Why you should integrate tire and vehicle scanning to your fleet management system
Today, a high-functioning fleet management system is the only way to maintain your fleet. Equally important is having the ability to gather the data needed to make your system function at its potential.
In this blog, we explain how tire and vehicle data scanning is becoming one of the biggest assets out there to take your fleet management system to the next level, and answer the following questions:
- What are Fleet Management Softwares?
- Why is data gathering the Achilles heel of FMS?
- How can you get the most from your FMS with a tire and vehicle scanner
- How can Anyline’s tire scanner be integrated?
Jump to key topics
Jump to key topics
1. What are Fleet Management Softwares?
In order to manage company vehicles or rental cars, many fleet managers turn to Fleet Management Softwares (FMS). These dedicated platforms allow companies to record and keep track of various tasks and activities. By having a better overview and understanding of their system, it becomes easier to make data driven decisions to improve efficiency, control costs, keep track of vehicles, manage drivers and improve business operations.
Among other things, a FMS helps fleet managers with:
- Vehicle tracking – Thanks to telematics like cellular triangulation, GLONASS, and GPS, it becomes easy to track vehicles in real time. Fleet managers can view the location of each vehicle and optimize routes or create business-relevant maps.
- Data reporting – Data reports improve the monitoring of operations, as well as maintenance activities.
- Inventory management – It’s also possible to track inventories, such as spare parts or tires.
FMS access real-time data to update every parameter at all times. If this gives an even better and more accurate fleet overview, it also means that fleet managers have to collect and process a lot of data.
2. Why is data gathering the Achilles heel of FMS?
FMS are powerful tools for fleet managers, but they are only as good as the data you feed them. Unfortunately, the full potential of many FMS are limited by a lack of necessary data, as well as by inefficient and manual methods of data gathering.
For example, if route optimization and vehicle tracking are important to keep operating costs low, fleet managers should consider tire tracking. Tires are an asset and should be considered as such: they have a huge impact on fuel consumption and operating costs, especially with the nowadays rising prices. The problem with tires is the difficulty to record valuable data into FMS – with the data being molded into sidewalls, most tire data capture is still done manually.
Similarly, keeping track of vehicles and parts can become a significant burden for employees when they have to enter data such as license plates, vehicle identification numbers (VINs) and vehicle part numbers, using manual data capture methods. Not only are these processes time consuming, but often result in erroneous data entering the FMS. Identifying and correcting these mistakes is time consuming, costly, and causes losses to worker productivity which the introduction of digital tools should work to prevent!
3. How can you get the most from your FMS with a tire and vehicle scanner
Thankfully, new innovations like optical character recognition (OCR) can easily resolve the issues of data capture when integrated into an FMS.
Using any camera enabled device, technicians can scan tire and vehicle data in seconds, and enter this information into their FMS in a matter of seconds. OCR brings the following advantages:
- Time-efficient – the scanner captures DOTs, tire size codes, VINs and license plates in seconds.
- Accuracy – scanning data removes errors from your data capture processes. OCR technology scans the information without making mistakes, so you are sure that your data is accurate.
- Mobile – it’s possible to use Anyline mobile data captureon any device equipped with a camera. It works on smartphones, ruggedized devices and even TPMS.
- Works where you need it to – A mobile scanner doesn’t require an internet connection to work, and it also scans in poor lighting conditions or under bad weather.
By using mobile data capture, fleet managers can scan each vehicle as it arrives and register its information into their internal database. With this data, your team can keep track of each vehicle, as well as the tire age and manufacturing date. That way it is easy for fleet managers to know when it’s time to get a new set of tires, to find their way around their inventory quickly, verify tire recalls and also to identify whether their tires haven’t been stolen.
4. How can Anyline be integrated?
One of Anyline’s data capture technology’s biggest assets is that it can be integrated directly into any fleet management department’s existing system or mobile apps that fleet managers can use on their personal smart devices, such as smartphones or tablets. Integrating Anyline mobile data capture into an FMS allows fleet managers to:
- Track and record tire and vehicle data quickly and efficiently.
- It doesn’t require important investment and ownership costs, as it can be integrated into any device you and your technicians are already using.
- It’s easy to use and workers don’t need to learn how to use new devices.
Anyline’s SDK is easy to integrate and is backed up by hands-on support from customer service teams ready to help at every step of your project. It works with Android and iOS smartphones and offers support for common integration frameworks including Xamarin, React Native, Cordova and Flutter.
You can find out if tire scanning is the right solution for you by downloading our Mobile Data Capture Demo App to test its capabilities, or by reaching us today!