Fleet integration for automation - Using APIs

Are you one of many organisations who are exploring the benefits of integrating a fleet management solution into your business? Does the idea of automating processes which are currently done manually, appeal to you? Well, the good news is that you are not alone. There is a way to extract and integrate raw data from a fleet management solution into your other systems, then leverage and expand the value into your business.

The need to improve customer relationships

In any competitive business, there will be the need to constantly improve the way an organisation services their customers. Getting it right helps retain those valuable relationships and the business that comes with them.

A few examples may be:

• Having the capability of logging an event into your CRM every time a vehicle enters or exits a client location, providing a history that can support service levels around delivery.
• The requirement for real-time visibility of vehicle location, enabling reliable and accurate advice when handling customer enquiries.
• Improve the billing to your clients by automating the entry of cost centres or project codes with pre-defined values, chosen by users at the time of booking a fleet vehicle.

Integrating Telematics

By leveraging the raw data within the fleet management solution, it opens up the opportunity to improve customer relationships, remove some manual processing and make gains in operational efficiency. Integration is possible with internal business solutions like fuel cards, and accounting systems to automate data and information transfer.

One key trend around fleet management is the integration of real-time data with third-parties. The fleet owner can exchange data with all partners: the leaser, the insurance, the workshops, the logistics company and the final user benefiting from the service delivery.

A way to achieve this integration is through the use of APIs 'Application Programming Interfaces' to facilitate the interaction between software applications allowing them to 'talk' to each other.

Within a fleet management solution, API's allow raw data to be distributed for internal and external consumption, which is where business value is able to be accessed and leveraged.

Internal examples may include analysing the operational efficiency of your vehicle fleet, whereas, external examples may include HR, Billing, ERP, and CRM systems.

Summary/key take away:

There is valuable raw data within the fleet management solution that can be captured, leveraged and integrated into internal and external business systems through the use of API's. This provides a solid basis for increasing the level of automation of tasks currently being performed manually, supporting an improvement in customer relationships.

APIs from Smartrak help integrate and automate valuable Smartrak data into your business' software, providing an end to end integration solution.

Using Smartrak's developer APIs will enable you to pull data from Smartrak into any other business systems you might have.