GPS Tracking ROI

I’ve read several article sin the past few weeks that indicate to me the the UK is “getting” the business picture better than many US forms. The Tech World article I quoted today is well worth a read and even a study.

Key points are that manufacturers who have for years made their money by building some kind of a machine … a deliverable .. and selling it outright to an end user for a marked up price (profit) and then waiting for the machine to wear out and the customer to buy a new one are in a losing spiral.

If you look at some of the cost-benefits of leasing it’s no secret that this often makes great economic sense for the end user. So the manufacturing companies of tomorrow have got to make leasing the key aspect of their business. When the equipment is leased, it needs service.

Properly done, service is the greatest of customer loyalty and brand building. It’s also a great potential profit center. An example I know of personally is IBM printers. Take a look at http://www.printers.ibm.com and you’ll see some of the places IBM (which seems dead in some people’s perception) is still earning money off big customers who want to have their printing plant under their own roof, but want someone else to keep the printers running. Years ago a good friend of mine was doing engineering services for IBM on a government DoD contract. That aspect of IBM’s business dried up … guess the didn’t have Dick Cheney feeding them ‘no bid’ work … and I was worried my friend was going to be out on his ear without a job.

No need to worry, IBM offered him a transfer into their printer services work and he’s been happily insuring Pac Bell customers get their voluminous phone bills ever since.

The second major point in the Tech World piece is, control. It’s all very well to say, “fine, I’ll put my talent on the road and watch the money flow in.” But in today’s world that model is flawed. You can’t just send people out in the world un-monitored and un-supported. Inefficiencies will eat you alive.

First of all, people are people. if you aren’t tracking them, both in time and space, they aren’t going to be at the right place at the right time. Or they aren’t even going to give you the time you are paying for. And, if your billing for customer service just depends on hand-written or typed in logs from your field service reports, you loose two ways. If the employee wants to ‘rob’ a little time, or to give the customer a break, you won’t catch the problem. Secondly, even if the field force worker is as conscientious as a preacher, you are paying talented field service wages for pencil pushing tasks, prone to error. Either way the potential for business loss looms large.

If you want to make money out of field service and field force personnel, better think right now about tracking them, end to end. Buy something like this: http://ecommerce.geotab.com/hp6500/

yes, this is a paid political announcement for something I personally sell, but fear not, you can find others .. shop and compare. message is, for the price of a sophisticated cell phone you also get to:

Track users location from your desktop
Users touch button to set activity status
See the users status on the map
Manage employees time and actions
Easily send messages and/or dispatch addresses
Never get lost - view your current location on a map
Automatic route directions from current location to next requested stop

And everything runs on Windows Mobile, so integration with your existing business management systems is a snap.

Buy a field force tracking system from me, buy one from a competitor, but buy one now and remember if it doesn’t have GPS so you get your asset’s location along with your other business data, then your wasting your investment. “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”