Companies running fleet do not always recognise the benefits of a vehicle tracking system, often erroneously viewing GPS vehicle tracking technology as either being an expensive toy, not relevant to their business, or too complicated to understand!
During times of a severe economic downturn, the urgent priorities of aggressively keeping down costs and maintaining liquidity can impact on the equally vital necessity for fleet managers to maintain a high level of service to their customers.
The rising cost of fuel, always an abiding concern for any Fleet operating organisation, has become a critical issue and many companies have been forced to recognise the key fuel saving element that the adoption of real time vehicle tracking can bring to a company’s balance sheet.
The benefits of commercial vehicle tracking can be shown to directly affect a company’s bottom line, providing fleet owners with an opportunity to earn a significant return on investment (ROI), addressing issues of off-site fleet losing substantial hourly cash flow.
In addition, quality consulting diagnostics can prescribe customised added value components, total vehicle management and bespoke mobile worker solutions.
The implementation of mobile workforce tracking can be vital to the strategic imperative of sustaining a competitive edge in toughening economies and marketplaces. There are five top cist saving, ROI benefits of vehicle fleet tracking:
· Reducing fleet costs – fuel commands a huge part of a business’ budget and the unpredictability of fuels costs can wreak havoc on a company’s bottom line. Vehicle tracking supplies a powerful tool pinpointing driver habits which waste fuel, including: speeding, excessive idle times, unauthorised journeys and indirect routing to job sites. Deploying vehicles closest to a particular job site also helps reduce vehicle mileage, as well as reduce fuel. consumption.
· Communication Saving costs – repeat mobile calls and text messages to multiple drivers can quickly add up to a large communications bill. With a mobile workforce solution such as GPS tracking, fleet owners know the location of every vehicle and can determine which vehicles are closest to any job site for quick deployment. Reducing wasted time and money on unnecessary calls, means completing more jobs and reducing bills.
· Increasing billable hours – driver awareness of mobile workforce tracking, has a dramatic effect on encouraging completion of assigned jobs in a more efficient manner. Increased driver productivity means increased billable hours, completion of more jobs and improvement of customer satisfaction. Using data gathered by GPS is key to measuring performance.
· Decreasing overtime hours – Overtime pay can be a huge burden on a SME fleet operation. GPS Vehicle tracking ensures that timesheets reflect actual hours worked. By providing fleet owners with the ability to automatically track all the hours an employee spends in their vehicle and know exactly how long an employee spends at each job site, any mistakes made on manual timesheets are eliminated.
· Improving maintenance schedules – Properly maintaining fleet vehicles is important to ensure that each vehicle stays on the road and extends vehicle life. Regular maintenance also has a direct impact on fuel consumption.
The best vehicle tracker systems provide service alerts when a vehicle is due for routine maintenance. Proactively avoiding mechanical troubles and running vehicles at peak efficiency is another significant ROI saving.
