Logistics is the most critical thing to get right in a product business, but it isn’t easy. You have to manage drivers, optimize your truck loads, make quick trips, and more. It takes a lot of work to create a well-oiled machine.
That’s why many fleet managers are investing in technology to make things easier. And when commercial vehicle tracking with GPS is reported to increase profitability by 62%, it’s a great first place to start.
Investing in a GPS tracker for commercial vehicles is critical to getting the most out of your fleet. Keep reading to learn the 11 benefits you’ll see when investing in a commercial vehicle GPS tracker.
1. Reduce Fuel Costs
Fuel is one of the most expensive parts of a commercial vehicle fleet. If you’re busy, your trucks are on the road most of the time, so you constantly need to purchase fuel to keep them on the road.
It’s even worse today. Fuel costs continue to increase and may do so more in the future. If you aren’t careful about your fuel consumption, your fuel costs will go out of control.
A commercial GPS system will help bring fuel costs down. One way it does this is through route monitoring. You can see where your fleet drives, monitor traffic patterns and make quick changes to avoid extra time on the road.
This means you’ll be able to get to your destinations quicker, which leads to less fuel used.
You can also see what your drivers do on the road. If they’re wasting time or using unoptimized routes, that’s extra fuel from the budget. A GPS tracker will let you see what drivers are doing and keep them on the right track.
2. Reduce Bad Driving Behaviors
Another problem with drivers on the road all the time is that they may make bad driving decisions. When you don’t have GPS, you have no insight into drivers that behave badly on the road. They may speed, make poor directional decisions, use harsh braking, and engage in other bad driving tactics.
A GPS system allows you to monitor what people do. You’ll get an in-depth look at everything a driver does and can see when people regularly don’t drive well.
It’s not a big deal if a driver occasionally makes a mistake, but you don’t want someone that regularly does so. Your GPS will help you spot weak drivers and let them know they aren’t doing things correctly.
This means you can offer more training to people who don’t do well on the road. If they don’t improve after training, you’ll be able to find another driver who drives better.
3. Optimize Your Routes
You can do a lot to optimize your vehicle routes before they hit the road. If you use fleet management software, you can use a map to input your start and end destinations to get a route. In most cases, this route will work great for getting your drivers to their destinations quickly.
However, things can change on the road. You can get stuck in traffic jams, run into roadblocks, experience terrible weather conditions, and much more. All of that will slow people down and make the route drivers use not the optimized path.
A GPS system will change that. Since you know exactly where drivers are at all times, you can tie that information into your management software. Map software lets you get updated information about road closures, traffic, and other things. That means you can tell when a driver will encounter an obstacle that slows them down.
You can send new directions to your drivers when this happens. That means you can change to a more optimized route and make it to the destination quicker.
4. Resolve Disputes
One of the most significant challenges of a fleet manager is to resolve disputes between drivers and customers. Customers may occasionally complain about slow drivers. They expect trucks to arrive at a certain time, but it may not always happen.
The problem is that this is sometimes not true. Whether this is because of a customer lying or communication issues, it’s on you as a manager to resolve the problem.
GPS tracking products make this much easier. With GPS, you know exactly where your trucks are at all times. And with commercial systems, you keep a log that tells you a truck’s route history and when it arrives at its destination.
This makes the dispute resolution process much easier. You have a historical log telling you whether a driver was late. You can give that information to your customer to validate your claims or deal with a driver who was late.
This information may not be able to resolve your dispute completely. But it will provide a significant first step in dealing with the issue.
6. Protect the Environment
The environment isn’t usually considered when making business decisions, but it does have an impact when you install GPS tracking on your commercial vehicles.
There’s no denying now that the environment is changing. You can see it with more extreme weather events and the global temperature shifting. The question is, will business do their parts to help fix things?
One of the most significant impacts on the environment is vehicles on the road. Reports show that the transportation industry contributes to 27% of our total greenhouse emissions.
As mentioned above, GPS tracking will help you create optimized routes. That means your drivers will spend less time on the road. You may get more road time for some vehicles because of the increased productivity, but much of that time will be at customer sites loading and unloading vehicles.
The less time your drivers are on the road, the less they’ll contribute to environmental problems. That means investing in GPS tracking can help you reduce the number of greenhouse emissions your company produces.
As mentioned above, you’ll also have lower fuel costs because of optimized route planning. That means you’ll put less demand on oil, further adding to how environmentally friendly your company is.
7. Reduce Insurance Costs
Insurance is a significant cost when you have a commercial fleet. You carry a lot of products on the road and operate expensive vehicles. Insurance providers take on a lot of risks when they insure fleets.
However, you can reduce that risk when you invest in GPS tracking. Since you can monitor what your drivers do on the road, you have in-depth details about how safe your drivers are.
That’s information you can hand over to your insurance provider. If you can prove that your drivers are safe, that’s much less for an insurance company. An insurance company can see that your drivers are being safe and not taking any unnecessary chances.
That can lead to steep discounts on your insurance premiums. Over time, this can save a lot of money in insurance costs.
8. Better Financial Predictions
One big issue when managing a fleet is cost analysis. You can do a lot without knowing where your fleet is on the road, but you can only do so much.
Your costs can be unpredictable when you don’t have excellent fleet management. People will fall behind because of unknown road conditions, unanticipated fuel costs, and other factors. That can lead to unreliable cost predictions that will mess up your budget.
You can avoid unnecessary financial headaches when you track your vehicles with a GPS device. Your routes become much more predictable when doing this. That means you can better predict fuel costs, driver costs, the number of routes per day, and much more.
All of this leads to better financial predictions. You’ll be able to manage your profit and cost more efficiently and plan your finances for the future.
9. Improve Security
The best security isn’t going to protect you from threats in every case. Criminals will still find their way onto your property to steal your things. While commercial vehicles are harder to take, they still occasionally get stolen.
You’re out of luck if you don’t have a way to track your vehicle. You rely on the police to launch an investigation, which doesn’t always happen. In most cases, you’ll need to deal with insurance to get a payment for new vehicles.
A GPS will stop the headaches this causes. Most GPS trackers have a professional installation. That means it’s hard for people to tamper with your GPS devices to remove them.
That means you can track your vehicles, no matter who has possession of them. You can quickly figure out where your stolen vehicles are instead of relying on an investigation. Give your GPS data to the police, and they can track down who stole your fleet vehicles and return them.
10. Lower Maintenance Costs
Modern commercial GPS units do much more than tell you where your vehicles are on the road. Many of them have a ton of advanced telemetric features that let you know how your fleet is running.
Here are a few things you can monitor with new GPS technology:
- Engine temperature
- Fuel gauges
- Engine oil level
- Diagnostics information
- Overall vehicle health
All of this is information you would need to gather on your own when performing regular maintenance. Since your GPS technology can analyze your vehicle, you can collect this information at all times. Even better, that information can automatically upload to your vehicle maintenance dashboard.
That means you know when to take care of your vehicles and if there are any upcoming problems that you need to be aware of. That information will help you get in front of problems before they become more significant issues.
Since you can face more severe problems if you let issues go for too long, you’ll save money in the long run by reducing your maintenance costs.
11. Generate Reports
It’s hard to create reports when you don’t have vehicle data. You need to manually collect data, enter it into spreadsheets and software, and create custom reports from there.
Much of that work goes away when you work with GPS products. GPS trackers for fleets have a direct connection to the internet. That means they can upload data to your central management system automatically.
As a result, you have much less manual data entry to do yourself. You can spend your time doing other important work that helps the company more.
Another added benefit is automatically adding data to a fleet management program. You can use that to create helpful reports about your fleet. Here are a few things you can learn when generating reports with GPS data:
- Average route time
- Number of slowdowns
- Time spent at stoplights
- Employee breaks
- Time spent at customer sites
Of course, you can run many other reports, depending on the data you collect. Explore your options with GPS tracking to see what information is available.
Don’t Wait to Invest in Commercial Vehicle Tracking
You have a lot of resources on the line when you have a commercial fleet. You have a lot of products on the road, you need to manage drivers, and you need to keep everything running on time.
Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done to keep things running smoothly. Countless things can go wrong on the road.
That’s why it’s so important to have commercial vehicle tracking. A GPS tracker will help you monitor your commercial vehicle fleet on the road and ensure they’re getting to customers on time. Invest in a tracker today to see the benefits of GPS tracking for yourself.
Do you want to check out more tips that will help you manage your business? Head back to the blog to read the latest posts on the subject.
