Four Benefits You Can't Achieve Without Fleet Tracking
For the small-business owner, investing in fleet tracking systems can feel like an unnecessary expense. When you have a handful of vehicles to track, why should you invest in a tracking system? Before deciding that this is not an expense your company should implement, consider the following four benefits you cannot achieve without the right fleet tracking system.
1. Making Your Fleet Environmentally Friendly
No matter how many ways you cut fuel costs, or which alternative-fuel vehicles you add to your fleet, certain driver behaviors will increase your fuel usage due to the emissions created through your fleet vehicles. If you want to be an environmentally conscious company, you must find ways to minimize your impact on the environment — this starts with your fleet.
Fleet tracking gives you insights into driver behavior, so you can limit idling time and speeding behaviors. It also allows you to increase route productivity, so your drivers are not spending more time on the road than they should. You can schedule maintenance reminders into your tracking program, enabling your vehicles to run as efficiently as possible.
Each of these actions reduces your fuel usage and your emissions, by limiting the amount of time your engines are running and your vehicles are on the road. When combined, this helps lower your carbon footprint significantly.
2. Reduce Unauthorized Usage
Without vehicle tracking, you simply don't know if your drivers are using your vehicles for personal reasons. The accountability provided through vehicle tracking is essential to ensuring that vehicles are only used for authorized usage. Not only does this limit costs by minimizing wear and tear and fuel consumption, but it also helps protect you from liability due to actions taken in a company vehicle. As a fleet manager, you need to know that your company vehicles are being used only as you authorize, and fleet tracking makes this information accessible.
3. Reduce Costs
Reducing fuel use does more than lessen your environmental impact. It also reduces the costs for your fleet. When you aren't spending money unnecessarily on fuel, you aren't wasting money that could be used in other ways for your fleet.
Yet, fuel is just one of the costs you can cut with fleet tracking. With a fleet tracking system, you can spot problems like reckless driving, employees clocking excess overtime, employees taking side trips on company time, etc. You can also rest assured that maintenance happens on time, ultimately reducing downtime and the cost of expensive future maintenance. Insurance companies also offer reduced premiums to companies using fleet tracking, because of the safety improvements that fleet tracking offers.
These all combine to lower the costs of running your fleet. In fact, most fleets see a return on investment in just a few months because of the reduced costs thanks to the fleet tracking system.
4. Improve Fleet Safety
No matter how carefully you screen your employees, most companies have employees that use unsafe driving practices. Managing employee behavior to improve safety is a benefit of fleet tracking. Driving too quickly, harsh braking and rapid acceleration may be habits for your drivers, but these are habits that put your company assets at risk. With fleet tracking, you can track and eliminate many of these actions, so you can protect the overall safety of your fleet and company.
With these four benefits, it makes sense to invest in fleet tracking. Whether you have four company cars or 400, fleet tracking will improve the way you do business and minimize costs for your company. Find a fleet tracking system that fits your business needs, and start investing in your team’s safety today.
Robert J. Hall is president of Track Your Truck, a leader in GPS vehicle tracking systems and software used by various types of businesses all over the country.
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