Keeping a closer eye on every vehicle in your fleet can help you operate more efficiently and effectively, whether your company is responsible for five vehicles or hundreds. Modern fleet management systems make this level of oversight possible — and they’re not the only kind of tech tool that can deliver powerful advantages.

In an ever-increasing number of states, you can outfit your fleet vehicles with digital license plates. The connections between these devices and fleet management systems can deliver added benefits.

On the most basic level, digital license plates can transform the registration renewal process for commercial fleets and allow you to track all your vehicles and integrate them into a fleet management system without additional hardware. The connections between the two systems go deeper than this, however.

How Fleet Management and Digital License Plates Go Together

Digital license plates represent one of the most straightforward ways to connect the physical vehicles that make up your fleet with the digital platforms that allow you to track, oversee and manage them remotely.

Traditionally, the connection between vehicles and fleet management systems comes from an extra transponder, with costs to install the devices and transmit data. A digital license plate takes this extra device out of the equation.

The plates provide ROI in several ways, including streamlining the registration renewal process. Add in the value of easy fleet management, and the advantages will start stacking up.

These benefits come whether you’re using digital license plates with fleet management software explicitly designed to work with them or using these tags to connect with your company’s existing technology platform. If you have a deeply ingrained system that you can’t switch out, that’s not a problem — API integration allows you to smoothly get digital plates communicating with your technology.

Key Fleet Management Capabilities to Harness

The benefits can add up quickly once a fully featured fleet management system is up and running, using digital license plates as a source of position data and interacting in real-time with these digital tags. Useful capabilities for your organization can include:

• An overall fleet tracking view: Using a map view, populated with information about all your vehicles, can help you direct drivers from a central location. It’s easy to assess the fleet’s activities in various areas throughout the day with such a bird’s-eye view.
• Real-time geofencing and visibility: Within the overall map view of the fleet, it’s possible to set up geofencing zones that will alert you when vehicles operate outside of their assigned areas. This level of control serves as a powerful tool for real-time efficiency building for the fleet.

• Quick, contextual updates and alerts: You can keep a closer watch on your business’s overall operations if you know when every vehicle departs for a trip or arrives at its destination. These updates are available through the fleet management system.

• Trip and mileage tracking for efficiency: In addition to engaging in real-time oversight, you can break down vehicle operations based on their mileage over a period of time or on a specific trip. It’s possible to set alerts on a by-trip basis to react as soon as information comes in.

• Batching and sorting of vehicles: Management of the whole fleet becomes easier when you divide vehicles into batches based on their cost center and location, or another relevant accounting characteristic. This sorting availability becomes more valuable as the overall number of vehicles increases.

• Automated, fully digital registration renewal: Batch renewal of digital license plate registration is one of the killer value propositions of these devices. When the whole process of renewal is handled through a simplified and easy-to-read digital system, the company saves a considerable amount of time, money and complications.

• Digital compliance document access: Digital fleet management means immediate access to any relevant document around vehicle registration. All the files linked to the whole fleet are a click away, taking away the risk of missing an important detail or deadline, or falling out of compliance due to missing paperwork.
• Anti-theft features for simple recovery: When a vehicle is reported stolen, a fleet management system can help your recovery efforts. Not only can you track the vehicle in question on the map view, you can switch on a “STOLEN” mode that displays a visible message on the digital license plate for law enforcement personnel to see.

Knowledge is power in fleet management terms, and digital platforms can deliver a level of insight that would be impossible to attain with more manual legacy technologies and methods. Adopting a dedicated fleet management software platform is a way to future-proof your operations, getting in tune with this new method of oversight now.

Digital license plates are key fleet management devices because they work with the software on two separate levels.

• Digital license plates act as effective data capture devices, using their integrated telematics to give real-time updates on vehicle position. This connectivity makes fleet management work, all without the need to purchase additional, separate transponders.
• These digital tags also serve as a way to convey information from the digital fleet management platform. Clicking a button in the dashboard can have an immediate effect in the real world, from renewing registration to displaying a new custom message on the plate.

How to Get Started with Digital License Plates and Modern Fleet Management

In four states — California, Arizona, Michigan and Texas — digital license plates are immediately available for fleet deployment. If your company operates trucks in those states, there’s no need to wait — you can immediately convert to these powerful new digital tags. Even if your fleet is split across state lines, with only some vehicles in approved states, you can begin the process of conversion. In such a model, you can enter your whole fleet into a digital fleet management system. Vehicles with digital license plates will have access to more automated features, but it’s still useful to have the whole fleet listed in a single system, acting as one point of data truth.

Reviver is the leader in digital license plate technology, used alongside the powerful RFleet fleet management system or combined with your existing system via API integration. Get in touch to start the journey to more effective fleet oversight.