How telematics can make your fleet safer and enhance compliance
How telematics can make your fleet safer and enhance compliance
Running a productive, safe and compliant fleet requires everyone in your business to play a role. Collective responsibility is also reinforced by the recently updated Chain of Responsibility legislation which makes everyone in your supply chain responsible for the safe running of your fleet.
To achieve that, you need the right tools and processes in place to ensure all areas are compliant and operating as efficiently as they should be.
EROAD’s telematics platform provides you with visibility and valuable insights about your fleet to help manage the safety and performance of your vehicles. It also provides the capability to gather vital data to ensure your fleet’s compliance with key Australian safety and tax legislation.
This includes:
EROAD enhances your Chain of Responsibility compliance
EROAD’s award-winning fleet management solution puts safety at the forefront of everything. It helps improve your safety management practices by monitoring every aspect of your driver’s, vehicle’s and equipment’s performance so you can address issues quickly and also nurture a strong safety culture.
The key to your fleet’s safety and Chain of Responsibility compliance is ensuring your business complies with four key CoR areas. This includes:
1. Speed: ensuring vehicles and drivers do not exceed the speed limits
2. Vehicle standards: ensuring vehicles are maintained and are roadworthy at all times
3. Fatigue: ensuring drivers don’t work excessive hours and take breaks when needed
4. Mass: ensuring loads do not exceed a vehicles’ mass and configuration limits
EROAD can help manage compliance for each of these areas at the same time as helping create a higher performing fleet.
Here’s how EROAD can help manage your CoR compliance
1. Speed
Telematics devices have traditionally enabled companies to track speed against open road speed limits. EROAD has taken that one step further by tracking against posted speed limits and making driving event data available to fleet managers via an online portal.
EROAD’s Ehubo2 enables you to identify not only vehicle activity, but also which driver was in the vehicle at the time via an onscreen driver login. Better visibility, analytics and driver engagement helps encourage safer drivers and safer roads.
Driver accountability is shown to have a very real impact on speed and road safety.
An EROAD study found that vehicles where the driver was logged in had 50% less speed events than vehicles with no identified driver.
Source: EROAD’s ‘The Power of Accountability’ white paper
2. Vehicle Standards: Proactive management of vehicle maintenance
EROAD’s Inspect gives you the ability to proactively track vehicle defects easily by capturing them during vehicle inspections and displaying them on the Defect Board — ready for you, or your team, to take action.
Drivers can carry out a vehicle inspection by either using EROAD’s app on any mobile device or via the in-vehicle Ehubo2 device to record the actions required.
EROAD also allows you to schedule regular service and maintenance on your vehicles to ensure your fleet is kept in top condition. This ensures you have a solid track record for your compliance and enhances your productivity at the same time as minimising unexpected maintenance costs.
3. Managing driver fatigue
Driver fatigue is a key factor in ensuring workplace health and safety for any business using heavy vehicles. Ensuring your drivers work reasonable hours, aren’t held up unnecessarily and take proper breaks is now the responsibility of everyone in your chain – from senior managers running your operation, to schedulers, to those loading and unloading your trucks.
EROAD helps manage driver fatigue by monitoring the distance and time a vehicle has been running. Fleet managers can easily monitor driving time on EROAD’s desktop fleet management and reporting portal – Depot.
It also allows for two-way messaging so you can stay in touch with your drivers and provides real-time in-cab feedback and coaching to help maintain good driving habits.
4. Ensuring responsible mass to load constraints
Under Chain of Responsibility, everyone is responsible for what is loaded onto a truck. EROAD’s Depot gives schedulers a single view of current and scheduled jobs combined with full vehicle details, through our Partner Gateway and integration with key job management platforms like ICOS live and MyTrucking.
Other safety benefits of using EROAD
Driver management
EROAD’s Ehubo2 allows you to monitor everything from who’s in the driver’s seat, for how long and where they are as well as speed, seatbelt use and maintenance issues. It also allows for two-way messaging so you can stay in touch with your drivers and provide real-time in-cab feedback and coaching to help maintain good driving habits. And, in those rare cases where drivers might be falsely accused of speeding or reckless driving, you can refer back to precise data on EROAD’s platform to confirm the vehicle’s speed and location at the time.
Helps monitor your sub-contractors
Staying across your partner activities is also imperative to your CoR compliance. EROAD’s Share provides you with the ability to share information with sub-contractors and other businesses up and down your supply chain, so you have visibility of their vehicles too.
This means you can proactively manage your CoR compliance to ensure they are meeting the same high standards you expect from your own drivers, as well as your duty of care obligations.
“We now have the same level of visibility across our owner driver fleet as we do of our company fleet and can now better manage all their compliance. We thought we were good and now, with EROAD Share across the fleet, we know we are good.”
Barry Raymond, CEO, Freightlines
Maximising Fuel Tax Credits
Claiming fuel tax credits (FTC) is routine for most Australian businesses operating fleets and off-road equipment – but many are missing out when it comes to maximising their FTC rebates.
This is because most businesses typically use the standard on-road rate to calculate their FTC – regardless of whether the travel was on a public road or off-road as it doesn’t require a lot of monitoring or record-keeping.
EROAD can help maximise your FTC rebates by automating and capturing accurate locational data for your FTC claim. This means you could possibly:
- Claim up to 2.5 timesthe standard on-road FTC rebate rate for off-road usage
- Recover under-claimed FTC retrospectively for up to FOUR previous years by showing a six-month pattern of consistent use with EROAD’s telematics solution
- Easily claim off-road FTC for heavy and light vehicles
- Create ‘geofences’ for work sites near or close to public roads or construction zones to claim the maximum FTC entitlement
- Save significant admin time
EROAD’s Fuel Tax Credit Solution allows you to collect, manage and compile the right data to accurately complete, and maximise, your FTC claim.
*Note: Rates are as at 1 July – 3 August 2020. FTC rates are reviewed every six months so may differ slightly from those above. The off-road rate also varies depending on fuel type. Please see the Australian Taxation Office for more details here.
Accurately monitoring your Fringe Benefits Tax
Most businesses opt to use the statutory FBT method, which is based on a car’s cost price, because it is generally easy to administer as it doesn’t require you to keep a logbook. But with the gradual introduction of a flat FBT rate of 20% (in 2011) some businesses could unwittingly now be paying too much under this method.
If you are already using the operating cost method, which is based on the operating costs of the car and can be more cost effective, but still using paper logbooks, there’s a better way to keep accurate records.
EROAD’s electronic FBT logbook now makes it easier to collect the right data to comply with the Australian Taxation Office’s (ATO) requirements under the operating cost method – which could save you significant time, money and admin.
EROAD’s in-cab electronic FBT Logbook solution collects real-time vehicle data and automates the entire logbook process to record time, data, mileage and the nature of the trip at the touch of a button – saving significant time and money. No more filling in paper logbooks and hours of admin.
EROAD provides complete visibility of your fleet and also allows you to maintain usage logs throughout the year to ensure the 12-week period of records selected for your FBT properly reflects the average usage of the vehicle.
Are you ready to make your compliance easier for a safer, more efficient fleet?
