For as little as $300 per vehicle and a small monthly maintenance fee, you can take full advantage of this constantly evolving technology to reduce your company’s operating costs. Here’s how GPS fleet tracking saves your company money.

1. Improve navigation. Your GPS fleet tracking system will be fully integrated with Google maps. This enables drivers to identify the fastest, most direct or most fuel-efficient route to a destination (whether it is within the city or across the country). The navigation function also provides live time reports on traffic conditions along the way, even providing detours around traffic jams. If the weather is bad, you can choose terrain views to see what is ahead. Navigation functionality in your GPS fleet tracking system also allows fleet managers to know precisely where every vehicle is at any time. This makes it easy to identify the closest vehicle to an emergency situation and quickly re-route a vehicle.

2. Monitor and improve driving habits. Because your GPS fleet tracking system compiles data on driver behavior, you can identify drivers who are habitual speeders or who consistently brake hard or who accelerate too fast from a stop. You will have regular reports of every trip taken by every vehicle. You can program the GPS fleet tracking system to alert the driver when the speed limit is exceeded by more than 5 mph and to alert the fleet manager when the speed limit is exceeded by more than 10 mph. You can track exact routes and know which drivers are taking detours or are sitting somewhere with the engine idling for extended periods of time. By monitoring and reviewing this data with your drivers you can improve driving habits and safety.

3. Accident and theft reporting capabilities. If a driver is involved in an accident, the GPS fleet tracking system will provide a complete analysis of the incident with precise data on the speed and direction of the vehicle. This results in accurate and defensible information about the accident for police and insurance companies and makes completing insurance claims faster and easier. In the event of a theft, you will be able to track exactly where the vehicle is at any given moment and this information can be shared with police. You also have the ability to lock doors, disable the starter and cause the horn to start blasting from your central office with your GPS fleet tracking system.

4. Vehicle monitoring and maintenance management. Your GPS fleet tracking system will also have the option for including a maintenance tool. This can interface with the vehicle’s on-board computer to provide notices of times for routine servicing, low tire pressure, evolving engine or system problems or excessive carbon emissions. This enables the fleet manager to either alert the driver of a problem or to bring the vehicle in for service or repairs before there is a complete breakdown requiring emergency action.

Use of these four major capabilities of a GPS fleet tracking system will help your company save money in the following ways:

– Use less fuel and save on fuel costs

– Reduce engine maintenance and operating costs

– Save 5-35% on insurance costs per vehicle

– Eliminate damaging or costly bad driver habits

– Increase productivity and reduce overtime

– Reduce paperwork for drivers, fleet manager and payroll

– Eliminate unauthorized breaks, side trips, or after hours use of vehicles

– Improve customer service and customer satisfaction

In most cases, companies that installed a GPS fleet tracking system recovered the total cost of installation and the first year’s maintenance costs in 3 to 6 months. Some recovered their entire annual cost in just one month. A GPS fleet tracking system is becoming an essential tool of effective and efficient fleet managers throughout the world in all industries, services and businesses. Can you afford to continue spending too much on fuel, insurance, operating costs, employee overtime and employee waste? Isn’t it time you find out how a GPS fleet tracking system can save your company money?

Types of Information You Can Gather

A fleet GPS system will be connected to a satellite mapping service that will also be able to provide information at the street level and a satellite image of streets and buildings anywhere your vehicles might go. Upon request, these mapping services can be programmed to distinguish truck routes, as well. Other information includes:

- Precise location of each vehicle up to the minute.

- Vehicle route history.

- Ability to show the proximity of vehicles to a given location.

- Notification and alerts about traffic violations, unsafe driving practices, and driving habits that waste fuel.

- Maintenance history and schedules.

- Fuel saving suggestions.

- Vehicle theft protection and recovery tools.

- Geo-fencing capabilities.

- Instant calculation of alternate routes.

Ways to Use the Data

The abundant data provided by a fleet GPS tracking system can be used in many ways to improve efficiencies, reduce fleet operating costs, improve customer service, make operations more fuel efficient, and even reduce accidents and vehicle break-downs. Whether you use you vehicles to haul freight over long distances, to respond to human emergencies, to provide product servicing and maintenance or to transport your sales force, fleet GPS tracking can help you in often unexpected ways.

1. Driver information provides the basis for coaching or re-training drivers who your fleet GPS data shows to be driving unsafely or in ways that waste fuel or damage the vehicles.

2. Driver information from fleet GPS tracking can provide the basis for performance based compensation and bonus programs, and the metrics tracking for implementation of the program.

3. Driver and route tracking maintained by your fleet GPS device provides needed documentation for dispute resolution of customer complaints, servicing time, schedule discrepancies.

4. Provide directions when a driver is lost or to redirect a driver around traffic jams or accidents causing long delays or highway closures.

5. Ability to define routes on the basis of travel time, fuel efficiency or route characteristics.

6. Identify and redirect the closest vehicle in response to an emergency.

7. Program driver and dispatcher alerts when vehicles exceed safe speeds.

8. Create anti-theft measures, such as disabling starters, locking doors, triggering sirens and defining geographic boundaries.

9. Verify time cards, automate billing and accounting steps and avoid mistakes.

10. Improve employee productivity by as much as 35%.

11. Monitor time per stop and after hours or other unauthorized vehicle use.

12. Use your scheduling accuracy and reliability as a marketing tool.

13. Rack up insurance discounts on each vehicle equipped with a fleet GPS tracking device.

The capabilities of fleet tracking expand year by year. Investment in fleet GPS tracking and monitoring will often pay for itself in money saved with fuel savings in just the first year. As your fleet becomes more efficient and more productive with these tools and the abundance of data provided, your company will reap the benefits above and more.

If you are not using a fleet GPS system you are missing out on far too many business efficiency tools. Shouldn’t you make the investment today?