More than just maps

It’s the middle of the night and the cellphone on your bedside table lights up like a Christmas tree. The GPS system you’ve recently installed to track your fleet of trucks has just sent you a text message. One of your service vehicles is moving out of the company yard, and it’s 3 a.m. You hop out of bed, log onto your computer and confirm that, yup, you’ve got a truck on the move.

You call the police and give them turn-by-turn directions to locate your vehicle. The boys in blue pull the truck over at a busy intersection and apprehend the thief. You’ve just recovered a heavy duty Ford pickup truck, trailer, and $30,000 worth of landscape equipment. And it all happened because your GPS system knows you don’t cut grass in the dark.

Sound like science fiction? It’s not.

Seven years ago, one of the managers at Acres Group, a landscaping firm based in Wauconda, Ill., got a text message that alerted him to a vehicle theft as it was happening. He called the police and they nabbed the bad guys. Jeff Dumas, vice president of Acres Group, says before installing the system, the company had lost about $100,000 in vehicles and equipment to theft at its three Chicago-area locations. The thefts prompted them to install a company-wide GPS tracking system in the company’s more than 300 vehicles. Approximately four months later, the late night text message arrived. After the arrest, “the thefts stopped,” Dumas says. “We’ve had nothing like that since.”
 

Riding shotgun.

Tracking vehicle movements outside of business hours is just one of the many features available on GPS fleet tracking systems. Caretaker Landscape and Tree Management, based in Gilbert, Ariz., installed GPS tracking in its service vehicles five years ago. Matt White, president and CEO, says his company uses the GPS system software to track driver habits and vehicle data, from vehicle acceleration to hard braking, vehicle speed, sharp turns, idle time, routes and even vehicle service needs.

White says one feature he relies on is the weekly “dashboard” updates the system provides. Instead of having to sift through the vast amount of data collected, the GPS software pulls out the most critical data, providing a snapshot of the company’s fleet performance.

Dumas says Acres Group’s operations managers use the data collected by the system as tools to help manage their crews. Managers can track when a truck idles too long or wastes fuel, or when a driver exceeds maximum set driving speeds. This information is used to initiate conversations with employees to help them change their behavior. “Out of 120 vehicles, we had eight or 10 that would speed,” Dumas says. After managers let the crews know they were being monitored, Dumas says, speeding incidences were reduced to just one a week.

Dumas recommends rolling out functionality of the system slowly so employees are not overwhelmed by too many bells and whistles when they are training to use it.
 

Phone-free call.

Neither Acres Group nor Caretaker Landscape uses the software to schedule vehicle routing for regular landscape routes. However, as Acres Group is the eighth largest snow removal company in the United States, Dumas says the routing features become critical during snow removal season.

When a truck breaks down, as is fairly common during snowstorms, Dumas says the driver can call in and the system knows exactly where he is. They can then print out a map or dispatch a map to the GPS on the dash of the repair service vehicle.

Many of Acres Group’s snow removal customers are the managers of townhome communities and banks that need to have their parking lots cleared before morning so their residents and customers can get in and out. During snowstorms, Dumas says customers anxiously call to know when the snowplows will arrive at their property.

If a customer calls the company, the GPS tracking system allows staffers to locate vehicles and let them know a snowplow driver is on his way.

“We don’t want the guys using their cellphones while they’re driving,” Dumas says. “We can get the information without calling the guy while he’s driving, so he doesn’t have to find a place to pull over to call us back. Safety wise, it’s been great.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Mount Vernon, Wash.