For many businesses, company vehicles only travel for a fraction of the day. This makes it difficult to see dramatic fuel and vehicle maintenance savings, because mileage can be low and infrequent. A construction company’s vehicles might travel to a nearby site and remain there for the whole working day. An engineering firm may make long stops at locations to complete work and see little change on their vans’ odometers over the week.
Aside from the times when a vehicle is being driven, when can vehicle tracking help a business to generate savings? The answer is all day long. We’ll explain why.
Engineer site-based worker with tracked vehicle
Monitoring time on site
How often do you think your on-site staff arrive early or leave after their required working hours are through? Do you think they are more likely to arrive late and leave early? Without a record of their activity, it can be hard to guess.
Consider an employee’s hourly rate for a moment. Perhaps it is $30 per hour. This means that each lost employee hour costs your business $30. When several employees are consistently on site for less than the required time, this cost proliferates every day. A fraction of this sum could be spent on installing vehicle tracking in your employees’ vehicles, providing the benefit of knowing when workers arrive and leave locations.
iTracker offers daily timesheets for each of your vehicles and allows you to set late arrival and early departure alerts. You can even use the Geofencing feature to draw a zone around any of your work sites and set time-based rules for when vehicles should enter and leave those areas.
To put the savings into perspective, look at the price of several workers leaving their work site 30 minutes early on a regular basis. Imagine a business with 20 employees, all tending to head home before the end of the working day. If the employees are paid $30 per hour, that business stands to lose $300 from early departures in the space of one day. Over a single week, they are $1,500 out of pocket. If the company only had the tools to help them identify, address and correct and address behaviors like this, they could save upwards of $76,000 per year.
This one small change can create huge savings, and it is just the beginning.
Efficient job allocation
Jobs can often come in with little warning. When this happens, do you try to send the closest worker to the site? With the iTracker vehicle tracking system, this is easy. You can see a list of your drivers’ vehicles in order of their proximity to a zipcode. This gives an accurate prediction of which driver could reach the job sooner. Sending the closest employee to the job not only reduces the fuel costs for your business, but also allows you to optimize workload and increase customer satisfaction.
If a plumbing and heating company is called out to an urgent water leak, it wants to send the closest plumber to the problem fast! The hourly cost of employees that we discussed in the last section applies here, too. Keeping customers waiting costs a business, both in time and in reputation. But the extra driver time required for a longer journey, and the extra fuel used, has a price attached to it too.
Efficient allocation of drivers according to their proximity to jobs can even help some businesses avoid penalties for arriving late to a customer or prevent a situation where work is not completed in the time frame that was agreed.
Examining personal mileage
Some businesses allow employees to take company vehicles home after the working day. Others may permit use of company vehicles for private journeys. Without complete visibility of your vehicles’ movements throughout the day, it is difficult to attribute running costs to either business or private usage. It is also hard to know whether your rules regarding the personal use of vehicles are being followed.
A landscaping business might let employees drive its company vans home after work. The owner may not have agreed to their staff using the vans over the weekend. If those vans are not insured for personal use, the business risks hefty fines if an accident were to happen out of hours. Vehicle tracking offers several tools to ensure your company vehicle arrangement is respected, such as alerts for movements out of hours, detailed driver logs and daily route maps.
Vehicle tracking will easily highlight any spikes in activity out of hours. If unauthorized private mileage could be reduced by just 10 miles per week, then the cost of installing vehicle tracking is already paid for.
In the instance where a company vehicle is being used for business other than your own, such as an employee performing work ‘off the books’, tracking information can be crucial. You should be aware of any work that is attached to your brand and any misuse or mistreatment of your vehicles.
If you have authorized private use of your vehicles, a vehicle tracking system will help you to differentiate between business and personal mileage and the costs associated with each. What’s more, you’ll be able to see how your vehicles are being driven during these times. We will explore this in more detail later in the guide.
Shutting off the engine
Leaving an engine idling typically wastes half a gallon of diesel per hour. The average cost of a gallon of diesel is around $3.00. It is likely that your vehicles will be left to idle from time to time, but to what extent?
The iTracker system monitors how long each vehicle is left idling and displays this result in your daily vehicle reports. If your employees often leave your vehicles running unnecessarily, you could cut this figure down by coaching drivers to turn off the engine when they are stationary. Through reducing engine idling by just two hours per week, the iTracker system pays for itself.
Improving driver behavior
Are your company vehicles being driven in a way that leaves room for improvement? The iTracker vehicle tracking system will show you how harshly your drivers are accelerating and braking, and what speeds they have been travelling throughout the day. These metrics are calculated into a simple driver score. However, all instances of bad driving behavior can be investigated in isolation on the route map.
You can use this information to address any reckless driving behavior that is putting unnecessary strain on a vehicle or causing undue risk of accidents. This insight has a direct impact on the cost of running your vehicles and on your company image if your vehicles are branded with your company’s name.
A holistic approach to creating savings
Our customers from a range of sectors find countless ways to create savings and avoid unwanted costs with the help of vehicle tracking, regardless of how many miles they travel. Request a free demo with our team today to see the iTracker vehicle tracking system in action and discuss the different options available.
