A TMS and integrated, modern driver workflow experience means happier drivers on the road

Picture this: You’re entering the grocery store to purchase some everyday items. Sounds simple, right? You receive your grocery list via text, and you see you need to pick up milk, carrots, raisins, baby food, freshly baked bread, and a few other essentials. It is a large, unfamiliar grocery store, and you grow frustrated quickly because you find yourself bouncing back and forth from aisle to aisle. It takes you about 45 minutes to finally find your items, pay, and go home.

Now, let’s picture an alternate scenario. What if the list of items in that text message also included the products’ correct aisles, directed you to each aisle in numeric order, and advised which side of the aisle each product was on? Most likely, this would make your shopping experience far more pleasant and undoubtedly much faster. This is what a seamless driver workflow experience should look like — having driver job tasks singularly presented to the driver based only on their location stop. This form of driver workflow methodology helps commercial drivers complete in- and out-of-cab job tasks in the most efficient way.

The weighted responsibilities of today’s commercial driver

Many unfamiliar with a commercial driver’s day-to-day responsibilities may assume that their primary job function is simply driving from point A to point B. Individuals who are well-acquainted with the industry know that this is not the case.

Drivers are responsible for recording many in-cab and out-of-cab job tasks, including their Hours of Service (HOS), Driver Vehicle Inspection Reporting (DVIR), and International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA) documentation. Additionally, they must complete numerous forms and documents to send back to back-office teams, record billing information, and search for trailers to load and unload. If not streamlined, these tasks can result in an excess amount of tedious, manual, and administrative work for drivers, taking away from what they’d rather be doing: — and what’s better for business costs — driving.

All fleet managers who value their drivers want to retain the right teams for their operations by making the job as straightforward as possible — and the right technology can help make this a reality. Utilizing a robust Transportation Management System (TMS) that is coupled with a deeply integrated driver workflow experience application will make the most significant impact on a driver’s daily life while they’re out on the open road.

With a deeply integrated TMS and driver workflow application experience, a driver can enable the following driver job tasks and activities:

• Driver workflow trip management
• Stop-specific task updates
  • Including shipper, intermediate, consignee, and more
• Multiple tasks per stop
• Task-driven stops that are based on specific stop types
  • Including arrival, departure, and smart tasks
• Integrated ELD- and HOS-availability clocks
• Geofence auto-arrival and departure events
• GPS breadcrumb-trail reporting
• Inbound image and signature-capture retrieval
• Commercial grade turn-by-turn directions
• Driver messaging

Find the right driver workflow solution for your business

When drivers are out on the open road, the perfect scenario is to complete their growing number of administrative job tasks as quickly and smoothly as possible without much interference to their driving time. However, suppose they must juggle several singularly focused driver apps, logbooks, and clipboards. In that case, these administrative job tasks will take much longer to complete. A deeply integrated TMS and driver workflow app experience that leverages both context and location awareness allows drivers to address all their required job tasks, including DVIR, recording HOS, IFTA logging, messaging, navigation, and more in a single, unified driver workflow application.

These benefits will allow for improved trip management, stop-specific task updates, integrated ELD- and HOS-availability clocks, and turn-by-turn directions. Additionally, an enhanced driver workflow app can utilize advanced geofencing capabilities to trigger exact arrival and departure events.

Drivers can also share critical data with the back office and stay in the know on route changes that accompany traffic and weather issues. Simultaneously, the back office can guide drivers through tasks and forms on every stop to eliminate confusion, trigger notifications based on arrivals and departures, and have more consistent, reliable data.

To find out more about how you can gain the functionalities discussed in this blog post, start exploring driver workflow solutions at Omnitracs.