find the one you need or let the system choose one for you. Many systems offer broadcast, waterfall, and status tendering options. You can also filter out the below mentioned tendering methods:
Lowest cost: When it selects the lowest rate and extends this offer to other carriers.
Auto-Award: Shipments are permanently assigned by specific carriers.
Allocations: Using contractual percentages and by the load numbers (4 numbers to Carrier A, three numbers to Carrier B).
Service-Based: When choosing the best-performing carrier.
Customer-Based: When selecting the airline that a customer prefers.
Management of Shipment Rates
A rate engine is one of the essential tools in a FMS. A rate engine calculates transport rates for the parcel, LTL, truckload, and intermodal shipping using a set of rules. These include base rates, discounts, and contract agreements. FMS should be capable of creating custom pricing rules to accommodate complex tariffs and sending a quote to clients as soon as they request it.
Load planning
The loading space for trucks, trailers, and containers can be planned and calculated. This calculation will take into account maximum loads and weight. You can also enter vehicle dimensions and save them for future reference. This is called master data. The freight order contains data about item dimensions. Some FMS offer the ability to view and modify cargo distribution and space utilization.
Transportation Execution Features
Once the carrier and shipper have agreed, the load must be transported. A FMS cannot deliver freight but can assist with dock scheduling, fleet management, and settlement to reduce the burden.
Read More: ERP System in Manufacturing Company
Fleet Management
A FMS allows you to manage your fleet from one platform. FMS providers may not offer advanced fleet management capabilities. Still, you can assign drivers and equipment and manage dispatch and financial settlements for drivers.
You can manage fuel consumption and environmental impact by using dedicated fleet management software. This software also allows you to track vehicle checkups and activities remotely.
Dock Scheduling and Yard Operations
Most shippers spend time scheduling dock appointments, while truck drivers spend their time waiting in line to get their turn. A FMS can be integrated with a WMS, yard management system, or other software to allow dock scheduling and load sequences to be included in the transportation plan. This gives you an overview of all transportation constraints, will enable you to make more precise schedules (automatically and manually) and applies your business rules and rules for every location. You also have access to a load status that you can view and share with customers.
Documentation Management and Settlement
Transportation, particularly the settlement portion, is complex and requires a lot of documentation. There is, however, some progress toward automation. FMS today can create digital transformation bills of lading and invoices, as well as conduct freight auditing. This will allow you to automate billing and invoicing, create invoices, and improve claims management.
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Transport Visibility Features
Okay, you've got your shipment delivered. You still need to finish. How can you build business relationships with your partners? Are you planning to analyze your operations and make informed decisions about the future? You can also use a FMS to help with this.
Portals for Connectivity
Although a FMS typically allows customers and partners to connect via email, some vendors offer customizable self-service portals. Customers can view and create orders. Partners can also send tender offers and review invoices.
Analyze of Route
While planning is the primary function of a FMS system, routing is not. Many businesses use customized fleet management software to optimize their routing activities. This software, which is not available in FMS, can utilize all algorithms to determine the best routes. If your FMS's routing capabilities need to be improved, you may need to combine these tools.
Five Major Challenges in Transportation Management System
The Inability of Vehicles' Capacities
This is one of the main problems with traditional transport systems. You have a team that reviews the vehicle details to determine what type and how many products and product quality it can carry. They need to be corrected. A vehicle may have more orders than they estimate.
Inefficient Route Managing
The inability to efficiently manage routes can have a direct impact on the delivery time. It can also lead to idling engines (when a vehicle is stuck in traffic congestion), increased driving time, and high vehicle maintenance costs.
The Inability to Track Consignments
A traditional transport system requires a dedicated team. They might have to make hundreds of daily calls to receive an update on the consignment's status.
Higher Transportation Costs
Manually allocating orders requires more human resources. Manual route planning and optimization can result in frequent vehicle maintenance, high driving times, delayed delivery, and a lack of vehicle capacity. This may make it more difficult to order more vehicles on the market. These problems all lead to an increase in transportation costs.
Inability to Deliver Orders On-Time
One of the most significant transportation problems is needing help to deliver orders at the agreed time. This directly affects customer satisfaction.
Modules of a Fleet Management Software
Module for Order Management
Order management is about the seamless integration of data from multiple systems like inventory databases, fulfillment systems, and vendor databases. It should provide a detailed view of every stage of the order lifecycle, from order placement to order fulfillment.
The module should have the features necessary to prevent orders from being lost, delayed, damaged, or stolen during fulfillment. Clients, managers, and customer service representatives can track orders online anytime, anywhere.
This module should:
- Create optimal routing plans to route orders.
- Based on the type of order, handle changes in transport requirements.
- Delivery processes can be synchronized to meet customer expectations during same-day deliveries.
- Integrate delivery data.
Freight Management Module
Logistics operations must be well managed. If freight management is not handled well, it can lead to huge losses. In today's cloud-based freight management system era, manual freight management is obsolete. The FMS must have a competent freight management module.
This module should:
- You can predict freight costs: This freight cost estimation feature can help with financial planning and cost estimation. This feature allows users to calculate freight tariffs that may differ from one region to the next. The freight charge module should also be able to predict the cost of different order types and orders.
- Allow carrier self-invoicing: Each carrier will have its requirements for invoicing, so the freight management module must allow pages to self-invoice.
- To resolve invoice disputes, use a settlements feature. This feature will help you save time and avoid conflicts with your carrier.
Module Transportation
This module is the most important in any FMS. This module helps to make the supply chain efficient and lean. This module is the core of the FMS. This module tracks the transportation costs throughout the supply chain management.
It should include features like:
- Consolidation and route optimization: Trip supervisors will be able to plan and execute trips more effectively if they have a way to view all the routes taken by trucks and freighters.
- Multi-modal transportation support: This is important when 3PL or 4PL providers are involved with the supply chain operations.
- You can update freight documents quickly and easily by digitizing them.
- You are tracking freighters and fleets, as well as information management.
- Management of fleet capacity: Collaboration tools are a way to make communication easier between stakeholders. One such feature is instant mobile notifications.
- Performance-monitoring feature: This feature is essential to measure the efficiency of the fleet. Monitoring the fleet's performance can identify bottlenecks and help to resolve them. A good fleet has an efficient fleet.
- Customer service features: This should allow customers to reach out to customer service representatives. This feature is crucial for any questions regarding shipments, invoices, or fleets during the fulfillment process.
- EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is essential for seamless data flow throughout the supply chain. The EDI implementation will ensure no paper-based documentation burden on the organization.
- A carrier management feature: This feature can be used to manage carriers and carriers' contracts. It will also allow you to rate pages based on their performance. This will help you choose the best carriers.
- This feature allows for the auditing and verifying of every shipment to address any future problems that might arise.
Module For Manufacturing
A module specifically designed for the administration of the manufacturing domain can increase the efficiency of your supply chain.
The following are desirable features for a FMS manufacturing module:
- Inventory management and control: This helps to maintain stock levels in the warehouse.
- Operational management: This feature ensures products arrive on time to meet customer demand planning and is shipped promptly after orders are placed. This feature monitors warehouse staff performance.
- Asset management: This helps to reduce costs and risk, maximize the return on assets and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Analytics and Reporting Module
Digitized business processes produce a wealth of data. This data can be used to improve operational efficiency by refining it. Analytics and reporting modules will make it possible to convert operational data into actionable information. This actionable information will help decision-makers and the powers within an organization to make the right decisions at a particular time, thereby fuelling the organization's growth.
Analytics and reporting modules should include features like:
- This feature allows for the collection, analysis, and summary of transport and supply chain metrics across an organization.
- This feature allows you to generate insightful reports about expenses, Entire fleet performance, invoices, and personnel management.
- Stakeholders can share all reports generated within and outside of the organization. This will facilitate cross-team collaboration.
- Business Intelligence capabilities will help estimate profit and loss (P&L).
- This feature can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of current organizational processes.
- This feature can identify deadweight strategies in an organization. The insights can be used to improve organizational efficiency by tweaking them.
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Conclusion
Using fleet management software is the best method to grow your business in a data-driven environment. Arion has created numerous extremely specialized solutions for logistical and transportation businesses, and we can assist you as well. Let's talk about it today by getting in contact!
