As a small business owner with a limited number of vehicles, you may be wondering whether your business is large or fast-moving enough to gain value from high-tech fleet management solutions. No matter your organization’s size and industry, the answer is likely yes.

Part of the value of today’s digital solutions, however, is that they’re suitable for companies of every size and description. Companies with a handful of trucks on the road can gain value from this technology, as can corporations with thousands of vehicles.

Not only can advanced fleet management and digital license plates help your small business, but their benefits might prove especially valuable for smaller companies. Without the backing of a massive corporate structure, you need to find extra efficiencies, keep your costs down and safeguard your profit margins — digital fleet management can help.

What Your Small Fleet Needs to Succeed

Manual processes and inefficient workflows are a common source of problems for companies of all sizes. Therefore, common fleet management actions, such as renewing registration status and tracking the efficiency of trips, can benefit from streamlining.

With a limited staff, you can’t afford to expend too much time and effort on day-to-day fleet management tasks. At the same time, these actions are too important to ignore. Falling behind on vehicle registration management is a compliance issue that your business can’t afford to encounter.

The basic question of what your drivers and other personnel need to succeed is relatively simple to answer. They need easy, efficient ways to get basic work done, putting time back in their days to perform more value-adding tasks. As an owner, principal, CFO or other executive of a small company, you can give them this efficiency through your choice of technology.

Digital License Plates for Small/Medium Businesses

These digital plates, currently approved for commercial-use in four states, are exactly what their name implies: They take the place of standard metal license plates and contain a vehicle’s registration information. Advantages of using these plates for your small fleet include:

• Easy, one-click registration renewal that takes time and effort out of staying in compliance with registry of motor vehicles (RMV) regulations in your state.

• Custom banner messages, giving you an extra space to display your branding and catch customers’ eyes.

• Anti-theft capabilities, including both vehicle tracking and ‘Stolen’ messaging, which make it easier to recover vehicles if they’re taken.
• Telemetry with no extra device, with the plate itself providing integrated telematics and saving the time and budget that would go to standalone solutions.

Fleet Management Software

A good fleet management software platform is a powerful tool that gives you a central way to manage everything about your vehicles, from tracking registration status to monitoring the real-time position of trucks in the field. The right technology tool will give you benefits including:

• A map view with real-time position data, so you can perform geo-fencing to keep your vehicles in the right area, track trip efficiency and more.

• Registration and compliance actions such as status checks and bulk renewals carried out in tandem with digital license plates, using RMV-approved technology.

• Automated alerts based on factors such as position and mileage, so you can respond to your fleet’s needs without constantly actively watching the system.
• Reminders for operators about important upcoming events such as scheduled maintenance or registration renewal, preventing last-minute surprises.

The combination of fleet management software and digital license plates is a powerful value-add, even if you buy these tech tools from separate providers. Today’s most effective solutions aren’t just powerful; they’re flexible, allowing you to add digital license plates to an existing fleet management system with API integration, or to enter vehicles with metal license plates into fleet management databases.

Technology that Scales with Your Business

Today, your company is small, but with time, effort and a little luck, you could scale up drastically. The same fleet management solutions that help small businesses thrive can scale up seamlessly as these companies grow, continuing to add value, and even increasing in importance over time.

When you add new components to your business, such as opening new offices, purchasing new vehicles or hiring more employees, you can simply add updated entries to your fleet management database. The simplified interface remains easy to use, no matter how much data you enter — these same fleet management systems are also powerful tools for massive corporations.

The more your company expands, the more efficiency and value you’ll get from using digital fleet management tools. For example, the registration renewal process remains quick and efficient, even if there are hundreds or thousands of vehicles in the system. This saves the time and effort that would go into attaching new stickers or plates to all of those vehicles.

Get Started with Digital Fleet Management

You can get started on your digital fleet management journey right away, and the sooner you add these extra efficiencies, the more chances you have to take value from the efficient new workflows.

For example, every time registration renewal is due, your team has to expend effort to complete the process. With a combination of digital license plates and fleet management software, the whole task can be accomplished in seconds. Over time, these efficiency gains add up.

Digital license plates for fleet use are currently available in four states — California, Arizona, Michigan and Texas. The industry-leading technology from Reviver can give you the benefits of custom messaging, one-click renewals, integrated telematics and much more. No matter where your company is based, you can add the RFleet fleet management platform to your technology stack immediately.

Get in touch with the Reviver team to add tech tools that will grow alongside your company.