GPS Tracking ROI

How much time and how much fuel am I losing from idling engines? ( 9 March 2006)

Are my drivers speeding and where? (10 March 2006)

(Today’s Topic) Where are my miles going? Am I making full use of expensive assets?

How much is asset abuse really costing my company?

What time are my drivers starting work and what time are they completing their shifts?

How many minutes of pre and post trip time are you paying for?

Are my drivers arriving on time for their deliveries?

Are my drivers making unauthorized stops?

How productive are my assets?

Are my sales representatives making their required customer calls?

 

Where are my miles going? Am I making full use of expensive assets?

Miles are the basic yardstick used to measure any fleet’s performance. But collecting mileage data is a time consuming and error-prone processes.

If your performance metrics are to have any business value, the miles must be recorded accurately, and all recording errors reconciled. However, even after you laboriously correct all mileage reports, you still only know one dimension of the problem.

You know how far your fleet traveled, but you don’t know where your trucks went. Where the miles expended where you thought the drivers were supposed to be? Or were miles wasted in side trips and wasted joy rides? With GPS fleet tracking you’ll operate your business based on knowledge, not hope.

One of my potential clients (they haven’t seen the light yet) is a county department of transportation. They operate more than 700 vehicles. Several years ago, they implemented a good plan. Instead of a county agency just getting a vehicle paid for by country funds, the county DoT set themselves up as a leasing agency.

Each county office who wants a car or truck pays from their own budget into the DoT budget, based on miles driven. Hence, no vehicles just sitting in front of county offices as status symbols and always money coming into the DoT to repair and replace vehicles as they wear out.

 Can you spot the fallacy though? Actually there are three major holes in this scheme:

1. Someone has to collect the data. That means each and every month a DoT person has to go through 700 plus mileage reports from more than 20 different county agencies. Late reports have to be tracked down, reports with errors in fact or format have to be hand corrected and then each and every report has to be hand-entered into the county’s asset management/budget system.
2. Since each mile reported is money removed from an agency’s budget, there’s a strong temptation to under report from time to time and then perhaps play ‘catch-up’ with the miles later. Not saying that county employees would actually cheat on their mileage reports, but then again, would you like to certify that 700 accounting system totals are actually going to match up with 700 odometers in the field? The county expends substantial labor (and miles) driving around the county making spot checks.
3. The biggest fallacy is the method of managing in itself. If you want me to put miles on a vehicle to, for example, show justification for keeping it, I can put miles on it in many ways … lunchtime jaunts, extra trips to ‘check on things’ or, if I’m really lazy and really inclined to cheat, I can just stick a jack under the right rear wheel and let it run in “drive” all day. (Don’t laugh, it’s been done).

Once all the reports are fixed, all the accuracy checks made by the county still has no way of knowing how many of their monthly miles are true and honest miles and how many may have been trips to the golf course (that’s been documented as well).

A simple system of no monthly cost “black boxes” that ride along as silent witnesses and report mileage and where the vehicle has been to a central management facility is being paid for over and over again every year, but the county just doesn’t know it.

Quick, how many miles did your fleet do last year and how many of those miles were for the business?

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.