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By Greg Bartlett

Times are hard. The cost of shipping freight is getting more and more expensive and companies need to streamline their deliveries to avoid unnecessary and often enormously costly mistakes! A shipping manager’s job is often a nightmare of gigantic proportions. Freight goes missing, ends up in the wrong county, or even in the wrong country! Drivers get lost, or go missing, the list is endless.

GPS fleet management systems have proven to be a modern marvel. They work by passively receiving signals from satellites which orbit the Earth. Satellites transmit accurate time signals, determined by atomic clocks situated on board and at the U.S. Naval Observatory. All the satellites are synchronized to transmit at exactly the same times, but because they are at different distances away, the GPS vehicle tracking device on the ground receives the signals at slightly different times. From four such signals, it can work out an accurate three dimensional location.

As a freight business grows, customer service can sometimes suffer. Fleetrover was such a company. Costs were spiraling out of control, but profits were falling because of the number of missing consignments and customer dissatisfaction was growing daily. Instead of going down traditional cost-cutting measures which see decreases in customer incentive schemes and a decline in quality, they decided to invest in a GPS vehicle tracking device for their entire fleet of trucks. After only a few months, they saw savings of seventy thousand dollars.

They were able to streamline deliveries so that two trucks were not making the same journey unnecessarily. They could re-adjust truck stops for their drivers so that the deliveries became more efficient and time and money was saved so business improved dramatically. The drivers were actually happier – or as happy as truckers can get- because they were able to show exactly how much time they spent on the road and were paid for exactly the work they did rather than putting in extra hours for the same pay. And Stan did not get lost so often, so everyone was pleased.

GPS fleet management technology saved this company thousands of dollars which it was able to filter down to its customer in the form of more incentives and lower costs. They were able to show more efficiency and improved their routes so that unnecessary journeys were not made. It even improved their CO2 emissions because of the improvement in their service.