Imagine your company could track every vehicle in its fleet, be it an executive car or an engineer’s van, at very little cost, wherever it is in the country.
Add to this the ability to grab every conceivable type of telemetry data from every car on the road, right down to every gear change, and one has to wonder why anyone would want, or need, all this information.
Today’s technology can give fleet managers the ability to collect an impressive volume of statistics in real time. Hidden in all that data will be some fairly important facts about the motoring characteristics of all the company’s drivers.
For any organisation involved in routing and scheduling, there will also be some priceless logistical information. All it takes is a little analysis and the ability to ask the right questions of the data.
Tom O’Connor, chief executive of vehicle tracking specialist Digicore UK, points out that companies deploying a vehicle tracking system need to be clear, from the outset, what they would like the system to do. ‘Some just want basic vehicle tracking. If all they want is real-time positional information on every vehicle, it will cost them somewhere in the region of a pound a day. But the systems can do a whole lot more than this.’
Some issues are more immediate for the client company than others. For vans and trucks, fuel efficiency and routing efficiency tend to be major concerns. For company cars, deeper compliance with health and safety is a more pressing matter.
‘What we try to tell companies is that it can fundamentally change the way they do business. They can work smarter by using the knowledge that vehicle tracking and the associated telemetry can offer,’ O’Connor says.
He points out that companies are under a lot of pressure in today’s economic climate to extract the maximum value from their assets, regardless of whether they have vans or salespeople on the road. ‘One of the first things that t racking and telemetry in combination can reveal is whether you have too many, or too few, assets deployed,’ he says.
The system will track the amount of time a van or car remains immobile in the car park, so underutilised assets can be seen at a glance at the monthly report. Often there are more cost-effective ways of dealing with peaks. The company can put contracts in place to hire more vehicles on a temporary basis, for example.
This could well work out cheaper than leasing all the vehicles that the company could possibly require at its busiest period, and then watching them sit idle at the depot.
The telemetry that comes with the vehicle tracking will reveal which company fleet drivers are driving more aggressively than others. Brake wear, tyre wear and rapid acceleration away from lights and stop junctions are a dead giveaway, and these trends can all be flagged up by exception reporting, without having to read through mountains of figures in order to obtain the information.
‘The point is not to play Big Brother. The system should not be used to entrap or punish people,’ O’Connor argues. Rather, the point of using the telemetry to identify rogue driving trends is to help the company pinpoint drivers who might benefit from either a quiet word or advanced driver training.
At the same time, the company is putting itself in a much better position to defend its record. If its executives ever find themselves in court charged with corporate manslaughter as a result of one of their drivers being involved in a fatal accident, company officers will have a defence. They will be able to show that the company was diligent in taking all possible steps to monitor and improve driving skills in its team of drivers.
Of course, this can also have a negative effect and, if tracking is mishandled, companies could experience a backlash from disgruntled employees. They could even find staff voting with their feet and heading for the opposition. But O’Connor argues that this can be overcome if the company c ommunicates its intentions properly with its drivers.
One of the great advantages of vehicle tracking for a sales team, for example, is that because the position of the vehicle can be seen in real time, the company can be proactive about any potential delay or hold-up.
Another great benefit is the ability to trigger alerts based on the information provided by the telemetry. So, if a salesperson has six visits scheduled for the day, the system can send an alert as soon as the car starts to move again after each visit.
It also means that a salesperson who decides to take the afternoon off playing golf instead of doing client rounds will have to explain why their car was parked at Happy Valley Golf Club for four hours that afternoon.
No matter how well vehicle tracking is communicated to staff, there will be occasions where staff will resent having their whereabouts tracked by the company. O’Connor says this can be addressed by using a ‘business usage/private usage’ switch in the car that stops transmitting or recording as soon as the privacy mode is activated.
Danny Briggesl, owner of vehicle tracking specialists AMS, explains that, outside logistics, one of the most popular uses of vehicle tracking devices in cars is for what is euphemistically known as vehicle recovery, where the device is able to signal the whereabouts of a stolen vehicle.
The recovery company can locate and secure the vehicle before the thief locates the tracking device. ‘Often, what companies do is put two devices in the vehicle; one that is hidden and hard to find and one that is obvious,’ Gall says. This is great for the company selling the device, of course, because it gets to sell two for each car instead of one.
The professional car thief is rather more difficult to deter. ‘They will often steal a vehicle and park it somewhere where they can watch it for 24 hours. If someone turns up to repossess the vehicle, then they’ll know it has a tracker hidden within it,’ he says.
The benefits of using a vehicle tracking system are many and – as long as the client company keeps its staff informed of its motives and intentions – should prove effective.
This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in Financial Director magazine
