Pro Installer March 2015 - Issue 24 | Page 40

40 MARCH 2015 PRO INSTALLER VEHICLE TRACKING www.proinstaller.co.uk A Real Vehicle Cost Saving A growing number of organisations of all sizes, from both the private and public sectors, are turning to vehicle tracking to improve the management of their fleet and make vital cuts. With affordable flexible direct rental options, and minimal initial investment, it is a great way of making significant savings and improving your service, whilst keeping on top of administrative and legal duties. Working with your team to improve their driving style will also lower the risk of damaging goods being transported, or guarantee an all-round better customer experience when carrying passengers. Vehicle tracking company Quartix discusses the benefits of this growing technology. Helping with administration and legal obligations Cutting down on fuel and maintenance costs Installing a tracking system in your vehicles will enable you to gain more control over your fleet and particularly growing fuel costs. With the real-time tracking, you are able to tell at any time if one of your vehicles is idling, and the daily and weekly reports will give you all idling details and totals for each vehicle. Cutting down on this practice could mean valuable savings on the fuel front, as well as reducing wear and tear. The Quartix system also shows a replay of every trip taken by each vehicle, all displayed on Google Maps, and allows you to search for the closest vehicle to an address in real-time, which will help you improve routing and dispatching. The Daily Route Maps enable you to analyse the routes taken and see how you could cut down on mileage, whilst the Real-Time Address Search means you can quickly send the closest or most appropriate vehicle to a last minute job, or advise a driver who is lost. One of the main features to help you reduce fuel consumption however is Quartix’s Driving-Style Monitoring suite. The module monitors and reports on harsh acceleration, braking and speeding, giving you the ability to make substantial fuel savings (typically up to 15%) whilst dramatically improving the safety of your drivers and customers. Harsh braking not Improving your service ‘managers are now seeing monitoring good driving as a top priority’ only wastes fuel and increases servicing costs (tyres, brakes etc) but is also known to be a driving style which leads to an increased risk of accidents, which is why managers are now seeing monitoring good driving as a top priority. To encourage their drivers to adopt a more economical and safer driving style, managers have found that using carrots, not sticks, often works best: giving incentive to better drivers and rewarding top performers, who are easily identifiable thanks to league tables on the Quartix system, has shown to be one of the most effective ways. Without singling any drivers out, another method is to look at the Driving scoring average across the fleet and working with the team to increase it. As well as directly saving money, using vehicle tracking can help you improve your customer service. With the live data updated every minute, you can advise a customer who calls in of the exact location of your vehicle and when it will reach them, or if a driver is running late. Having all the data at hand is also valuable when solving customer disputes: you will be able to prove if your employee did call at an address, or how long it took to carry out a job, or that a driver left a pickup point on time, for example. The extended reports available through vehicle tracking systems also help you keep on top of administrative duties, and be assured that you are complying with your duty of care obligations. With fleet operators’ vehicles sometimes wrongly blamed for causing damage or accidents, you will have access to the exact data to prove your case. In the unfortunate event of one of your vehicles being involved in an accident, the crash data feature from Quartix will provide you with a “replay” of the few seconds just before and after the collision. By checking the timesheets directly on the system, you can also monitor your drivers’ hours and verify payroll. Maintenance alerts are also configurable, to remind you of MOT dates, insurance renewals or tyre check-ups, for example. Finally, knowing the location of your vehicle at any time means you can locate and hope to recover a stolen vehicle much quicker. The Quartix system comes with a free mobile app which enables users to access the core features of the system whilst on the move. The app can be used by all Quartix customers on Apple, Android and Windows devices. Visit www.quartix.net or call our friendly team today on 0870 013 6663 for more information, an online demo or a tailored quote