The increasing prevalence of technology-based tools is creating greater opportunities for fleet and safety managers at mid-market organizations with auto fleets.

Use of telematic devices, which are mounted inside vehicles and use wireless networks to provide speed, location and braking information to fleet managers, has widened as the technology has matured and costs have dropped, said Herbert Mayo, vice president of risk control for Lockton Cos. L.L.C.

“It's been a rapid ramp-up,” he said. “Adoption has risen as technologies are vetted and proof of success is available. From a risk management perspective, it is not cost-prohibitive any more, and the benefits are huge.”

Fleets using telematics can see a reduction in crashes of 15% to 20%, Mr. Mayo said.

“The types of situations that are causing crashes can be better identified through technology,” said Nancy Bendickson, Minneapolis-based senior consultant with Aon Global Risk Consulting casualty risk control.

Indeed, the ultimate goal of fleet managers leveraging telematics should be to better educate drivers to make safer decisions behind the wheel, said Beth Lowrey, Fort Smith, Ark.-based senior associate for fleet management consulting firm Mercury Associates Inc.

“We have always tried to individualize training, but in-vehicle information was hard to capture,” she said. “Now, if we see somebody who has had a hard braking event or irregular shifting patterns, we can monitor that through technology and train accordingly.”

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Chris Hayes, Hartford, Conn.-based director of transportation services in the risk control department of Travelers Cos. Inc., agrees that telematic solutions work best when employed within a larger risk management framework that stresses safety.

“One thing we try to communicate to risk managers is that telematics alone is not a safety solution,” he said. “Telematics is technology that supports a risk management solution.”

Accordingly, fleet managers should strive to create open communication between driver and safety managers, he said.

“Going forward, it's not so much about the technology as it is about the acceptance of the technology by drivers,” she said. “So, as risk managers are becoming more skilled at using technology efficiently, it's becoming an easier sell to drivers.”

To help bridge this divide, telematic offerings are evolving from becoming passive recorders of vehicles' operations to devices that include in-vehicle cameras and active alarms to alert drivers in real time when their behavior exceeds parameters set by their companies, Ms. Bendickson said.

“When a driver sees a light flashing, they will know that they have to take action,” she said.

Dominique Bonte, London-based vice president and practice director of navigation, telematics and M2M for ABI Research, a unit of Allied Business Intelligence Inc., said such behavior modification technologies are part of the trend toward driver empowerment. By giving drivers instantaneous feedback, telematic devices can help lessen the sense among drivers that the technology is present solely to monitor them, Mr. Bonte said.

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“Increasingly, we see the driver is empowered in the process because he is given instant feedback,” he said. “This way, a driver can improve himself without his boss or fleet manager having to do so. It's important to reward drivers for good behavior. It can't all be about punishing the bad ones.”

Yet, the vehicle-mounted devices must be paired with robust analytics on the back end that help summarize and visualize data for fleet managers in order to avoid overwhelming them with information.

“In order to embrace and use technology, a well-managed fleet operation needs to understand that data is great but you have to have processes in place to learn from it,” Ms. Bendickson said.

Gary Hallgren, vice president of corporate strategy at Telogis, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based provider of location intelligence and route optimization software, said normalizing and aggregating data before it gets to fleet managers is imperative given the amount of data telematics devices can produce when deployed in fleets of vehicles.

“The more information a fleet produces, the more important it is to put actual safety programs in place and be able to monitor them through analytics dashboards that show trends over time,” he said.

Moreover, he said, telematics offerings are benefiting from the emergence of cloud computing, which has eased integration with other risk management and optimization software platforms. Cloud-based software also enables fleet managers to quickly incorporate information gleaned from drivers about, for instance, weather or road conditions to create “community-based knowledge,” he said.

“When you manage through the cloud, we can get new routes to drivers and get information to them much more quickly than if they were just following on-board navigation.”