A Guide To Vehicle Tracking With Fleet Management Software

Maintaining and organizing fleet vehicles, field personnel or other assets is impossible without a reliable centralized system accessible at all levels of the business. Luckily these systems do exist and are referred to as fleet management software or vehicle tracking systems. There are a number of solutions available and these have been developed to handle all aspects of managing and maintaining a fleet as well as personnel and job dispatching. Each comes with a raft of features and capabilities making it difficult to choose a solution.

There are many companies providing vehicle tracking and fleet management software solutions. These fall into two types of system, online or locally installed software.

Online systems are usually a web-based or "in the cloud". They are accessed via a web interface or web browser where as a locally installed system is installed on a local computer. The pros and cons to these two systems are minimal and come down to IT infrastructure already in use by the business. If a business has an existing database to manage parts of the business then this data may need to be accessed by fleet management software and this may need a locally installed solution.

What features or capabilities make fleet management software a good investment for a business?

Centralized Data Storage

Having all information in one place is a must for organization of all aspects of a business. All good solutions enable the input and storage of vehicle information like service, MOT and road tax records. Driver records such as driving qualifications, medical requirements and endorsements can also be entered on to the system. Important vehicle and driver documents can be scanned and easily retrieved when required.

Vehicle Service Reminders, Alerts and Management

One really useful aspect of fleet management is the ability to set reminders or alerts for vehicle servicing, MOT or road tax due dates. Personnel can update the status of vehicle repairs and drivers can record any vehicle faults when completing daily checks.

Vehicle Tracking with GPS

An important feature when deciding on a fleet management solution is the ability to know where vehicles or personnel are located or where they have been. Vehicle tracking is usually achieved with the installation of a small device in the vehicle or in the case of personnel or assets a small device can be carried in a pocket or attached. Once setup it is possible to see vehicles, people and assets in real-time on maps. Knowing where all the business assets are allowed the fleet manager or transport dispatcher to assign the right asset to the correct location.

Job Assignment and Dispatch

This is a very useful feature but not all fleet management systems feature it. The ability to assign jobs via the system is a really useful function. Mobile personnel, drivers or field engineers can update the job status, upload images and signatures enabling back office staff to immediately see and inform a customer of progress. These systems can be installed on existing devices such as smart iPhones, Android and Blackberry handsets.

History Trails and Reports

When all of a business's data is stored in a centrally managed system it is easy to compile reports that can improve efficiency and even save money.

Detailed reports on individual assets such as vehicles can show total running costs for that vehicle. Vehicle tracking information can show how much fuel has been used and help to suggest cheaper alternative routes. This combined data from personnel can help a business to see where efficiencies can be achieved.

To summarize, fleet management software and vehicle tracking solutions should enhance a business and if used correctly and should improve the operating and efficiency of a business's mobile resources. The savings that can be achieved may be out-weighed by the costs of the systems but that should also be balanced against the increased productivity and the ability to offer a better service to clients.

Stock Market Guide to Investing For Beginners

As a general guide to investing: the stock market and investing for beginners is a bit like a riddle. All investors should understand the stock market because stock investing is the key to higher investment profits. At the same time, investing DIRECTLY in the stock market is not smart investing for beginners, because it often leads to unnecessary losses. So, here's a basic guide to investing in stocks without playing the stock market, so you can make money and sleep at night.

No matter what anyone tells you, the stock market is not predictable over the short term. For example, not one person on the face of this earth predicted that in early May of 2010 that the US stock market would fall 999 points within one trading day. Most people do not even know what 999 points means. The good news is that you do not need to understand the day to day rhetoric of the market to make money investing in stocks. But you should understand how the stock market works; and how investing for beginners can be simplified.

Stock prices fluctuate based on only one thing: buying and selling activity. Every second the market is open, some people are placing BUY orders and others are placing SELL orders. If these orders are in balance prices change little. If buy orders far outweigh sell orders prices soar; and if sell orders swamp buy orders prices fall like a rock. The stock market is simply an auction where buyers and sellers (buy and sell orders) are hooked up with each other. What prompts investors to buy or sell? More than anything else, the news events of the day influence investment decisions.

For example, there was bad news on debt problems in Europe the day the Dow Jones Average dropped nearly 1000 points before recovering most of the loss before the market closed. Why the move was so extreme was a bit of a mystery, but one thing is for sure. Big sell orders swamped buy orders and prices took a dive. The Dow Jones Average started the day at about 10,000 (it was actually a few hundred points higher), so a 1000 point move translates to about a 10% drop in stock prices in one day. Now, let's move on to our guide to investing for beginners.

You do not need to play the stock market game of outguessing the market on a daily basis in order to make money in stocks. The good news is that over the long term stocks have been good long term investments, with average annual returns of about 10% over the last 80 years or so. There have been years when the stock market and stock investors on average lost 50%, and years when it gained 50% or more; but these are the exception.

Stock investing for beginners should focus on long term investing in stock mutual funds. As a basic guide to investing ... if you own stock funds, bond funds and money market funds in about equal amounts ... you should do just fine over the years without wild swings in the value of your total investment portfolio.

In mutual funds professionals do the management for you. By owning all three basic fund types (stock, bond and money market funds) your overall risk is lowered. When the stock market has a bad day or year, you've got money in safer investments to cushion the blow. The real secret to investing for beginners is this: allocate your assets to stocks, bonds and the money market by investing in mutual funds. Decide how much (what percent) to invest in each, and keep your money invested that way. Let's say you go with 50% in stock funds and 25% in each of the other two categories. Once a year review your results, and move money if your percentages have changed. For example, if your stock fund (s) is now only 40% of your total investment, move money from the others to bring it back to 50% ... ditto to keep your other funds in line with your original allocation.

If you keep your money invested across all three asset classes (like above) the stock market and its unpredictability should not longer be a major concern.

Advanced Mobile SEO TIPS For Mobile Marketing

In 2016, Google introduced the mobile-first index system to provide the best user experience for their mobile users by prioritizing mobile-friendly websites. This new indexing system will first look into the mobile version of your website to determine the ranking. Websites without a mobile version or poorly optimized mobile websites will drop out even further in search engine results pages (SERPs). But, the good news is this Mobile SEO is simple and easy to do yourself tasks.

Advanced Mobile SEO Tips for Mobile Marketers:

Mobile SEO is nothing than a conventional SEO, creating content and tagging to make it stand out online. These white-hat mobile SEO tips will help you to avoid search engine penalties and maintain better online visibility.

1. Google My Business: mobile online marketing.

One of the most important and effective mobile marketing move that business owners can do is signing up for Google My Business account. It is free and simple, by filling the information to the best of your ability and add more possible pictures of your business. When people searching for the keyword that is related to your business, there is more likely to visible your 2nd information first. So, think of using it for mobile marketing.

2. Using social media:

According to reports, average mobile users spending their 80% of the time on social media of the total times they are spending on the mobile. These social media sites bring a huge amount of traffic to your website. So, to improve visibility to mobile users, priorities your social media marketing strategy. The frequency of posting, Quality of content and optimized social media campaign will help your brand stands out. Also, read our Content Marketing Guide.

3. Take advantage of plug-ins for mobile SEO:

If your website uses WordPress or another content management system (CMS). you can use various plug-ins to improve your mobile site more user-friendly. One of the popular CMS, WordPress offers a large number of plug-ins to optimize images, improve speed and take care of other important mobile SEO factors.

WPtouch is the popular universal WordPress plug-in that will create a Google-approved mobile version of your website. If you can't afford a professional to update and optimize your website, try these plug-ins to build a mobile-friendly website and improve visibilities.

4. Use keywords for mobile users:

It is proven that mobile users search differently than other desktop users. Optimize your content for mobile keyword search phrases to show up your content to the right people. Find the right tools to find the right keywords for your content, you can find keyword comparisons by the device in Google's Search Console.

5. Improve page loading time:

When it comes to mobile SEO, page loading time is the most important issue. There are many factors that define the page loading time. Gzip compression, Image optimization and using Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), there are some tools and plug-ins to perform this tasks and improve the faster loading of mobile web pages.

Final Words:

Digital marketing trend changed the whole scenario of marketing. Mobile SEO is becoming a most essential task for all bloggers and webmasters for mobile marketing.

The Five Components of a Business Strategy

Can you define exactly what makes up a business strategy? Some people say no, but we think you can.

In fact, we believe a valid business strategy has five components:

1. Your company's current or desired core competencies
2. A description of how you will differentiate vs. competitors
3. The industry or industries in which you intend to compete
4. The initiatives you plan to implement in the areas of marketing, operations, information technology, finance and organizational development
5. A financial forecast that shows how your plans will meet stakeholder requirements over the next 3 to 5 years

Let's look at each of these components .

The first component of a valid business strategy is a clear description of your company's current or desired core competencies.

You may be thinking, "Great, but what's a 'core competency?"' While there are many definitions, here's a good one from Wikipedia:

" ACore competency is something that a firm can do well and that meets the following three conditions:

• It provides consumer benefits
• It is not easy for competitors to imitate
• It can be leveraged widely to many products and markets.

A core competency can take various forms, including technical / subject matter know how, a reliable process, and / or close relationships with customers and suppliers. It may also include product development or culture, such as employee dedication. "

For example, we could say that Southwest Airlines is a reliable airline that offers low fares. But in order to provide those benefits, it has to have certain "core competencies," important capabilities that enable it to have low fares and to be reliable. We believe that Southwest Airlines has four core competencies that it executes so well that it regularly beats all other US airlines in terms of profitability.

These core competencies are:

• The lowest operating costs per plane
• An economic point-to-point airport network
• A fanatical culture focused on customer service and cost savings
• An ability to keep planes in the air more of the time than its competitors.

Southwest airlines could not offer the benefits of low prices and reliable service if it did not master these core competencies. What key benefits do you want to offer your customers? What core competencies do you need to master to provide them?

The second component of a valid business strategy is a description of how you differentiate vs. competitors.

In our experience, differentiation is about being the best at something. This should be encapsulated in your mission statement - what are your company's aspirations and how are you going to beat the competition? We just talked about how Southwest Airlines differentiates - what are you going to offer customers that will make them choose your products or services so that you can grow your business?

It takes a lot of hard work to come up with a great answer to this question and even more work to make that difference real. It's easy for us to say that Southwest is the best low-cost airline in the US, but it's extraordinarily difficult for them to pull it off.

The third component of a valid business strategy is a description of the industry or industries in which you intend to compete.

You need to be able to define just what kind of company you are - are you a furniture manufacturer? A gift card retailer? A consulting firm, a bearings distributor, a toy importer, etc.? This step sounds easy but we find that companies are often so concerned about getting too narrow in their focus that they fail to become really clear about what they want to do. A company with a good business strategy will have thought through these issues and made the hard decisions necessary to clarify its identity. If it has, it can easily pass the litmus test of identifying the industry or industries in which it operates.

The fourth component of a business strategy is the set of initiatives you plan to implement in the areas of marketing, operations, information technology, finance and organizational development.

These are the plans that guide your company's focus and resource allocation over the next several years. If your business strategy is specific enough to be relevant, you will have detailed plans in all of these areas.

The fifth component of a business strategy is a financial plan that forecasts the results you expect to get from your plans and illustrates how they will meet stakeholder requirements over the next 3 to 5 years.

Your strategic planning process can not be separated from your annual budget process. In the vast majority of companies, if it's not in the budget, it does not exist. That's why you have to have a very senior financial person on your strategic planning team, preferably the CFO. During the planning process, your team must agree a financial plan that estimates the results of implementing your strategy. This plan needs to earn the approval of your company's management and board and should be reviewed on a regular basis to track results and make refinements.

So - those are the five components of a valid business strategy. Good luck planning your success. And succeeding because you plan.