GPS Tracking ROI

If you run a business where you pay people by the hour you naturally have a concern or two about their lunch breaks.  It’s a real drain on your resources and profit margin if you let employees get away with taking too much time for lunch.  If the employees are on the road then, of course, the issue is doubly hard to manage, because if they aren’t in the work place, how will you know?

A while back I installed a GPS Tracking System for a fellow who had a small fleet and one of the things he wanted to know he could get a handle on was time and attendance .. lunch hours and unauthorized breaks in particular.

After the units had been installed on his trucks and a few week’s worth of data had been collected, the client and I sat down for a training session to learn what he could learn from his new GPS tracking data.  here’s what we found just in checking the times and places his drivers were taking their lunch breaks:

The 58 minute Man: One loyal and long-term employee was very consistent.  Over the course of at least three weeks he never took a lunch break longer than 58 minutes.  Indeed, you could virtually set your watch by this guy.  A great worker indeed.  yes, except for one little thing we happened to note.  This fellow’s work area was on the south side of the city from his home … the clients he visited averaged a good 10 miles from his home.  But each and every work day, fair weather or foul, the guy would leave his work area and rive 10 or 12 or 14 miles out of the way across the city to his home … and then 58 minutes or so later, leave his house and drive another 10 or 12 unnecessary miles back to his first "after lunch" stop.  Six days a week, an average of say 20 miles each work day, that’s at least 120 miles each and every week that this guy and his truck were not working for the company.  regardless of what the IRS says, this was at least $120 dollars per week of cost to the company they were getting zero return on … that’s about $6200 per year this "58 minute man"was costing the company in non-productive mileage.  Not to mention, of course, the extra half hour to an hour that he spent in wages traveling back and forth to his wife’s kitchen.  The GPS unit in this guy’s truck cost the company less than $600 installed, and pointed out more than 10 times it’s cost in totally unknown expenses in less than a moth.  How is that for a Rate Of Return On Investment?

The Three Hour Man: Next we looked at another employee who showed a very odd pattern of behavior.  Monday through Friday his work pattern looked very detail and profit oriented behavior.  Nearly a model employee.  But every Saturday this fellow was working through the normal lunch hour until 1 or 2 in the afternoon and then stopping, for an average of three full hours at a location that the owner didn’t r4ecognize as one of the company’s clients.  After a little detective work my client discovered that the address where the strange, long lunches occurred was the house of the worker’s mother.  Yep, every Saturday afternoon he was stopping by and spending the afternoon with his mom,before driving back to work and clocking out.  A factor that made this even a bit more astounding was, the Saturday work was at time and a half, so each of these Saturday "lunches" with mom was costing the company about $90 extra dollars in wages … money they got absolutely no return on.  Let’s say this guy worked 50 weeks a year … that looks like about $4500 in excess labor charges caught, in three weeks, by a $600 investment.

So, what sort of lunches are your folks taking?  Still think that GPS tracking is an expensive luxury and that you can’t afford it?  based on these true stories and many others I have seen, you can’t afford not to equip your vehicles with GPS tracking … the potential for ROI is excellent.