9 Secrets to Reducing your Fleet Expenses
As a fleet owner, your day-to-day costs can quickly add up. What you don’t know is there are further hidden, expensive...
Read moreBest Electrical, based in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, is a family-run electrical contractor servicing a large area of the UK, with London at its centre. Best Electrical offers a wide variety of electrical services from installation, maintenance and compliance for both commercial and residential clients.
The company prides itself on providing 24-hour, 365-day emergency maintenance service for all its clients. However, providing this service also means that the company allows its drivers to take their vehicles home.
Robert Ranson, Director of Operations for Best Electrical, realised that in order to keep providing this quality service to his clients, he needed to be sure his drivers were as productive as possible.
He decided that a GPS Tracking System was the solution to his problem.
Increasing Productivity and Reducing Personal Use of Vehicles
According to Mr. Ranson, Best Electrical mainly services maintenance and emergency calls. Technicians are available 24/7, which requires that his engineers take the company vehicles home. Unfortunately, that meant Mr. Ranson had no idea if the vehicles were being used for unauthorised journeys or if employees were arriving to their first job site on time.
With GPS vehicle tracking, Mr. Ranson can use the Live Fleet feature to monitor the location and status of all eight vehicles in his fleet.
In addition, Vehicle Activity Alerts let Mr. Ranson know if an engineer shows up to their first job on time or if they left their house on time in the morning.
"We have significantly reduced personal use of our vehicles since the drivers know I monitor usage," said Mr. Ranson. "And for my own sanity, I now know that my engineers are where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there."
Since installing truck tracking, Best Electrical has gained an additional £60,000 in revenue due to increased productivity without having to increase their workforce.
"We complete an additional job per day per engineer," said Mr. Ranson. "We know our engineers are doing their jobs and not sitting on the side of the road taking a two-hour break."
Improving Fleet Efficiency
For a company that averages 250 jobs per week with eight vehicles covering such a large geographic area, inefficient dispatching can waste thousands of pounds.
Verizon Connect GPS Tracking includes the Nearest Vehicle Locator to pinpoint the vehicle closest to any job site. With this feature, Best Electrical can respond faster to emergency calls and dispatch the engineer that can get there first.
This not only helps improve response times for clients, but also helps to reduce fuel usage by reducing the number of kilometres each vehicle travels.
"Our fuel costs have gone down dramatically," said Mr. Ranson. "And we now have a much better response time than our competitors."
GPS tracking includes Google Maps API to provide the precise location of every vehicle in any fleet. With the satellite view, dispatchers can provide visual landmarks to drivers to make sure they quickly find their next job location.
"With the Google mapping, I can see right where my engineer is and help him if he gets lost," said Mr. Ranson. "I'll tell them, 'you see that white building right in front of you? That's where you need to be!'"
The Verizon Connect Difference
Before deciding on the GPS Tracking System, Best Electrical compared several different GPS tracking providers. What impressed Mr. Ranson most about Verizon Connect was the flexibility, ease of use and expert customer support.
"With fleet tracking you can literally do as much or as little as you want," said Mr. Ranson. "You can just leave it alone and it works."
GPS Tracking features a simple, intuitive user interface that makes it easy to find the information you need, when you need it. The exclusive Dashboard also gives users the ability to quickly view their entire fleet performance on one simple screen.
"The 'dashboards' on other systems were far too complicated," added Mr. Ranson. "It makes it easy to get the information you need to make good business decisions."
Mr. Ranson also appreciates the unlimited training provided by Verizon Connect. According to Mr. Ranson, no other company he looked at offered extensive, free training on how to effectively use GPS to optimise fleet operations.
"I use the system all day, every day," said Mr. Ranson. "We were so inefficient without tracking. Fleet tracking has become an integral part of our business."
