Fleetmatics Group PLC released the second edition of its FleetBeat Report, an analysis of data points extracted from thousands of commercial fleets managed by the company over four years. According to the report, which was co-authored by Dr. Stephen Fuller, university professor and director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, performance of small businesses in the services industry directly reflects the health of the economy.
The report was derived from a dataset of over 10.7 billion telematics-generated data points from commercial vehicles managed with Fleetmatics’ SaaS platform in the U.S. The company used regression analysis to compare this data with national monthly retail sales data. According to Fleetmatics, there were eight telematics-derived, independent parameters considered in the analysis, both in aggregate and at the per vehicle level, including those related to mileage, number of vehicle stops, mileage per stop, number of active vehicles day per month and number of vehicles active in a month.
The businesses examined for the report had 5 to 100 vehicle fleets and worked in the retail or service industries.
In addition, the report determined, based on data from small business services performance and retail sales in four Metropolitan Statistical Areas, that geographic features can significantly define regional small business activity profiles. It also examined regional differences that drive activities of small business services companies in the New York, Chicago, San Fransisco and Miami markets.
“It has long been said that retail sales trends are often impacted by the health of small business,” said Jim Travers, chairman and CEO of Fleetmatics. “Fleetmatics is uniquely positioned to analyze small business services activity given we have one of the largest fleet management data clouds in the world. Also, our customers are typically in the earlier phases of consumer consumption, such as distribution of goods and home deliveries. This latest edition of FleetBeat offers a new and insightful view into how our data intersects with retail trends, and we couldn’t be more excited by the results.”
The data from the FleetBeat Report also correlates highly with retail sales data from Moody’s and the U.S. Bureau of Census, said Fuller.
Read the entire report here and view an infographic from the report here.
