Benefits of GPS Vehicle Tracking for Fleet Management
When you’re running a fleet, every mile, minute, and gallon counts. The benefits of GPS tracking go beyond merely knowing the current locations of trucks. It can improve operations, reduce costs and increase efficiency. This also enables fleet managers to check if drivers are using the correct routes. Less time spent on the road equates to savings in fuel expenses. Furthermore, GPS tracking systems enhance the safety of drivers through monitoring of harsh braking, speeding, and excessive idling. This data is a game-changer allowing fleet managers to give feedback through training towards safer driver behaviors.
In the same way, another one of GPS benefits is that it helps in fleet maintenance. With monitoring of vehicle usage, tracking helps fleet managers know when to service vehicles, avoiding costly breakdowns. Regular truck preventive maintenance and trailer preventive maintenance become easier with GPS tracking systems, as they help keep track of vehicle usage and service schedules. Furthermore, customers are able to receive accurate delivery estimates, leading to enhanced customer service.
What are GPS Tracking Systems?
GPS tracking uses satellites to tell you where your trucks are, how they’re being driven, and what’s going on under the hood, all in real-time. This cluster of satellites orbiting around the Earth sends the signals to a GPS receiver on the ground which calculates the exact location of where the user is. These systems are a part of many industries such as transportation, logistics, personal safety, and fleet management. All of these industries are receiving benefits of vehicle tracking with GPS technology.
From logistics and transportation to personal security and, of course, fleet management, there are all kinds of industries that use GPS systems. One of the GPS benefits is that it superintends to the quickest route of the vehicle and leads to lower fuel consumption and reduced toxic emissions. If you are in the business of distribution and deliveries, GPS is indispensable.
10 Key Benefits of GPS Tracking System
GPS tracking offers a ton of benefits, and it’s a smart way to boost your fleet’s performance and keep your customers happy.
Benefit 1: Route Optimization
Perhaps the biggest advantages of GPS vehicle tracking system across your fleet is the ability to use software to optimize routes and planning, and all of the many ways that can benefit your fleet across the board.
For example:
- When picking a driver and vehicle for a job, you can automatically identify the one most nearby that is not otherwise occupied, reducing the overall mileage driven and improving response times.
- Route planning can help identify bottlenecks, traffic backups, and other locations that should be avoided, either temporarily or indefinitely, and can route vehicles around those areas.
- Optimized route planning can provide a variety of benefits to areas such as reducing your carbon footprint, reducing fuel consumption and costs, reducing mileage and wear on vehicles, adapting to changing conditions in real time, and much more.
With as many potential benefits of GPS tracking, including computerized route planning, it’s even better when you have real-time knowledge of where every vehicle is, where it’s going, how long it will take to get there, and what route it’s taking. Without location tracking, all you have are estimates.
Benefit 2: Spot Bad Habits, Boost Safe Driving
Driver behavior can play a surprisingly large role in fleet management. Proper defensive driving can improve fuel efficiency, reduce wear on vehicles, prevent accidents, and even result in happier and more effective drivers.
Without some means of tracking vehicle movement and telemetry data, however, you don’t have any way to identify driver behavior beyond incident reports and self-reported behavior. Vehicle tracking benefits are that it allows you to monitor locations, speeds, and speed changes, all of which can give you valuable information about driver behavior.
More advanced fleet tracking systems do more than just track location via GPS. They can also track telemetry data from the vehicle’s onboard computer and can even provide additional detection for driver behaviors. You can identify anything from fuel fraud to harsh acceleration and braking to off-route driving to distracted driving.
Per ITConvergence:
“Recent studies show that some of the benefits fleets can obtain from IoT fleet monitoring systems include:
Fuel economy increased by 20%
Economical driving improved by 15%
Harsh-braking incidents decreased by 75%
Engine idle time down 60%
Driving hours decreased by 20%
Safety incidents reduced by 20%
Compliance increased by 15%”.
Perhaps more importantly, you can identify drivers who don’t violate policies and proactively reward those drivers. These driver incentives both provide incentives to noncompliant drivers to adjust their behaviors and reinforce those behaviors amongst compliant drivers.
Benefit 3: Cost Improvements
Time is money.
Knowing where your vehicles are allows you to send the closest applicable vehicle to whatever need you must fulfill. Shorter routes, faster responses, and more optimized routes, all offer the advantages of GPS, which can all save time and money.
All of these also save money by reducing mileage and wear on vehicles. Yes, we’ve already mentioned this, but it bears repeating: the costs saved can be immense, especially in larger and more distributed fleets.
Another way you can save money is by reducing premiums on fleet vehicle insurance. Insurance companies are well aware of the many benefits of GPS tracking and often offer discounts for fleets that implement it to their standards. Some estimates claim you can save as much as 35% off of your insurance costs.
You can also proactively understand when your fleet is reaching capacity and can justify purchasing another vehicle or when your workload is improperly balanced and you have vehicles being underutilized.
Benefit 4: Proactive Problem Identification
There are many possible problems that vehicles in a fleet, or a fleet as a whole, can encounter in daily business. GPS can’t solve all of them, but it can help with some of them.
These include:
- GPS can tap into map information that monitors traffic in real-time and can identify areas where traffic is backed up or stuck at a standstill, identifying alternate routes ahead of time so your vehicles can avoid slow, idling, or less efficient detours.
- One of the pros of GPS is that it can monitor accident information and take steps to reroute road closures and other issues that crop up with little or no warning.
- GPS can monitor vehicles on an individual basis. When the fuel efficiency, speeds, or other behaviors reach certain thresholds, it can indicate a problem with the vehicle that can be solved with preventative maintenance, often before the driver even consciously notices the issue.
- Vehicles can be given leeway to travel within a given area, but geofencing can send alerts to dispatch or the fleet manager when the vehicle leaves that allowable area.
This just scratches the surface of what can be done with a combination of GPS tracking, vehicle telemetry, and driver monitoring.
Benefit 5: Loss Prevention
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of GPS tracking to a fleet is loss prevention. Whether it’s pickup trucks or semi-trailers, GPS tracking is always active and will phone home with the location of vehicles even when those vehicles aren’t in active operation, such as overnight.
Alerts can notify you when vehicles or assets move outside of their expected area or even when they move unexpectedly when they shouldn’t, such as overnight when a driver is at home or asleep.
In the worst-case scenario, when assets are stolen, GPS tracking can allow their swift recovery. It is one of the important benefits of vehicle tracking system. With active monitoring from the home base, police can be notified even before a theft is completed, and the response times can be swifter than you’ve ever thought possible.
This isn’t hypothetical, either. Here’s a real case where GPS saved a company.
“The organized ring of thieves struck when they thought nobody was watching: in the middle of the night on a weekend. One by one, they drove off with ten trucks and trailers from the lot of Diamond Landscapes, a commercial landscape company serving central Kentucky.
The potential loss of these vehicles, valued at over $500,000 could have devastated the company as they waited for insurance to help them recover and resume operations. Just one catch – Diamond Landscapes saw the whole crime unfold in near-real time.
The thieves didn’t know about the fleet management technology within the vehicles. Using an app, it was easy for company officials to watch their trucks moving as they were being stolen. They called the police. A high-speed chase quickly ended when the owner of Diamond Landscapes, Chris Trower, was able to share location data with law enforcement.
Every stolen truck and trailer was recovered. Instead of waiting weeks or months to resume operations, Diamond got back to its full-service landscaping and snow removal business right away.” – Contractor Magazine.
Of course, an incident like this will still be hugely disruptive to a fleet even if the vehicles are recovered nearly immediately. GPS tracking can’t prevent thefts, other than in the sense that if thieves are aware that GPS tracking is enabled, they may be less likely to attempt to steal the vehicles. It’s a reactive but valuable service GPS tracking can provide.
Benefit 6: Fraud and Misuse Detection
Out of many advantages of GPS vehicle tracking system, one is that you can tell if drivers use a work vehicle for personal chores. Maybe they want to take the truck home with them for a task to save on fuel costs or rental expenses. Maybe they’re abusing a company gas fund for personal use. Maybe they go out of their way on a route to provide some kind of ride-sharing on the side.
Whatever the case, these kinds of fraud and misuse can, in part, be detected by GPS tracking systems.
“There may be times when your drivers use your vehicles for their errands. For example, they may stop off to see a friend or relative or to do some other errands without asking for prior permission. To hide the fact, they may tell you that the delay was due to traffic or an accident or being stopped by the law enforcement authorities. Another common one is when they make long-distance journeys but decide to go their own way rather than staying on the agreed route. This may cause more expense in terms of fuel costs.” – Veturilo.
When such abuse is detected, swift action can be taken, and investigations can be launched. GPS evidence is proof and justification.
Benefit 7: Reduction of Paperwork and Data Entry
One of the key benefits of GPS tracking is that, while many (though not all) of these benefits can be done in other ways, those ways require immense amounts of active data entry and human analysis. By using GPS tracking and computerized tools for fleet management, you can offload the data entry to APIs and automatic systems, you can use complex algorithms to solve routing problems, and you can deliver route instructions directly to drivers without needing to mess with phone calls or dispatch.
While it might not seem like much, any reduction in paperwork and data entry is excellent. Not only does it help modernize a business, but it also reduces carbon footprint and, more importantly, the potential for human error.
Benefit 8: Proactive and Preventative Maintenance Improvements
In addition to the above-listed benefits of vehicle tracking, it can reduce mileage and wear and tear on vehicles, you can also use it to proactively schedule preventative maintenance. Instead of having to funnel all of your vehicles back to a central shop to have work done on them, you can automatically use the GPS tracking system to identify nearby maintenance providers. Then, by making those providers part of your route planning, you can ensure that any time maintenance or inspections are necessary, the vehicle is near a location.
To build up a network of service providers rapidly, you can work with us. At Epika, we partner with businesses across the nation to provide fleet maintenance services virtually anywhere your vehicles could end up. You can find locations near you quickly and easily with our map and integrate that knowledge into your GPS tracking with ease.
Benefit 9: Enhanced Customer Service and Satisfaction
Improved routing translates to speedier deliveries. Accurate ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) calculations stem from precise live mapping. All of that adds up to customers who feel informed and respected.
One of the most crucial benefits of GPS vehicle tracking system is that it can meet the demands of the customer. You can send live updates, resolve emergencies more effectively, or make ad-hoc changes without stress or panic. That’s how trust is built and contracts are kept. In today’s world, fast and transparent is the only way to stay ahead.
Benefit 10: Improved Fleet Utilization and Resource Allocation
One of the pros of GPS is that it shows you which trucks are working hard and which ones are just burning cash sitting around. It helps identify inefficiently utilized units, reassign vehicles more effectively and even downsize your fleet to reduce expenses. You simply sell off what you don’t need and shift your assets where they’ll work harder.
Additionally, the ability to track vehicle location and performance allows companies to boost productivity and, in turn, improve the fleet’s ROI.
FAQ’s
Is GPS tracking even legal?
Yes, in general. Some states in the US and some countries around the world may prohibit it or may require that you inform your drivers and get their consent, but since you can make that a condition of employment, it’s not a high bar to clear.
Aren’t GPS systems inaccurate?
One of the benefits of GPS vehicle tracking system is its accuracy. Modern GPS is a very refined system – just about every smartphone has a good one in it – but cheap systems can have signal strength issues on occasion. Generally, investing in a middle- to high-quality system will alleviate these issues. Sometimes, in rural areas, GPS can struggle (especially if the system piggybacks off cell signals), but usually, that’s not a huge problem.
How does GPS fleet tracking work?
Each vehicle gets a GPS unit. Mapped to a central system, you can monitor the location and speed of each vehicle in real time, along with their data usage.
What are the features of GPS tracking systems?
GPS tracking has features like real time location tracking, route optimization, speed monitoring, driver behavior analysis and geofencing. One of the benefits of GPS vehicle tracking systems is that they offer maintenance alerts, fuel consumption monitoring and historical data reports. These systems aid fleet management, boost productivity and reduce operational cost.
Conclusion
GPS vehicle tracking systems offer many benefits for fleet management from route optimization and driver behavior to safety and cost savings. Pros of GPS are that it gives proactive maintenance alerts, reduces fuel consumption and theft and increases customer satisfaction. By improving fleet utilization and providing insight into operational performance businesses can save costs and increase productivity. Whether it is better resource allocation, fraud detection or streamlined management, GPS tracking is a must-have for modern fleet operations.
So, what are you waiting for? The benefits of GPS fleet tracking are immense, and while it can take some time and a skilled technician to install the systems, it’s well worth the effort. Plus, we can help. Our network of partner businesses is full of experienced technicians more than capable of installing a system for you. Just reach out to get started or to ask us any questions you may have.Â
