Thinking about installing GPS vehicle tracking devices into your business vehicles?
Whilst employees may not like them citing privacy concerns, in reality there are many major business benefits of GPS vehicle tracking devices. These benefits include:
Whilst it's important to be able to contact drivers about changes in pickups, deliveries and service calls, the frequent calls asking “Where are you now?” is highly distracting to the driver and is also a very inefficient use of the driver's time and the time of your head office staff. Imagine the time wasted with a fleet of business vehicles!
By seeing all of your company vehicles on a Live Google or Bing map you can eliminate those calls. Also the travelled route of each vehicle can been for the day answering those queries “Have they been to X customer yet?“.
If a customer calls and has an urgent pickup or service call requirement, it's also simple to visually see the closest field vehicle that could potentially make the visit. Or if one field driver is delayed, another close by driver could make the customer visit.
This greatly improves productivity, improves your profitability and reduces unnecessary phone calls to drivers.
Rather than giving customers approximate times, the main office can easily see exactly where the driver is now, and how far away from the customer they are. This makes it very easy for the business to inform customers about pickup, delivery or service arrival times down to 5 minutes accuracy, if required.
For example, if a business customer has an urgent item they need for their customer, they call your office, and one of your staff says the driver is 12 kilometres away and should be there within 10 minutes. This is much better than replying with “the driver should be there sometime this afternoon, or around 3pm”.
Your customers will certainly be impressed with the accuracy of your service times. This is a great competitive advantage and can win you business over your competitors.
The whereabouts of your field staff especially during bad weather can be a real concern.
Also too is not being able to reach a particular driver after a long period of time. By seeing their location on a map from the data from the GPS vehicle tracking device and how long their vehicle has been stationery can at least make it easier and more timely to respond to any potential safety issue for the driver.
If the unfortunate happens and one of your fleet vehicles is stolen, knowing it's exact location using the GPS vehicle tracking device allows you (or the police) to recover your vehicle quickly thereby reducing vandalism and damage. Also, quick response to theft greatly increases the likelihood of the vehicle's recovery before it's stripped down.
Insurance companies know the benefits listed above in regards to fast vehicle recovery so most of them will give you a insurance premium discount. These savings can be significant.
If your vehicles are left at your work premises, yard, depot or some other frequent parking spot, you can receive instant, automatic notification by SMS text or email if your vehicle leaves that area. That way you quickly know if one of your staff have moved the vehicle without your permission or if it is being stolen.
As GPS vehicle tracking devices send frequent 3-4 minute location logs, key on and key off information is very simple with the report function to know the kilometres travelled each day – effectively replacing paper-based log books.
Reports such as speeding, long stops, mileage, total travel hours per day, week or month can easily be obtained with a press of a button.
Using such reporting functionality you can see if any vehicles are being over or under utilised and make better business decisions of the use of these assets. This is another efficiency boost for your business.
I'm sure you can see the savings and benefits GPS vehicle tracking devices bring to your business.