Dec 18 2010

Use it or lose it! (ROI that is…)

Category: Alerts,Driver Accountability,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 2:38 pm

I was looking at one of our customers’ accounts the other day.  They have 23 vehicles.  Many people with that many vehicles think they “have a handle” on what’s going on.

I was thrilled to see that this company was using GPS Insight to see what was going on with their fleet.

Specifically, they were using our:

  • Alerts
  • Scheduled Reports

I call these 2 features “Unattended ROI” since you don’t have to do anything except let US monitor your fleet for exceptional situations and alert you to them, as well as run a summary report automatically and look at it in your inbox in the morning.

Scheduling Reports to alert to exceptions

Scheduling Reports to alert to exceptions

You can see there are landmark, idling, speeding, and “long stop” alerts set up here.  This customer wants to know every time a vehicle gets to the office “late” which is between 6 PM and 5 AM.  That can be used to identify people working late as well as people sneaking into the office when it is not manned in order to load up on parts for side jobs.

We have checked this for them 728,641 times since they set up that alert.  We’ve alerted them only 820 times (which is typical — usually 1 in 1000 alert checks results in an alert).

They have also set up a number of scheduled reports:

Scheduling fleet tracking reports to automate your job

Scheduling fleet tracking reports to automate your job

Just by setting up these 8, we have sent them 1300 reports and all they have to do is read them in their email every day.  They come as .html, Excel/CSV, and associated maps (for speeding, idling, and odd-hours violations).

I wish all our customers (and users of GPS Tracking in general) were this diligent about setting up MEANINGFUL alerts and reports.  It drives significant ROI knowing in real time what is going on with your fleet.  If you don’t use them, you are throwing away this return on your investment.

Use it or Lose it!

Rob.

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Aug 14 2010

GPS Insight has sent out over two million alerts based on driver behavior!

Category: Alerts,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling — rdonat @ 5:06 pm

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.”  You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so!  They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

  • Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
  • Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
  • Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
  • Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight.  We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

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Aug 10 2008

Instant Idle Time Reduction — saves $100,000 in a MONTH

Category: Company Efficiency,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings — rdonat @ 2:58 pm

A large customer recently shared some statistics with me the other day. They estimate that in July, they consumed roughly 20,000 fewer gallons of fuel than they did 2 months prior.

What changed? In mid-June, they asked us to start notifying them (programmatically) whenever a vehicle idled for longer than 7 minutes.

Once they got that notice, they would turn it into an email to the driver and the driver’s supervisor, and have it sent to them via blackberry.

INSTANTLY, the unnecessary idling stopped.

Here is a graph of the dramatic reduction. Bear in mind that in this industry and market, 25% idling is considered normal (stop lights, traffic, powering the lift gate, etc.) — that equates to roughly a 90% decrease in UNNECESSARY idling:

Instant reduction in idle time

In June, this translated to roughly 10,000 fewer gallons of fuel (mostly diesel). In July, the first “full month” it was more like 20,000 when the final fuel bills were in. We helped this customer ensure their numbers were correct this using our fuel consumption report as well. Believe it or not, this is less than a gallon of fuel savings per day on average, per vehicle, but it has a massive effect on bottom line.

The rough cost savings for this fleet is over 3 times the cost of GPS Insight’s monthly service fee.

Bear in mind that this is still unfortunately a small decrease relative to the total fuel bill, but an interesting thing became clear after the drivers started shutting their vehicle down rather than leave them run, especially in the hotter markets:

The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.

Without a nice cool cab to get back into, they took less time doing deliveries, since every minute they took to get the truck back up and rolling, the cab got hotter in the sun, especially on hot days. Our customer’s management commented to GPS Insight that they got more deliveries done on account of this change, as well as saving a considerable amount of money on fuel.We will introduce this capability for all of our customers in August, since the improvement was so significant, and we want everyone to be able to send both their driver and their supervisors proactive alerts/messages when excessive idling, speeding, off-hours usage, and out-of-geofence activity is detected.

Look for news about this new feature in our upcoming newsletter.

Thanks,
Rob.

The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.

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