Workforce productivity: What makes a good GPS tracking system?
“If a GPS system helped you take on one extra job per week, and if overtime payments could be reduced by a couple of hours per week, what would your return be per employee?”
Landscape contracting is labour intensive. With many vehicles, drivers and sites to manage, and customers spanning a wide radius, a popular tool for improving workforce productivity is GPS tracking. A goodtracking system doesn’t just tell you where your vehicles are, it provides information that is directly relevant to your business operations. The following points will help you choose a system with the strongest reporting capabilities:
- Which reports will I need to improve productivity and operating costs?
Accurate timesheets teamed with late arrival and early departure alerts will reduce undue overtime claims and ensure your customers get the hours of service that they pay for.
For park supervisions, tracking reports provide proof of attendance. Quartix vehicle tracking APIs allow you to feed all these reports into your own business systems, including payroll. The data should be accessible by any team, with the ability to drill down into individuals or groups of drivers and create custom reports. Reports can be accessed via email and on a mobile device, helpful for managers who are often out of the office.
- Which reports can identify actions needed to lower fuel costs?
Reports that include daily route logs, driving style reports with acceleration and braking metrics and geofencing alerts to flag unauthorised journeys and unwarranted use of company fuel can help. “It doesn’t happen often, but if a driver does use our vehicle at a non-agreed time, we will see that on the system,” says Julie Renshaw of John O’Conner Grounds Maintenance. Helping a driver to improve their driving style can lower fuel costs significantly. Maintaining a good driving score has been shown to reduce fuel consumption by up to 25% (Frost and Sullivan 2015).
- What other fleet insights can help reduce costly overheads?
Real-time vehicle utilisation reports, often extending to ride-on equipment, ensure fewer vehicles are out of action and reduce unnecessary costs. Keeping all your fleet on the road helps increase capacity to service and charge customers. Some tracking systems also offer vehicle MOT, service and maintenance reminders.
A good tracking system helps to plan, react and validate. Worcestershire-based Whiting Landscape opted for Quartix vehicle tracking so it could monitor staff remotely. With the majority of work completed off-site, the company could be unknowingly losing a lot of money if staff were leaving early or arriving late.
Another feature to look out for is the ability to identify your nearest vehicle to a postcode, so that you can best deal with requests in real-time.
- How will a GPS tracking system support and help my drivers?
Landscape contracting is competitive, and it’s critical to keep operational costs low and ensure quotes are competitive to help the business grow. Share these motivations with your workforce and encourage them to embrace GPS tracking by introducing incentives for exemplary driving behaviour, e.g. most improved driving style or most jobs completed on time. With the safeguarding of a tracking system, your drivers are also well covered when it comes to false claims about their driving or punctuality.
- How can I justify the investment in GPS tracking?
With Quartix, short-term and rolling contracts offer optimum flexibility – should your number of vehicles change, you aren’t tied in for several years. If you have a fleet of 40+ vehicles, special rates and longer-term contracts are optional. It’s not hard to see how a small monthly payment can lead to a large return per driver. If you focused on their driving style and eliminated private usage to reduce fuel consumption by, say, 70 litres per month… We’ll leave you to do the maths.
www.quartix.net, email enquiries@quartix.net, or call 01686 806 663.