When speaking with a client about their recent vehicle purchase, the owner smiled and said, "I want to show you something". He pulled out a spread sheet containing the cost centers for all of their pickup trucks, vans, rack trucks and dump trucks.

Your new hires are helping you expand, but some are bringing lousy driving habits you don't want along with them, and given your busy schedule, you won't have time to train them. Or do you?

One thing that is commonly asked for new users signing up for GPS fleet management is: will this save money on my insurance? And the answer is, 'it depends'.

Like most things, if the system is not monitored and the information it provides is not acted upon then GPS won't be nearly as effective as it has the potential to be.

The first thing our customer success team reviews with new clients is their vehicle use policy. Most don't have anything concrete and it usually consists of some unwritten rules that are told to drivers.

Insurance companies like to see things written down, something that can be clearly communicated with drivers, managers and staff. We tend to agree and provide a boilerplate template for a vehicle use policy and customize it to our client's own policies they want to enforce.

In the past few years, there has been a push to start up cashless tolling in full effect; especially after other states like Massachusetts have become completely toll-booth free. New York is following suit with the NY Thruway Authority announcing that it will be switching to cashless tolling by the end of 2020.

You aren't alone in dealing with apathetic, unhelpful and plain rude customer service. Sadly, this has become the accepted norm, even for products and services we champion and invest heavily in. If you think this is ridiculous and makes no sense, we agree.

Driver safety dash cam

Carmalink is the leader in creating safer drivers with timely, trainable, accurate safety reports. Safety managers are using these reports during driver meetings to highlight the skills drivers need to focus on improving.

Feedback from the last Carmalink user survey indicated that safety was the top priority for most fleet owners. We know it can be hard to look at a list of "Safety Alerts" and make decisions about what to do with drivers continually receiving these alerts. With the addition of the Garmin Fleet 790 tablet, safety managers will see 1080p HD footage of each safety incident.

- No more guessing what happened
- Use the footage to see who needs training
- A clear picture of the required steps to correct the problem

Carmalink prioritizes your fleet's safety and we incorporate new technology such as video capture and artificial intelligence to detect more complex safety issues like distracted driving, cell phone usage, tailgating, and more.

It's no rumor that the insurance industry is starting to require dash cams in commercial vehicles. This is partly due to the fact that commercial underwriters haven't turned a profit in seven years. A perfect storm between increasing rate of distracted driving accidents and larger and larger settlements awarded by juries.

Thank you to everyone for coming out and making this year's Touch a Truck event put on by the Trucking Association of NY a success. And a special thank you to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum in Glenville for hosting us at your facility.

After listening to feedback, it became clear that a lot of our customers have mixed use fleets, and not all of them need ELD. However, all trucks needed connected dash cams and navigation.

This caused an issue between using ELDs for all trucks and creating issues for the back office staff dealing with unclaimed records from non-ELD drivers or only having part of their fleet covered with nav and cameras.

We wanted to create a new plan that fits between the Basic and Pro that brings the advantages of running an ELD tablet in a truck without the ELD headaches.

It's not just you, all businesses are feeling the pain when it comes to recruiting top talent and the anxiety of keeping your best workers happy so they don't leave .