Here’s a common problem that fleets face with navigation:
Your driver gets instructions to pick up or deliver a load at XYZ Shipping’s depot at 3 pm. He puts the depot address into his navigation system, and it tells him where to go.
Except, it doesn’t really tell him where to go. It finds the exact center of the property where the depot is located, or the middle of the building’s rooftop, and puts the navigation pin there.
Then it takes him as near to the pin as it can—usually to the road where the company’s main entrance is located.
So he gets there at 3 pm and realizes that navigation is telling him to go into the main parking lot of XYZ Shipping. Since he’s fairly sure that they won’t be impressed by an eighteen-wheeler pulling up alongside their offices, he now has to waste time figuring out where the docking bay is—and whether the entrance is even on the same road that the navigation system has taken him to.
By the time he pulls into the depot, he’s 30 minutes late, and now his company’s reputation with XYZ has suffered, he and possibly the carrier get paid less for this load, and in the future, he’s going to deliberately pad his navigation time to be sure this doesn’t happen again.
Multiply this by hundreds of drivers, every day of the year, and a story that, at first glance, looks like a minor annoyance or embarrassment, starts to look like a serious efficiency problem that wastes thousands of man-hours and potentially even millions of dollars.
Historically, this shortcoming with navigation systems has just been a fact of life. At least we’re not using paper maps anymore, right?
But in fact, there is no reason to put up with this.
Eleos customers don’t.
Their drivers are able to easily move the navigation marker on the map and share this new location back to their fleets’ systems so that it can be remembered in the future. They can pick up the map pin and move it to precisely the gate they need to navigate to—and then every driver who navigates to that address in the future can see the updated, correct, driver-verified location, even drivers for other fleets that use Eleos, like Prime, Inc., Knight-Swift, USA Truck, Ryder, and more.
By using drivers to help adjust and confirm facility location data, fleets not only gain efficiency but keep their drivers for longer. When drivers have control over this frustrating problem, they feel empowered to do their jobs well.
And over time, with so many drivers improving location accuracy, they simply don’t have to deal with bad navigation instructions nearly as much. That makes them happier. When drivers know that the system they’re using actively makes their jobs better and easier, they tend to stay with carriers using that system.
Another great benefit of allowing drivers to provide updated facility location data is back office personnel no longer need to manually update lat/long data, freeing them to focus on much more important tasks and projects.
Of course, fleets still have complete oversight of the crowd-sourced latitude and longitude updates. They can double-check every updated location, assess whether it’s better or worse, and update their internal records accordingly. They can also use the location updates in other integrations, like optimizers, as well as logging them for later use.
This solution is far superior to what other technology companies can offer. Others do give drivers the ability to update map data, and they can infer correct locations from the arrival patterns of multiple trucks over time. But the reported information is only shared between that fleet’s drivers. This is because no one but Eleos has figured out how to correctly match and identify the locations across multiple fleet’s systems, stored in different formats, with varying degrees of accuracy. We have solved this problem with a patent-pending crowdsourcing solution that allows us to confidently determine that location A, stored in one fleet’s system, is indeed the same as location B, stored in another fleet’s system. The Eleos Platform can then share this driver-provided information across fleets.
If this is a feature that would improve your own fleet efficiency and driver happiness, why not schedule a free demo of Eleos to see what else it can do for you?
