Tracking Vehicle Use Can End Abuse
You can save company money in a very big way by tracking vehicle travel patterns. Since you can’t be in every vehicle, every minute of every day, you really cannot know how a vehicle is being used. You probably also don’t have time to do the math to see if any of your fleet vehicles are racking up huge numbers of miles. But by tracking vehicle travel patterns with a simple GPS device, you can know exactly where every vehicle has been driven.
Most companies have policies in place stating that company vehicles can only be used for company business. Some companies allow their employees to take vehicles home, while others do not. But are you tracking vehicle use? Some of the most common abuses of company vehicles include:
- running personal errands during the workday
- taking a truck home on the weekend to move furniture for an employee’s antiques business
- using a company car you are allowed to drive to and from work to take your kids on weekend day trips.
Each of these abuses of the privilege of driving a company vehicle can be detected by tracking vehicle movement. With a simple GPS tracking device that attaches to the steering column of each vehicle, you can not only know where each vehicle is at any moment (because you will be tracking vehicle movement), but you can also use the capability of tracking vehicle movement and save the history to prove where each vehicle has been and when it was there.
Consider the cost to the company if every vehicle is being driven an extra 100 miles per week. Assuming that your vehicles average 10 miles per gallon around town, each vehicle will use ten gallons of gas. If gas is selling for $2.75, each vehicle is costing the company an extra $27.50 per week. You can do the rest of the math to carry that out by the number of vehicles being used and then multiplying by 52 weeks. That comes to $1,430 per vehicle per year – and that’s just for gas!
If you calculated the “per vehicle” and “per mile” costs for insurance, oil, maintenance, parts, wear and tear, tags, taxes, risks, tires, etc. you would probably find the cost per mile of unauthorized use of company vehicles to be quite surprising. By tracking vehicle travel patterns, you can stop the abuse and save the company a bundle.
When you add up all of the costs for unauthorized use of all vehicles in your fleet you might be surprised by how widespread the problem actually is. When the reports from tracking vehicle movement are compiled, you would have a good bit of evidence for tighter enforcement of the rules governing use of corporate vehicles. You might also discover that you would be able to save enough money to pay for GPS devices for every vehicle and for monitoring in less than 90 days. You could end up getting a raise, the reports from tracking vehicle travel patterns would make your work easier and faster, and the company could do something important with the money you save.
The next step is to begin to think about how tracking vehicle driving patterns could help you improve driver safety, efficiency and even save fuel so you are environmentally friendly. If you know you have habitual speeders, you can use the GPS device to set an alarm to notify them when they are exceeding the speed limit. You can track drivers who accelerate like they are drag racing when they pull away from a stop sign (and all the wasted fuel). You could put a stop to wasteful work habits and save money while also improving productivity and customer service. If you are a fleet manager and you would like to be a hero, sell the company on tracking vehicle travel patterns.
For more information about the benefits oftracking vehiclebehavior, claim your free report “7 Ways Your Company Can Save Thousands of Dollars With GPS Fleet Tracking.” A number of companies have boosted their revenue and decreased their costs by implementing a GPS tracking system for their fleet. To calculate the ROI for your company, see the GPS vehicle ROI calculator.