Time and time again we see that there are 3 big questions our clients should be asking in their business to drive substantial savings.
Once you ask yourself these questions then it becomes straightforward to use the Mobil-i tracking sys-tem to capitalise on the answers.

1. Do you pay your drivers overtime?

If you pay your drivers overtime do you cross refer-ence their time sheets with the vehicle reports showing when their vehicle was in use? Doing this regularly can quickly throw up anomalies where drivers claim hours here and there when their vehicles are actually not in use. We’ve seen cases where drivers have called home during the day, parked up, and then continued working later in the day claiming overtime.

2. Do you reconcile all fuel expenses with mileage driven?

In a busy office with drivers coming in and out, handing in receipts for fuel, it can be very easy not to cross check diesel claims against actual mileage driven. How can you be sure that a diesel receipt handed in by a potentially unscrupulous driver wasn’t in fact for fill-ing up his wife’s car? Using our fuel tracking functionality you can ensure that all fuel used is fully attributa-ble to the vehicles in your fleet and the corresponding mileage driven.

3. Do you allow your drivers to use your vehicles out of hours?

Another area where we can often help uncover hidden costs to your business is by tracking personal mileage that your employees may be doing in company vehi-cles. It doesn’t take much extra mileage across a fleet of 10 or more vehicles to quickly add up to a substan-tial extra fuel bill. Using our system to run out of hours reports can quickly help pinpoint anomalies or patterns of behaviour that you can quickly take corrective measures to prevent.

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought. Honestly answer these 3 questions and see what this means to your business.

We have global strategic partners that work with our sister companies across the world. This month we will take a look at Gruma who recently signed up with us via our Mexican partner SISAT.

Gruma was established in Mexico in 1949 and has grown to be one of the largest producers of corn flour and tortillas in the world. Today the company has around 100 manufacturing plants in multiple countries and employees over 20 thousand people.

Gruma are using both MSTrack Pro and MSTrack Web to track a fleet of 487 delivery vehicles in Mexico. They are also making full use of the open architecture of the database behind MS Track Pro. This has allowed SISAT to do some custom development integrating data from MSTrack Pro with data in Gruma’s IT systems.

Gruma is now able to fully optimise the routes that their delivery drivers take so that they can be as effi-cient as possible.

When you consider that Mexico is approximately 28 times the size of Ireland, in terms of area, it is easy to see how important streamlining drops made by delivery vehicles in this way will lead to substantial cost savings over the entire fleet.

We are really excited to welcome Gruma to our list of global customers and pleased with how the integration work went with our partner. As always these new ex-periences all feed back into improving our product of-fering, both globally, and for our Irish customers.

Over the next few months we plan to share with you some stories from our inter-national sister companies.We have global strategic partners that work with our sister companies across the world. This month we will take a look at Gruma who recently signed up with us via our Mexican partner (SISAT featured on the back of this newsletter).Gruma was established in Mexico in 1949 and has grown to be one of the largest producers of corn flour and tortillas in the world.

Today the company has around 100 manufacturing plants in multiple countries and employees over 20 thousand people.

Gruma are using both MSTrack Pro and MSTrack Web to track a fleet of 487 delivery vehicles in Mexico. They are also making full use of the open architecture of the database behind MS Track Pro. This has allowed SI-SAT to do some custom development integrating data from MSTrack Pro with data in Gruma’s IT systems.Gruma is now able to fully optimise the routes that their delivery drivers take so that they can be as efficient as possible.

When you consider that Mexico is approximately 28 times the size of Ireland, in terms of area, it is easy to see how important streamlining drops made by delivery vehicles in this way will lead to substantial cost savings over the entire fleet.

We are really excited to welcome Gruma to our list of global customers and pleased with how the integration work went with our partner. As always these new ex-periences all feed back into improving our product offering, both globally, and for our Irish customers.

Thelinor Ltd is an aerial installation company and they undertake installations on behalf of UPC.

Based in Newcastle, Co. Dublin they have a fleet of vehicles, 60 of which are tracked by our Mobil-i GPS vehicle tracking system.

Thelinor have been a customer of ours for approximately 1 year having made the transition from a competing tracking system.

Dave Thompson is the Managing Director of Thelinor and he is full of praise for the Mobil-i vehicle tracking system and his team find it much easier to use than their old system. In particular they like the back end integration capabilities that they can get from MS-Track Pro. For example they can extract time tracking data into excel and then develop their own pivot tables to compare with their drivers timesheets. This was something that they found was lacking with the competitors system who only offered web based tracking as opposed to Mobil-i’s full suite of products.

They have already made fuel savings across their entire fleet that has more than covered their investment in the Mobil-i system.

Thelinor are also very positive about the service levels that they have received from Mobil-i and in particular cite prompt turnaround times when it comes to swapping out of tracking units and troubleshooting any system access difficulties that they may encounter.

Dave Thompson highlights one incident which more than paid for the cost of the tracking system. One of their workers was performing an installation and needed to use the lights from his van to light his work area so he left the engine running. While he was working someone jumped into the Van and stole it. Because the van was left with the keys in it the insurance company would not have paid out.

Thelinor employees quickly pinpointed the location of the vehicle on their MS Track Pro desktop tracking system and then notified the Gardai. They were then able to guide the Gardai to the exact spot by using the mobile tracking software on Dave Thompsons smart phone. The Gardai recovered the van, with no damage or theft of equipment from the vehicle, in less than 90 minutes from the time it was stolen.

Over the next months and years there will undoubtedly be a number of inquests and trials as the relevant authorities try to get to the bottom of what happened and who was liable.

Being involved in the tracking industry one of our first thoughts, when all of the accusations of blame were flying, is that it should be pretty easy to pinpoint exactly what happened using data from the ship itself.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all vessels over 299GT carry an AIS transponder on board, which transmits their position, speed and course, among some other static information, such as vessel’s name, dimensions and voyage details. This data can be combined GPS information to plot the exact course the ship took.

Already there are some videos appearing on Youtube that are using data received from AIS capable land stations. These stations have received only some details of the route of Concordia and from there they have interpolated the route of the ship.

It is likely that this kind of tracking data will play an important part in determining the exact route the Costa Concordia in the final minutes of its misfortunate final voyage.

One of our clients, a Dublin based facilities management company, recently got in touch to ask if there was a report they could run that would show the hours and kilometres their vehicles were doing outside business hours.

We showed them how to use our overtime report which details the information that they needed. Now, this client has 50 vehicles in their fleet and having run the overtime report some very significant findings were made that can save them at least €60,000 this year alone.

The overtime report was run to see what vehicle usage there was between the hours of 6pm and 8am and at weekends. These drivers were only supposed to work 9am-5pm so this gave them some leeway.

The findings of the report were that in any given month the fleet was doing 50,000 km out of hours! This represents a significant cost to the business each month in fuel alone. If we assume that each vehicle achieves 14km/litre then 50,000 km means 3500 litres of fuel used a month.

3500 litres at €1.45 per litre = €5075 which equates to €60,000 a year.

When you also consider that these vehicles are on leases that have a specified mileage amount tied to each one, by cutting on average 12,000 km a year of mileage off each vehicle would also have a serious impact on the leasing costs of the vehicles.

In terms of Return on investment that this client has achieved on their tracking solution this one report alone has saved them over three times their annual investment in the system. For their fleet of 50 vehicles the system costs them less than €1500 a month or €18000 a year. Spending €18,000 to save €60,000 I’m sure you agree is well worth it.

So what can you learn from this?

First of all unless you are monitoring all of your vehicle usage you are leaving your business open to extra costs.

Secondly make sure that you are using all of the reports in your tracking system. Sometimes the reports that you are not using can contain a wealth of information that can lead to even greater savings.

To access the reports:

1. Login to MS Track Web and go to the Reports tab.
2. In the ‘select report detail’ section select the name of the report you want and then check the ‘Report by Driver’ option.
3. Now select the drivers you want and press ‘Run’.

Amongst these new driver reports are the following:

Speed Report
This report will allow you to see all of the speeding transgressions that have occurred with your drivers. This shows each location where they were exceeding the speed limit.

Daily Activity Report
This report allows you to determine the total amount of driving done by a driver irrespective of the vehicles that they have driven. The daily activity report is based on ignition on and off.

Daily Movement Report
This details travel start to stop specifically based on movement and not ignition.
Very useful for ensuring that your drivers are not ex-ceeding working time directives when they are driving multiple vehicles in your fleet.

Trip Report
This report has a breakdown of trips and vehicles each driver was driving.
All of these reports have the ability to be exported to MS Excel. This gives you further options to use the data as you see fit.

The following video demonstrates how this can be used:

Improved fleet utilization

The GPS tracking system is not designed to stop drivers from nipping in for a paper or stopping for a coffee on route. It will rather provide fair and accurate record of your work pattern to help the company manage the fleet more efficiently.

Security

Vehicle tracking systems also act as a security device and greatly improve the chances of your vehicle being recovered if it is stolen.

Health and Safety

The new working time directives and related safety at work legislation make employers liable for accidents if a vehicle is not maintained properly. The tracking system can enhance the safety of employees by allowing employers to monitor driving hours and apply working and driving time directives.

Even work distribution

Vehicle tracking systems can help managers and supervisors distribute work more fairly. GPS tracking can answer questions such as who is the closest to a particular job or site.

Efficient route planning

Vehicle tracking systems may help staff plan the best route from a vehicles current location to a site thus assisting the driver. More recently with mapping now including traffic patterns management and supervisory staff can assist with early warning of potential traffic delays and suggest alternate routes.

Instant vehicle location

This is handy in a variety of circumstances, and even more so if broken down. Control room staff are able to instantly determine where the breakdown is and are able to direct recovery companies more accurately.

Proof of service

All too often a customer may query the legitimacy of invoicing or work done. By being able to accurately determine historical locations of vehicles management staff are able to use the vehicles history as a form of
proof of delivery. This can be presented to the customer without the involvement of the driver of the vehicle.

Accurate billing

Tracking systems allow employers to use tracking systems to determine accurately the duration of time a vehicle would have spent at a particular location and hence assist with more accurate billing of the work done at a site. This naturally will lead to less customer queries of invoicing and a more efficient process in collection of monies owing for work done.

Driving standards

Companies that carry the “How’s my driving” stickers often complain that he scheme is unfair and subject to general public perception of good or bad driving. A vehicle tracking system can allow an employer to refer to historical tracking records to determine an unbiased and fair clarification on any complaints about driving standards.

In past articles we have looked at how our tracking software and solutions have been instrumental in detecting and catching criminals. Well now it seems that the criminals have copped onto the benefits of tracking technology.

A recent article in the Houston Chronicle highlighted the fact that organised crime gangs, in particular drug traffickers, are using GPS vehicle tracking for automobile tracking to track cars that are involved in transporting illicit goods.

“There is no honour among thieves and even less trust,” said Jeffrey Scott, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “This kind of tracking device is a way for bad guys who don’t trust each other being able to work together.”

Drug enforcement agents are finding examples of drug shipments are being tracked from Latin America all the way to their destinations in the United States.

The criminals are catching on to the benefits of GPS vehicle tracking and are using some of the advanced features that have benefited our clients over the past years. These include the ability of the criminals to set up alerts, for example when drivers deviate from a predetermined route, then a text message is sent to the drug boss.

The article mentions one case where a driver was caught with a vehicle load of drugs and he tried to bargain with the law enforcement agents and help them catch the rest of the gang. However things didn’t work out for him as his gang mates were forewarned as they had been able to see that the vehicle had been stopped too close to a police station. This put an end to his hopes of double crossing his fellow criminals.

It goes without saying that Mobil-i would never knowingly supply criminals with their tracking solutions, and this is one segment of the market that we are not interested in pursuing!

If you need advice on how to solve your tracking requirement get in touch with GLT – our cooperative, partnering approach, backed by thorough product knowledge, could save you hours of costly research and development.

We are now delighted to be supporting the CalAmp range of Fleet & Tracking devices, which we firmly believe to be unparalleled in this Industry in their range of capabilities, applications and interfaces.

We can also help you with your Personal Tracking / Lone Worker applications with our new SOLUS GPS mobile phone device.