Save Money By Tracking Vehicle Travel Patterns

If you have been managing a fleet of vehicles very long, you know that every minute a vehicle is on the road is costing money. So, how much are you spending on unauthorized vehicle use and on drivers who waste time and money to reduce work? Managing this cost alone by tracking vehicle movement could make you the company hero for the next year.

There are several ways to abuse the privilege of driving literally any kind of company vehicle:

- driving around throughout the day to do personal errands between business stops

- waiting until the garage is closed in order to take the truck home and use it for a sideline moving business

- using the company van to take the youth group to the nearby amusement park

Tracking vehicle use with a GPS device can end these and other types of abuse. These small devices are installed on the steering column of vehicles. If you want to monitor each vehicle in "live time", you can do so. Or monitoring services can notify you that a vehicle is in use and deliver to you a report on the use of the vehicle at specific times or over a period of time. The device can also create a history for each vehicle. Tracking vehicle use allows you to compare its movement over time.

Let's look at the cost of fuel for this kind of activity. Let's assume that you have 30 vehicles in your fleet. Some are trucks, some are cars, and some are vans. Let's say that the vehicles are being driven an average of 150 miles each week for non-business activities, and that the average gas mileage over all vehicles is 15 mpg. Let's also assume that the price of fuel averages about $2.80 per gallon. When you do the math, the annual cost for misuse of your vehicles is $43,680 for fuel alone. Tracking vehicle use allows you to document this cost.

If you then calculate all of the other costs to the company of employees making unauthorized use of vehicles, the total could reach triple digits. Tracking vehicle use with a simple and affordable GPS device will enable you to calculate all costs of operating your fleet on a "per vehicle" basis. You just need to pull together fuel, maintenance, oil, parts, tires, wear and tear, insurance, license tags and taxes and estimate the risk of having the vehicles on the road. The total cost could be staggering.

When you add up all of these costs for every vehicle that might be in use for something other than business, the amount could be staggering if it is widespread. But if you invested the small cost of tracking vehicle movement with a GPS tracking device, you could pay for the device and the monitoring service and still hand the boss a huge amount of money. If your fleet is like most, the cost of tracking vehicle activity with a GPS device would be recovered in just three months. In just ninety days you could expect to recover the cost of the device for tracking vehicle movement and the cost of a full year of monitoring.

Tracking vehicle use also provides the documentation you need to prove that some of your service technicians are taking long round-about routes to appointments. If you know better customer service would give you an edge in your market, and you knew exactly where every vehicle was, you could pinpoint arrival times with deliveries, for customer service calls, or delays due to traffic or a more complex previous service call. The more you consider the many uses and values of tracking vehicle activity, the more you begin to understand the value of the investment.