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Manage Your Fleet with Trimble’s Connected Location and Dwell Time Data

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Efficient fleet operation depends on an accurate understanding of where your assets are, the time they spend at each destination and when they’ll arrive at the next. Unfortunately, dwell times – the amount of time a vehicle and driver spend waiting at a destination to load and unload freight – can vary wildly and throw even the most carefully planned routes into disarray. Lengthy, unexpected dwell times can cost time and revenue, negatively impact customer relationships and frustrate drivers.

This complex problem is one the commercial transportation industry has grappled with for decades, but it’s not until now that we’ve been able to gain a foothold. Our solution? Giving fleet managers access to aggregated dwell time metrics that provide actionable insights for better planning and decision-making.

As we recently announced, Trimble Fleet Manager, our back-office solution accessible via our Mobility telematics portfolio, now includes these industry-specific, average dwell time metrics through a seamless workflow integration with Connected Locations – made possible by the Trimble Transportation Cloud.

Connected Locations Deliver Dwell Times

Connected Locations leverages Trimble’s database of 4.7 million verified, North American commercial places, curated by our world-class GIS team. These Places are coded with polygonal geofences, as well as entry and exit gates where known and additional location attributes (such as operating hours, phone numbers, gate notes and more). Where companies traditionally used circular boundaries to denote a location’s general perimeter, our polygonal geofences reflect a location’s true size, geography and road connections.

By more precisely outlining a delivery location, these polygonal geofences generate far more accurate data around where and when a a vehicle’s GPS crosses a geofence boundary and triggers an arrival or departure event. This approach improves final mile navigation safety, enhances efficiency and champions collaboration. Trimble Fleet Manager then combines this location data with the aggregate dwell time metrics to provide fleet managers a clear picture of how long a driver and their vehicle might reside in a location.

Before Trimble launched this Connected Locations integration, there was no other source capable of providing average dwell time metrics for pick-up and drop-off locations, meaning drivers often encounter unexpected delays while waiting to be loaded or unloaded with no insight into how long those times might be.

“The Connected Locations integration with Trimble Fleet Manager significantly enhances our customers’ ability to manage their fleets,” said Ron Bisio, senior vice president, Trimble. “Fleets can’t get this level of precise commercial location data anywhere else, and by leveraging the Trimble Transportation Cloud, we’re helping solve challenges around inefficient delivery, scheduling and driver utilization.”

For example, if the typical dwell time in a facility is 30 minutes, fleet managers gain a better understanding of when a driver might leave and continue on the route once they arrive at that facility. This enables fleet managers to more effectively plan trips, manage arrival times and respond to customer expectations, especially as dwell times have a cascading effect on the day’s itinerary.

The Future of Fleet Management

These new features add up to increased visibility on your vehicles’ location and schedule, empowering more proactive planning decisions and easy resolutions for customer inquiries – giving you the data you need, when you need it. But we know this enhancement is only the first step in the battle against dwell times.

We understand how important accurate arrival and departure times are to maintaining schedules, keeping customers happy and satisfying service level agreements (SLAs). Alongside the addition of a custom location editor, we will continue to enhance the accuracy of our real-time location reporting to provide more complete transparency around facility dwell times.

We’re proud to continue building new features like these into Trimble Fleet Manager to provide a modern, reimagined fleet management experience that eases the burden on back-office staff and helps them solve day-to-day problems with an intuitive, scalable and secure solution.

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Want to see Connected Locations in action for yourself? Reach out to request a demo today!

To learn more about Trimble Fleet Manager and how you can incorporate Places data into your company’s visibility and equipment tracking operations, visit: https://transportation.trimble.com/products/fleet-manager.