One of the most important aspects of fleet management is addressing the variables that come with the territory of hauling freight and running trucks on the road. Trucks’ journeys are inherently prone to downtime, unexpected maintenance and other issues. One of the biggest variables for fleets is weather, and anyone who has driven in severe weather knows both the impact it has on your trip and the potential for danger it brings. Running into weather issues can have significant impact on your fleet’s fuel efficiency, uptime and safety.

Teletrac Navman recently introduced Director Weather, an integration with Weather Telematics that shows map-based forecast algorithms to users of the Teletrac Navman Director fleet management platform. Fleet managers and dispatchers using the program can see real-time weather conditions and road hazards like rain, snow, sleet, fog, heavy winds and lightning. They can also see risk indexes that anticipate the likelihood of their vehicles experiencing delays due to inclement weather, to determine whether a driver needs to be rerouted or pulled off the road altogether.

So what does this look like to the fleet manager? Michael Bloom, director of product management for Teletrac Navman, says the main advantage of the software’s layout is the way it specifically presents the information fleet managers need to know.

“When you look at weather on consumer websites, you see a map with color patches that represent intensity of falling rain or snow,” Bloom explains. “We provide that data as well, but what makes Director Weather stand out is that we take it a step further. We know customers looking at weather on a map are trying to evaluate what the road conditions are for their drivers. Our weather product does this step for them and graphically renders and shows the impact of weather on the roads, similar to how traffic is rendered on maps today. Fleet managers can push alerts to drivers through in-cab tablets to alert them of weather changes, road hazards or predicted delays.”

Severe weather events like thunderstorms, ice storms or blizzards can disrupt business and even regular, variant weather could wreak havoc if fleets don’t have real-time access to weather conditions and the potential impact on drivers, Bloom says. Putting accurate, real-time information at the fingertips of fleet managers and operational staff lets them translate insights from dynamic weather conditions to make better decisions that impact driver safety, costs and margins.

“This is particularly relevant in a world with the ELD Mandate,” Bloom notes, “where fleet managers’ ability to proactively monitor and help drivers bypass severe weather could mean the difference between a driver potentially timing out because of delays or getting to their destination before needing to go off-duty.”

In this way, the fleet operations office can become a bit like air traffic control, warning its drivers of dangerous routes and rerouting or advising them to pull off the road when things get too dicey.

This can have positive impacts on both the safety of the driver and the equipment. High winds are found to contribute to rollovers and precipitation can create slick roads truck drivers have to navigate. If these situations can be avoided, so much the better for the driver. Additionally, rerouting or warning drivers about severe weather can prevent vehicle deterioration and unnecessary issues like tire replacements, which could extend the truck’s service life.

The impact of weather mapping and tracking is simple and clear. So what might be coming to this area of telematics in the future?

“We expect to see greater use of historical weather data along with machine learning to create smarter alerts and automate necessary actions within the business to keep operations running smoothly,” Bloom says. “This could include tasks beyond notifying the driver, like alerting customers to delays, forecasting increased fuel expenditures or contacting distribution centers so they can expedite unloading once a late truck arrives.

“We also expect to see updated algorithms that re-route drivers automatically based on current and predicted weather,” Bloom concludes. “But automatically rerouting drivers based on weather disconnected from traffic opens up a new world of possibilities that will improve operations and increase safety for drivers.”