Vehicle tracking solutions offer a wide variety of benefits, chief among them numerous ways to save money. Significant money.
Vehicle tracking solutions use GPS mapping and real-time wireless communication to keep you in touch with your fleet and drivers at all times, regardless of where they are. These systems have become tremendously popular with all types and sizes of businesses that operate vehicles, whether just a few or hundreds. Government agencies and departments, too. When you’re done, read other ways a fleet fuel management company can benefit your business.
Consider what you could do with savings you generate from:
1. Safer, smarter driving.
Some industry sources say you could improve your fuel economy by as much as 25% simply by working with drivers to polish their skills and eliminate fuel-wasting actions such as power takeoffs, hard braking, speeding, etc. The federal Environmental Protection Agency says these wasteful behaviors can cut your fuel economy by as much as one-third.
Not only that, harsh driving techniques are hard on your fleet, virtually assuring higher maintenance and repair costs over time.
Vehicle tracking solutions also enable you to eliminate unauthorized usage — things like long lunches or personal side trips that reduce productivity and waste fuel – because you can track your fleet in real time. Just knowing their vehicle’s location and performance is “on view” can make an immediate difference in what your drivers do and how they do it.
It all adds up to lower fuel consumption and increased safety. Your insurance company may lower your premiums. And your on-time delivery or response rate could noticeably improve.
2. Minimized engine idling.
Idling can be a major source of wasted fuel, and it’s often unnecessary. Vehicle tracking solutions help curb this practice, ensuring you’re also complying with increasingly-prevalent government regulations that limit idling as a means to reduce emissions. You don’t want to be cited for an idling infraction, because that’s another wholly unnecessary expense.
3. Less – and less frequent – maintenance.
Vehicles that receive proper and regular maintenance last longer and perform better. They’re more reliable, and that means your workforce can be more productive, because time in the shop doesn’t generate revenue. And repairs cost money.
Vehicle tracking solutions keep preventive maintenance on schedule. And they immediately alert you to impending problems such as engine trouble codes, low battery warnings, etc. That can extend the life of your fleet, resulting in potentially substantial savings through less frequent vehicle replacement.
4. Better fuel inventory management.
Vehicle tracking solutions help you control how fuel is used. The ability to eliminate or significantly reduce fuel losses through misallocation, poor record keeping or theft can give your bottom line a tremendous boost.
5. More accurate accounting.
Automatically capturing time-on-the-job data ensures accuracy that can lower payroll costs as well as vehicle-related expenses. Tracking driver hours and location identifies working versus breaks, etc., eliminating inadvertent manual reporting mistakes or deliberately “stretched” timecard logging.
And if your operation provides services to third parties, automated data capture assures accurate customer billing. Never again will you unknowingly leave money on the table when you invoice those customers.
But wait. There’s more.
The real-time information you capture from vehicle tracking solutions enables you to make better-informed daily operations decisions and conduct better-focused strategic planning. You have more detailed data you can analyze, plotting fleet performance trends by individual vehicle and overall patterns. You can refine routing and scheduling to save fuel and increase productivity, and your forecasts will be more accurate.
So reducing expenses is just the beginning. Implementing vehicle tracking solutions can help you manage your entire operation more efficiently. And although you will, indeed, save money, your enhanced reliability and accuracy will boost customer satisfaction. And that also builds profitability.
Photo Credit: Icebergtz via Flickr