Fleet managers are facing ‘death by data’ as they try to contend with the increasingly massive flow of information concerned with running a fleet.

Audit trails for risk management and duty of care, the huge proliferation of car models and options, licence and insurance checking and vast files of information from providers mean that fleet managers are under more pressure than ever to manage information properly.

That is the view of a senior chief executive in the industry who warned that his own section of the industry – telematics – is as guilty as others of information overload.

“Fleet managers are often bombarded with huge amounts of information that takes hours of analysing to reach the real point at which decisions can be made.

And telematics providers have often added to this problem,” said Ian Walmsley, chief executive of Eagle-i Telematics.

As a result, Mr Walmsley tasked his firm’s experts with finding ways of making telematics more user-friendly, and easier to extract relevant information.

Speaking at the launch of its new Monitor3 telematics product, he said the new system cuts out unnecessary data, offering fleet managers a car dashboard style screen where they can customise which criteria, such as speeding or lower than average MPGs are flashed up in the dials, which can then be investigated more deeply.

“Monitor3 cuts through all the waste directly to the information that is really needed, allowing managers to take well-informed decisions more quickly,” he said.