Have you stopped to calculate the cost of employees using company vehicles for personal needs? Is this prohibited by your corporate policies? Knowing and eliminating this cost by tracking vehicle movements could save tens of thousands of dollars each year, even for a relatively small company. You know that every mile a vehicle is driven costs you money. You might not know who is responsible or how to prove abuse. The good news is that tracking vehicle use can help you end abuse by providing exactly the proof you need.
There are several ways to abuse the privilege of driving literally any kind of company vehicle:
- running personal errands during the workday
- taking a truck home on the weekend to move furniture for an employee’s antiques business
- using the company van to take the youth group to the nearby amusement park
Some of these kinds of things are relatively minor infractions of the rules, but the cost can become significant over time. By simply installing these small GPS devices on the steering columns of the vehicles, you can use your system for tracking vehicle movements to either monitor (live) where each vehicle is, or you can wait for a weekly report from tracking vehicle travel patterns. Your driver can’t argue with a GPS tracking report that proves that the vehicle was at an amusement park all day on the previous Saturday.
What is that weekend antique dealer costing you? If this person takes home a box 20 foot truck every other weekend to deliver and pick up antiques – using company diesel fuel – and clocks 425 miles each of these weekends, the fuel cost is significant. By assuming the truck gets 10 miles to the gallon and fuel costs $3.00 per gallon, the cost for this single vehicle comes to $3,315 per year. With that amount of money, you could install GPS devices for tracking vehicle travel in 9 vehicles and pay for the tracking services for a full year.
By the time you add up the pro rated costs for everything else, you could be saving a bundle by tracking vehicle use. Take a few minutes to figure it out. Gather all of the costs on a ‘per vehicle’ and a per mile basis: fuel, oil, insurance, maintenance, parts, wear and tear, tires, license tags, taxes and the risks of having the vehicle on the road.
When you add up all of the costs for unauthorized use of all vehicles in your fleet you might be surprised by how widespread the problem actually is. When the reports from tracking vehicle movement are compiled, you would have a good bit of evidence for tighter enforcement of the rules governing use of corporate vehicles. You might also discover that you would be able to save enough money to pay for gps devices for every vehicle and for monitoring in less than 90 days. You could end up getting a raise, the reports from tracking vehicle travel patterns would make your work easier and faster, and the company could do something important with the money you save.
Finally, consider that I’ve only asked you to think about the cost of unauthorized use of company vehicles and the cost savings you could achieve by tracking vehicle use. Now think about the money you could save if you could prove that some of your drivers were intentionally taking longer routes from one place to the next, or that by tracking vehicle movement you could prove that some of your drivers are sitting somewhere killing time. The more you think about the value of tracking vehicle movement, the greater the potential savings you can achieve for your company.
To learn more about the benefits oftracking vehiclebehavior, get the white paper “7 Ways Your Company Can Save Thousands of Dollars With GPS Fleet Tracking.” Many companies have boosted their revenue and decreased their costs by installing GPS vehicle tracking for their fleet. To calculate the ROI for your company, see the GPS vehicle ROI calculator.