You own a business, your employees are always out providing assistance to customers, but you have no idea about their actual situation and are forced to call them all to organize everything. In this article, we look at 4 benefits of GPS trackers for your business.
1 - Route optimization
2 - The nearest vehicle
3 - Awareness
4 - Behavior
1 - Route optimization
Having many customers is great—it means your business is doing well. But if you are not properly organized, you could have unnecessarily high costs (which you can reduce) due to travel. Our ego often tells us that we are doing the right thing or, in this case, that we are taking the shortest route to our destination. But if you look at the vehicle's movements on the map, you may realize that this is not the case because there is actually an even shorter route. Obviously, this type of analysis is only possible if you have taken the trouble to install trackers in your company vehicles. Most devices allow you to view past movements on the map, making it extremely easy to see whether shorter alternative routes exist for reaching different destinations. It all seems very easy and straightforward, right? In reality, the "rules of the road" are much more dynamic....
Employees often use navigation apps (Google Maps, Waze), and these do not always suggest the shortest route. Sometimes the shortest route is the busiest, so it is worth taking a slightly longer route that allows you to save time. So, all things considered, trackers would be more useful for making minor route corrections or for helping you realize that the route from customer X to customer Y is excessively long.
2 - The nearest vehicle
This one is very easy... the biggest advantage you can get from GPS trackers is being able to see the real-time location of all vehicles at the same time. Does a customer suddenly call you because they have a specific need? Forget those interrogation-style phone calls where you have to ask every time, "Where are you? Where aren't you? Who told you to go all the way over there?
Many tracking applications allow you to enter the desired address and display it on the map along with the vehicles' positions. This makes it very easy to see which vehicle is closest to the customer and call that person directly to take care of the request.
3 - Awareness
To organize yourself as effectively as possible and plan for the future, it can be useful to know the status of every vehicle at a glance. Would you like to know whether your "team members" have arrived at their destination, whether the job has been completed (the vehicle is leaving the customer), or whether someone might be trying to be clever by going places they should not have reached? Using these devices gives you access to all this information: you can view and receive alerts when a vehicle enters or leaves clearly defined areas using geofences, see whether the vehicle's engine is on or off and, of course, find out if someone is in the "wrong place at the wrong time" thanks to real-time positioning. In short, you can know what is happening, where and when, with the great convenience of seeing everything from both your smartphone and your PC.
4 - Behavior
Is it really worth driving at 160 kilometers per hour on the highway just to reach the customer on time? Tracking applications have very useful features for monitoring vehicle behavior and make it easy to give you that time-based "overview" so you can understand what is happening and when. As mentioned earlier, you can receive alerts on your phone via notifications, and these will be saved in chronological order so you can accurately reconstruct what happened. The most common behavior alerts include speeding alarms (when the preset limit is exceeded), engine start and stop, and the beginning and end of a journey—to give you precise information about how long the vehicle was stationary or in motion.
Also, with the widely used "Trip History" feature (which may have different names), you are shown the route taken using different colors based on travel speeds. For example, with our app in partnership with Ruhavik, you can see the different speed ranges according to color: the route in green indicates speeds from 0 to 40 kilometers per hour, yellow from 40 to 60, light orange from 60 to 80, dark orange from 80 to 100, and red from 100 to 140. These limits can of course be modified as you wish.
So, when you see a vehicle showing a light orange route on the map within a city, it might be the right opportunity to tell the driver to slow down. That excessive speed in the city could cost you much more in terms of health and money if an accident were to occur.
Conclusion:
Speaking from one business to another, we both know that there are times when you need to "move" quickly to achieve your goals within the set deadlines. But sometimes, those 2 minutes you want to save will cost you much more if something goes wrong. On the road, it often happens that this "something" goes wrong either because of us or because of others.
These are 4 very simple but highly effective benefits that you can enjoy once you start implementing GPS trackers in your business.
Our solution:
All our devices are configured and equipped with a global SIM card already installed, including 5 years of tracking, allowing you to view the real-time location even without a monthly subscription: