IVMS for you?

IVMS – short for In Vehicle Monitoring System – is a term you're going to hear more about. It originated in high cost, high risk industries like oil, gas and mining, but is moving into more common usage as businesses look to better meet their obligations in terms of managing driver behaviour and ensuring driver safety.

Why should you be interested?

An IVMS allows you to:

• Accurately track your drivers at all times
• Prevent accidents by monitoring for unsafe driving practices
• Manage jobsite equipment costs with unparalleled accuracy

It combines a vehicle tracking unit, a range of electronic sensors in a vehicle, satellite and cellular communication and specially-designed software to interpret the data.

Here's how a vehicle monitoring system works. The tracking unit gets its location via a GPS satellite. It also gets information about the vehicle's acceleration, stability, engine speed and other factors from a number of onboard sensors. The information is transmitted between the vehicle and the telco (usually via a cellular network). The telco securely transfers the information to a Navman Wireless data centre. And you can monitor the information in real time, via the cloud, on your computer or mobile device.

Tracking your fleet in real time allows you to see where your entire fleet is at a glance, improve the efficiency of your fleet by selecting the best routes between destinations, and keep your customers happy with more accurate ETAs, quotes and invoices.

With an IVMS you can capture data on speed, engine revs and braking, and combine this with second-by-second data grabs from the GPS tracking. This allows you to pinpoint patchy driving and other problems, and gives you an accurate and objective tool for analysing and reporting on driver behaviour as well as monitoring and training drivers on ways to improve their safety.

You can accurately monitor vehicle speed, and set criteria in the system to provide you with detailed over-speed alerts. Real-time over-speed alerts can be pushed out to driver managers (as well as drivers). And reports showing the proportion of time spent speeding will tell you whether your driver is heavy-footed or just picks up speed going downhill.

Monitoring engine revolutions can tell you whether you should have driver safety concerns. Over-revving is a major contributor to driver stress. Heavy braking is another indicator of driver stress and inattention and accelerometers will tell you how hard a driver is cornering, yet another indicator of driver stress.

An IVMS helps you better manage jobsite equipment costs by automatically breaking down equipment use by project as assets move from job to job and even as subcontractors come and go. The resultant reports can help better cost accounting, reduce write-offs for unallocated asset hours, improve asset management on individual projects, track subcontractor hours, and improve bidding on future projects by providing accurate documentation of asset use on different kinds of jobs. An IVMS also helps you improve preventative maintenance accuracy (no over or under servicing of your equipment) and gain visibility into unauthorised use, track equipment for up to five months without needing a direct supply in the event of tampering, and receive unauthorised movement alerts triggered by a built-in motion sensor.

So, IVMS for you? No question about it really.