Fleet Tracking Takes the Guesswork Out of Business Management | The Communication Blog

Friday, January 8, 2010

Fleet Tracking Takes the Guesswork Out of Business Management

By Todd Cavanaugh

Have you ever turned off your computer at 6:00 pm and wondered where one or more of your company vehicles were? Have you ever looked in amazement at the fuel cost line in the monthly finance report? Have you ever wondered why there are so many customer complaints about service response time? Putting a GPS device in each vehicle and initiating fleet tracking takes the guesswork out of business management.

For just $300 per vehicle, you can equip every vehicle in your fleet with a GPS tracking device. An each device can be installed in less than a minute. These devices will then communicate by satellite with your central monitoring station to communicate data from the vehicle to the station and from the station to all or individual vehicles. This fleet tracking system will give your managers and dispatchers the information they need to make smart decisions that will improve fuel economy, increase driver productivity, and save you a serious chunk of change. Some business owners report savings in fleet operating costs of up to $100,000 per year!

Among the results you can achieve with fleet tracking are:

- Less time spent on paperwork by drivers, managers, accounting and payroll.

- Reduce billing and payroll errors.

- Improve route efficiencies, lower mileage and reduce fuel costs with fleet tracking.

- Eliminate extra stops.

- More efficient routing and driving reduces idling times.

- Ability to redirect the closest vehicle with fleet tracking for urgent needs.

- Eliminate unauthorized employee vehicle use.

- Crack down on employee fraud.

- Help individual drivers improve safety and teach fuel-saving driving practices.

- Protect your drivers from accusations of unsafe driving or false claims by customers.

- Rapid recovery of stolen vehicles.

- Improve product and service delivery.

- Document of performance metrics for performance-based compensation.

- Lower insurance rates.

Fleet tracking will provide a myriad of standard and customized reports on vehicle history, driver history, safety statistics, economies achieved, and payroll and billing information. You can monitor the location of every vehicle in a single screen view or in greater detail. You can view vehicle status from the office or on a hand-held device from anywhere. You can even access statistical information from remote locations to help you answer customer questions or complaints, estimate costs and schedules for new clients or customers, and provide instant assistance to drivers.

Some of the companies installing fleet tracking technology are reporting ROI of 1000% or of 15 to 1. The Aberdeen Group recently conducted a study of how fleet tracking can improve productivity of service calls on products. This study indicated an increase in the number of service calls a technician or specialist can complete per day of almost 25% when GPS fleet tracking was installed in their vehicles. Imagine what that kind of productivity improvement would mean across your entire company!

The overtime pay eliminated by a 25% productivity improvement through fleet tracking is exponential. Not only will productivity improvement reduce or eliminate technician overtime, it will also reduce or eliminate overtime for supervisors, managers, dispatchers, garage staff, and more.

With driver alerts, you can also encourage safer driving and more energy efficient driving. Simply keeping the vehicles operation at 60 mph or less with fleet tracking will save money in several ways. Increasing speed, according to the US Department of Energy, from 50 to 60 mph uses 73% more horsepower. At 70 mph, that figure increases to 159%. For each mile per hour above 50, fuel consumption is increased by 1.5%. Using safe driving and fuel economy alerts will save you a huge amount on fuel and maintenance costs across the fleet.

Effective management of service and maintenance schedules for vehicles with a fleet tracking system can also save as much as 4% in fuel efficiency by keeping the engine tuned optimally. Regular service can prevent many problems that would otherwise cause a big engine problem. The ability to anticipate and repair these problems can improve fuel mileage by 35% or more. Proper tire inflation can add to the savings achieved through fuel economy.

In short, a GPS fleet tracking system can achieve operating efficiencies, reduce operating and maintenance costs for the fleet, achieve significant fuel economies, reduce emissions, and protect your investment in the fleet. Give your drivers and fleet managers the tool that can enable them to responsibly manage your fleet of vehicles and generate greater safety and larger profits.

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