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By Greg Bartlett

In an interesting twist on the use of GPS vehicle tracking by companies to monitor their fleets of vehicles, one waste company in New Orleans may have saved itself a lot of money in fines by having the devices installed in their trucks.

A television station’s news department contacted the company after being given a tip that an individual had made a video of one of this company’s waste trucks dumping its contents into a storm drain at 2 am on a Sunday morning. The companies owner immediately pulled up the GPS vehicle tracking data for his trucks and found that one of the trucks had been stolen from a locked and gated yard at about 10:20 pm Saturday night, driven to the location where the video was supposedly made, and parked outside the company’s main offices at approximately 11:02 pm the same night.

The company is now offering a $10,000 reward for any information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the individual or individuals responsible for stealing the truck and attempting to set his company up to receive some hefty fines from the city and from the EPA. Only that none of the company’s employees were on duty at the time and the data from the GPS car tracker device were able to save the company this huge amount.

GPS tracking data has been used to save companies money by tracking their fleets for minimizing fuel consumption and for optimum customer service for a while now. Using the data to locate stolen vehicles has been in use even longer. The result of both has been savings for companies on the costs of operating their vehicle fleets in terms of fuel, salaries for drivers, and even insurance premiums. Now it is possible to add proving that the company did not commit a crime, but someone else committed a crime against the company to the list of ways GPS tracking data can save a company money.

GPS tracking technology is used in vehicles for many different purposes. Individuals and businesses are finding that the benefits of having GPS tracking devices in their vehicles far outweigh the costs of acquiring such systems and having them installed. This example just goes to prove that new uses are being found almost every day for the data produced by the use of GPS vehicle tracking.