Why GPS Fleet Tracking Matters For Your Business

Businesses that rely on fleet vehicles to provide products and services to their clients can experience tangible financial benefits with GPS fleet tracking. GPS tracking essentially puts you in the passenger seat of every truck in your fleet. By tracking your vehicles, you can gain complete control over your fleet, significantly reduce costs and improve productivity.

Reducing Fuel Costs
Almost everything monitored by GPS vehicle tracking can work to help reduce fuel costs. Speeding is a huge factor in high fuel usage. Maintaining proper speeds can significantly reduce the amount of fuel used by your trucks. Many vehicle tracking solutions provide speed information and alert you when vehicles exceed set speed thresholds.

Excessive idling can contribute to high fuel costs for many businesses. When drivers unproductively waste fuel by using their vehicles as climate control, you lose money from your bottom line. GPS tracking can help reduce idling times by alerting you when vehicles idle longer than a preset duration so you can take corrective action.

With some fleet tracking systems, you have the ability to integrate your fuel cards with the software. With powerful reporting tools and real-time data, you will have total control over your fuel spend. You will get precise fueling information for your fleet overall, as well as individual fuel usage from a specific vehicle. This allows you to easily pinpoint any fuel wasting practices or outright fuel theft.

Reliable fuel transaction information allows you to track accurate miles per gallon, pinpoint the direct cause of high fuel consumption, eliminate fuel leakage, enforce fuel-saving driving habits, ensure your vehicles run efficiently, and ultimately reduce your overall fuel costs.

Improving Driver Behavior
Other major contributors to high fleet costs are unauthorized vehicle use and improper driver behavior. GPS vehicle tracking can relay a variety of information regarding driving behavior, including vehicle speed, engine start-up and shut-down and idling time.

This information can be used to enforce driving policies and curb unwanted behavior, such as excessive speeding, tardiness and extended vehicle idling.

Quality GPS fleet tracking solutions also provide the ability to automate timesheets. You will know exactly when an employee starts work, how long they take for lunches and breaks, and when they stop working for the day without relying on manual timesheets.

Accurate, verifiable timesheets will streamline payroll processes and help you avoid excessive overtime pay due to timesheet falsification or unintentional errors.

Increasing Security and Safety
GPS fleet tracking can also help improve the security of your fleet. In the event a vehicle is stolen, a hidden GPS receiver can help you recover a vehicle and any onboard equipment quickly. In addition, some systems offer features that alert owners immediately if a vehicle is used during off hours.

Some GPS tracking providers feature alerting functions that let you know when vehicles are due for routine maintenance. Proper maintenance ensures that your vehicles are compliant with safety guidelines and can help reduce repair costs in the long run.

Enhancing Customer Service with Improved Routing and Dispatching
GPS truck tracking solutions can incorporate a number of features that help improve customer service. With proper mapping software, fleet owners know the exact location of every fleet vehicle. This gives dispatchers the ability to effectively direct drivers to any job site. Also, the best fleet tracking solutions provide current traffic conditions so drivers can be diverted around delays.

GPS tracking solutions also allow you to locate and dispatch the closest vehicle to any job site. In doing so, fleet managers will know if drivers use the vehicles for unauthorized journeys or purposely take extended routes to job sites. This reduces fuel usage and vehicle mileage, and increases the number of jobs completed per day.

Better routing and dispatching helps you get to your customers more quickly. You will also be able to determine when a vehicle arrived on a job and when it left, providing accurate and verifiable proof of services.

Using Reports and Alerts
Superior GPS tracking solutions allow you to generate concise and easy to understand reports on a weekly or monthly basis. In addition, you have the ability to gain instant access to reports. The data can be organized to give you information about daily vehicle activity, speeding violations, violations of company driving policy, a complete list of vehicle starts and stops, excessive idling times and much more.

Some systems even have extensive historical reporting functions. You can access any GPS information gathered by your system from the time you started using it. Using data mining techniques, you can compare the performance between two employees, or compare an employee’s performance against the company average in areas such as speeding, idling, miles driven and engine on or off times.

Alerting features can easily notify you of unwanted behavior. Alerts can also be triggered for excessive speeding, excessive idling, engine start-up or shut-down during off hours, unauthorized vehicle usage and when a vehicle enters or exits specific geographic areas.

Explaining Fleet Tracking to Your Employees
Once you’ve decided to track your vehicles, it’s important to get your drivers and staff on board for the program. GPS vehicle tracking can help reward hard work and eliminate bad habits that can lead to serious financial loss.

Let your drivers know that truck tracking provides an important safety function for your business and the drivers as well. GPS allows you to keep up with proper vehicle maintenance and recover any stolen vehicles more quickly, which will help keep your business from incurring losses.

Truck tracking is also an essential customer service tool that can lead to happier clients and additional business. The system can also protect drivers against false complaints about overcharges and services not rendered.

Most importantly, tracking your vehicles provides numerous benefits that help increase revenue. Increased revenue adds to a company’s financial stability and provides drivers with job security.

While vehicle tracking may be new to your business, GPS is a proven technology that is fast becoming the industry standard for businesses with vehicle fleets. By not tracking your vehicles, you could be putting your business and employees at risk.

About FleetMatics
FleetMatics is a global leader in GPS fleet tracking applications. The company’s solutions offer real-time insight into vehicle activity that reduces operational costs and improves customer service for small and mid-sized companies. FleetMatics now serves over 13,000 customers, has installed more than 200,000 vehicles worldwide, and is adding thousands of vehicles monthly. FleetMatics is among the largest commercial users of Google Maps. Its software-as-a-service (SaaS) and mobile application gives businesses anytime access to real-time data about their business. For more information visit: www.fleetmatics.com or call 1-866-844-2235.