Another Way To Lose Your Business If You Don’t GPS Track
Zephyrhills, Florida – A trucking company in Pasco County isn’t sure it can recover after vandals stole a truck and 48-foot trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of beef. Together, the truck and trailer are worth about $20,000. The meat is valued at $206,000…. But (the driver) decided to stop at a truck yard in Zephyrhills, and against company policy, (my emphasis) left the loaded truck there overnight.
By the time a co-worker arrived the following morning, the trailer had been loaded onto another truck and carted off…. The rest of the sad story about how to go out of business because the company wouldn’t protect a quarter-million dollar load with a $600 GPS tracker is here.
Here we go again, folks. The company secures a profitable contract, they send the driver off on the trip and tell him what they want done … the driver decided to do it his way and bang! Not only is a quarter-million in cargo and property missing (and yes, some is covered by insurance, but every loss like this just drives up rates). Much more important thna the one-time loss is the real fact. as reported by the trucking comopany owner, that he may have to close his doors. That means no income for him, no pay for the driver, no taxes collected for the State of Florida, on and on.
Any loss is a negative factor, even when, unlike yesterday’s report, the loss may not involve death or injury. But lives get unalterably changed at the very least. Why? For the lack of a little black box that cost far less than the chrome accents the truck owner in the picture spent for. Less than a couple tires, and unlike tires which have to be replaced again and again and again, the GPS tracker will outlive multiple trucks.
Do you know where your drivers stop? Do you know what time they start and stop their drives? Do you know if they are making side trips … or even hauling occassional loads for themselves? Do they falsify their RODS (Hours of Service) reports (log books) … making you liable, intentionally or unintentionally? Do they drive at the speed you tell them too, or 35 mph faster? Each of these “horror” questions are real-world events I personally witnessed in just a few years selling these systems commercially.
If you think these things can’t be happening to you, you are just whistling in the dark unless you track driver’s performance. You can’t manage what you can’t measure!
Wow, Dave, that is not a fun story. I am glad I don’t hear these horror stories too frequently (the occasional my truck was stolen & we weren’t paying attention but got it back the next day).
We DID just add inline maps to our exception reports, so now when a truck speeds, idles too long, is run outside of an acceptable time/area, you get an email/text message, along with a map of where that is (so it’s easier to discern if it’s an issue or not).
I have to wonder in a case like this though, with $200k+ at stake, if it was an “inside job…” — even it was, an unauthorized stop, outside of typical geo-fenced areas, might have prevented it.
As always, thanks for your GPS ROI insight.
Rob.
Hi Rob,
Yes, I hesitated before writing this one because it indeed could trun into a “who dun it”, taking the focus away from the management by measurement aspect of GPS tracking. But it’s just one illustration out of many that I see every week … all similar. Losses that happen because drivers are in the wrong place … intentionally or accidentally .. and management never gets to take action becuase they don’t know about the problem.
Actually I’ve just been working on a case here in the Philippines of the ‘accidental” variety that could have a huge dollar cost attached … and the driver wasn’t a crook or even conciously misbehaving, he was just doing something dumb and the boss never knew. I should write that one up. Be well, Dave