Why Your Small Business Can Benefit From GPS Fleet Tracking

GPS fleet tracking can save you money. But beyond the cost savings made possible by GPS fleet tracking, the right GPS system can help you avoid breakdowns and late deliveries, improve your management relationship with your operators, and increase customer satisfaction.

Challenges for Managing Your Small Fleet

Fleet managers of all kinds of vehicles, ranging from off-road vehicles to 18-wheelers, face three basic categories of management challenges: safety, efficiency, and accountability.

GPS fleet management enhances asset security

Some security challenges of fleet management are obvious. Fleet managers need to know where their vehicles are at all times. They need to know when deliveries are made when drivers aren’t on their usual routes, and when operators are using their vehicles for off-the-books deliveries.

Fleet managers need to be able to respond instantly when their operators are in distress. Crashes, breakdowns, and hijackings require immediate action. Fleet GPS tracking telematics gives dispatchers information for all of these security concerns and more.

Of course, you could approximate these services by installing Navman or Garmin or just by having your operators use Google Maps on their phones (assuming, of course, that your operators aren’t the security problem you need to control). But GPS fleet tracking can do so much more.

GPS fleet tracking enhances efficiency

GPS fleet tracking can greatly reduce your overhead, especially your fuel costs, but also repair expenses, insurance, and administrative expense.

Dispatchers can use GPS fleet tracking to make sure that operators drive under the speed limit. For light-duty service vehicles, every 5 miles per hour your operator drives over 50 miles per hour is like adding $0.25 to the cost of a gallon of gas (assuming a price of $4.00 per gallon). GPS fleet tracking can reduce fuel costs by 7 to 14 percent. Safer driving also means lower insurance costs.

GPS fleet tracking eliminates the need for paper logs. With fleet tracking, you can save hundreds or even thousands of hours that used to be spent on paperwork, without errors caused by forgotten entries, transposed numbers, or arithmetic errors.

Automated record-keeping makes accurate billing easy. You will instantly know the costs associated with each load and each driver, and you can allocate costs accordingly.

GPS fleet tracking reduces delays. Dispatch will know when a driver goes off route or the vehicle stays idle too long. And because GPS fleet tracking keeps pickups and deliveries going smoothly, it reduces the temptation to break the speed limit to get back on schedule.

And GPS fleet tracking validates each delivery. You can tell at a glance when your vehicles arrived at their destinations and how long they stayed, giving you objective evidence to settle any disputes.

GPS fleet tracking enhances accountability

With GPS fleet tracking, you can be more accountable to your customers. You will be able to detect delivery issues in advance and work with your customers to ensure mutually acceptable outcomes. You will be able to respond to customer inquiries in a timely and responsible manner.

GPS fleet tracking also ensures that your operators remain accountable to you. You can detect issues in driver performance early. You can prevent minor performance issues from becoming major performance issues.

How GPS Fleet Tracking Works

The tools that GPS fleet tracking uses are known under the general heading of telematics. Real-time GPS fleet tracking with telematics empowers your company to complete more jobs in fewer hours with fewer miles.

Everything about the way telematics devices deliver timely and actionable GPS fleet tracking information is intuitive and easy to understand.

• Telematics devices that are hardwired into each vehicle collect GPS data and other inputs from the driver and the vehicle itself.
• Each data point is transmitted by a secure cell carrier or satellite to the telematics provider’s operations center. Your GPS fleet tracking provider manages this side of data collection.
• Your GPS fleet tracking provider analyzes the data and transmits actionable information to the computers in your dispatch headquarters over the Internet.
• You view reports on your web browser.

With telematics, you can track trucks, delivery vehicles, equipment, and shipments of all kinds with any need to call drivers for updates, and you can also use your integrated telematics system to keep track of loaders, forklifts, construction, and warehousing equipment used by your fleet.

With telematics technology, GPS fleet tracking can instantly track driver progress, operator location, and late or missing deliveries — as you reduce your insurance claims by up to 50 percent.

Telematic GPS fleet tracking devices are hard-wired into the vehicles and equipment they track. They can track not just route and location, but also fuel efficiency, driving practices, and maintenance issues ranging from tire pressure to engine warning lights.

GPS Technologies provides software that translates GPS data into meaningful information as it is collected. The telematics software from GPS Technologies gives you timely, meaningful, and actionable information that gives you better control over equipment and services and better information for managing operator issues.

GPS fleet tracking from GPS Technologies gives you updates on vehicle location as often as four times a minute, but telematics is about a lot more than just tracking a moving dot on a map. With GPS fleet tracking from GPS Technologies, you can pull driver-generated data such as logins, logouts, and indicators of driver fatigue. Some GPS fleet tracking systems are hardwired into an onboard diagnostics system, but when this would invalidate a warranty, GPS Technologies can help you connect your vehicles to tracking devices through alternative technology. Every telematics system is equipped with SIM cards that connect to a secure network to send you all the information you need in real-time.

GPS fleet tracking usually pays for itself. The ability to prevent even one major asset from “falling off the radar” prevents losses that would greatly exceed the cost of the system.

Choosing the Right GPS Fleet Tracking System

Choosing and installing the right tracking system for your fleet is easier with expert guidance. At GPS Technologies, we are committed to helping you find the tracking solution that meets your needs. Contact us online or call us for a free quote at (847) 382-5107 8 am-5 pm, Mon-Fri CST.

Categorised in: GPS Tracking Service

This post was written by Malcolm Rosenfeld