GPS Tracking ROI

The ROI of GPS … Are you Hesitant to answer these questions? (Intro, Part 0)How much time and how much fuel am I losing from idling engines? (Part 1)Are my drivers speeding and where? (Part 2)Where are my miles going? Am I making full use of expensive assets? (Part 3)How much is asset abuse really costing my company? (Part 4)When are my drivers starting work and when are they completing their shifts? (Part 5)How many minutes of pre and post trip time are you paying for? (Part 6)Are my drivers arriving on time for their deliveries? (Part 7)(Today’s Topic) Are my drivers making unauthorized stops?How productive are my assets?Are my sales representatives making their required customer calls?

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Are my drivers making unauthorized stops?

This is a big one for those in route sales, route service, commodity delivery and the building trades. To generalize the problem, it’s called ‘moonlighting’ or ’skimming off the top’.

What if a beer truck driver just happens to make a stop once every Friday afternoon for just 5 or 10 minutes on his way back to the warehouse? What if that stop just happened to be a self-store facility, which the driver filled up with ‘lost’ cases of product which he then sold off from time to time via the internet? It’s not a what if - IT HAPPENED.

How could the driver do this with a modern inventory system? Well, he found a way you see. The fresh product that came into the warehouse was carefully counted. Salesmen visited the stores and bars that sold beer and made carefully tracked orders to replace store stock as needed. To insure freshness, merchandiser’s checked the store stocks on every visit and if there were cases that were getting stale, they carefully made up return orders for the delivery.

Once the drivers picked up the “old beer” though, who was really tracking it in the warehouse? Well, it turns out, not enough people. The delivery driver stopped every Friday on his way back and slipped some ‘old beer’ into his little treasure house and when he had a nice cache there he sold it off.  Not only was he stealing his employer’s product, he was stealing the time and labor to run the little scheme.

And even more than the financial theft, the gravest danger to the distributor’s company was the stale beer itself. The reason for the whole process of tracking the beer’s age was dictated by the brewing company. Had any of the stolen, old beer ever made it back to public store shelves and been found on spot checks by the brew house, the distributor might have lost his franchise .. and the whole business. All because he couldn’t afford to track his trucks.

Got a lawn service with a pump on the truck to apply product? Do you know your pump has only been operating at customers who pay you and not someone else, under the table? This is another “war story” that all too sadly came from the real war of business. A hard-working little company was making a nice go of caring for lawns, especially spraying on fertilizer and insecticides on long-term treatment programs. Not an easy business with large competitors with nation-wide advertising budgets, but the company was soldiering on making a nice go of things. The owner told me flat out he couldn’t possibly afford GPS tracking. Didn’t I know, he asked, how closely a small business had to watch expenses? Well, I assured him I did. He finally accepted a free trial on one of his route trucks. What do you suppose he learned in the first week?

Turns out several previous customers of this route service driver had cancelled, citing the high cost of lawn treatments. The owner assumed they had probably gone over to one of his national competitors. But sadly, what had happened was the route driver was still servicing those customers, collecting for the service in cash on each trip, using the owner’s truck, spray equipment, chemicals and labor time to run his own little sideline lawn service while the owner was blissfully unaware. It can’t happen to you? Well, let’s hope it can’t, but why bet your business on a hope?