Fleet managers must balance ever-shifting routes and customer needs — all while keeping drivers (and the public) safe. Three fleets are applying technology to better serve their customers, improve their efficiency, and boost the bottom line.
Smart Care leverages fleet tracking to improve operations and efficiency
Smart Care Equipment Solutions is the nation’s largest commercial kitchen equipment maintenance company, servicing restaurants, hospitals, schools, and universities in all 50 states. The fleet’s 600 vehicles make more than 30,000 service calls each month. Before Lytx®, they had an existing GPS system that delivered data about driver location, but no information about driver behavior.
In 2018, Smart Care implemented Lytx’s video telematics solution to better understand driver behavior — such as hard braking and driver distraction — by adding video capabilities.
Video has helped improve these behaviors. As Kevin Kelley, Safety and Health Manager noted, “Videos translate to a much more effective two-way coaching conversation with our technicians.” As a result of driver coaching, collisions dropped by 74 percent in the first quarter after implementing the Driver Safety Program.
The fleet tracking piece is paramount to our business. We could not survive without it.
In addition to safety, profitability was a key driver for installing Lytx GPS fleet tracking technology. Smart Care wanted to improve its technician utilization rate, which measures how much of a technician’s time is spent directly helping customers. Routes were planned to meet the goal of 68 percent utilization, but emergency calls required re-routing technicians. The improved fleet tracking capabilities enabled dispatchers to re-route drivers more efficiently and achieve a 72 percent utilization rate — effectively paying for the cost of the system.
As Kelley said, “The fleet tracking piece is paramount to our business. We could not survive without it. Our dispatch team uses the fleet tracking portion of Lytx to know where our technicians are at all times, route the ones capable of performing required work from nearby areas, and use geofencing to really understand where everyone is."
Durham Coca-Cola uses video evidence from its fleet management solution to help exonerate drivers from false claims
The Durham Coca-Cola Bottling Company has 140 vehicles that carry a high-profile name on their sides, sometimes making them a target for false claims.
Each claim consumes significant time and effort, even when proved fraudulent. Before installing the Lytx Driver Safety Program, Durham Coca-Cola was spending nearly $100,000 in annual claims costs. “When you’re an independent bottler, those claims can eat you alive,” noted Safety Coordinator Donahue Holloway.
Less than two hours after installing the Lytx system, a Durham Coca-Cola driver was involved in an incident. Holloway explained, “[The driver] was on his way back from the install when another vehicle collided with him.... After the event, he called us and said, ‘This is what happened.’ I went in to check the video footage and saw that it happened while he was making a turn and it showed clearly that it was not his fault.”
Other incidents followed. Holloway said, “We had two companies go after us when they thought we hit them....In fact, video clearly showed they hit us. Once we mentioned that we had Lytx, [the false claims] went away.”
In a little more than a year after installing Lytx, Durham Coca-Cola’s claims costs have dropped by 92%. The results were so impressive that the company’s insurance carrier highlighted the safety program for its other customers.
Doughnut Peddler uses MV+AI and Lytx solutions to manage growth and reduce risk
Sensing a growing appetite for freshly baked treats available through convenience stores, Doughnut Peddler CEO Jason Duffy embarked on an ambitious plan to expand beyond the company’s home base in Chandler, Arizona. With those plans came the need to grow the company’s fleet of 10-foot and 26- foot box trucks, and its roster of drivers.
As the company added drivers and established new delivery routes that extend from Florida to California, it also saw an uptick in risk. “When you start up new markets, you hire new people who might not be as familiar with the roads,” Cooper said. “We needed a solution that could identify risk and quickly help us train drivers – before we lost assets.”
The company found that Lytx's machine vision and artificial intelligence (MV+AI) technology accurately identified, categorized, and recorded risky driving, such as not wearing a seat belt, cell phone use, and smoking, which can affect the taste of baked goods.
The ability to see driver behavior in greater detail has helped the company improve driver safety through coaching with a 58% drop in incidences of speeding, 50% decrease in hand-held cell phone use, and 46% improvement in seat belt compliance.
Overall, “the ability to navigate Lytx’s online platform and access 24/7 video was night and day compared to the competitor,” William Cooper said. “Lytx has its solutions and integrations so dialed-in that anyone can easily use its system. The fact that we could easily integrate it with our current software applications and devices made this a grand slam.”
Want to see how Lytx’s fleet management solutions can help you improve efficiency and safety? Book a demo today.