Getting the right software for tracking vehicles & drivers is often a challenging task for fleet management companies. The most common issues are as follows:
Moreover, fleet management as a business is also changing. From fleets where 100% of vehicles are owned by a company (and drivers are on the payroll), we move to a structure where multiple parties and drivers who own the cars are independent operators. The role of fleet management companies in such cases is to play the role of the aggregator.
In the aggregator model, having reliable solutions integrated into the management tool is even more essential to ensure reliability and customer satisfaction.
Due to the issues mentioned above and challenges, fleet companies are increasingly relying on solutions where the tracking can be done accurately without the need for installing hardware. The great news is that all smartphones come inbuilt with GPS. The smartphone GPS can be used for data collection.
Processing the data to get reliable insights is another challenge. As mentioned earlier, telematics development is complex and time-consuming. To solve this problem, it is advisable to build your tracking system using ready-to-use Vehicle tracking and driver tracking APIs.
The top benefits of using APIs for vehicle and driver tracking are as follows:
Here are the four steps that you need to follow to build your fleet management solution using APIs:
At the very beginning, you need to ensure that you have a proper plan for the project to be successful. It’s helpful to have a complete list of features and capabilities you expect from the final product. Some companies may have basic vehicle location and driver location tracking requirements. In contrast, some other companies may want to integrate for advanced features such as driver scoring and eco-scoring of vehicles.
Some of the feature sets that you can consider are:
Once you know the features you require, you need to check out the API-based solutions available for implementing the features. Damoov’s telematics API provides most of the data necessary for Fleet Management Companies. Using Damoov’s APIs, you can implement typical features like safe driving scoring and implement niche requirements like drive coins and leaderboards.
Budgeting is also critical. There will be three main costs involved:
In the case of Damoov, the Fleet Management API is free to use for up to 10 users. This makes it an excellent option to try out!
You can build standalone software for fleet management or integrate it with your existing enterprise suite. Most APIs provide integration guidelines for major enterprise applications.
Mobile app development costs can be slashed if you use an open-source SDK. You can try out Damoov’s telematics SDK, which is free.
After feasibility study and budgeting comes the task of designing the software for fleet management and the app for data collection. In the case of fleet management software, your design would depend on whether you are building a standalone software or integrating the features into your existing business software.
In the case of the mobile app, you need to ensure the following:
The programming effort depends on whether you are building the software on your own or using SDKs. If you are building apps on your own, you have the following option:
Damoov’s SDKs are available for both Flutter and ReactNative.
For integration, you may have to check the guidelines of your existing enterprise software. If you don’t want to integrate, you will have to plan for convenient data export.
Fleet management companies worldwide have found Damoov to be useful for quickly building their products at a much lower cost. Damoov provides you with all the elements that you need to make your solution: