5 Benefits of GPS Fleet Tracking Rastrac Team | Dec 10, 2015 8:00:00 AM

For almost any organization with a fleet of vehicles, from shipping companies, to school districts, to law enforcement, to oil & gas companies, being able to accurately track the location of individual vehicles is a must-have capability.

The benefits of GPS Fleet Tracking are numerous, making this technology useful for a number of industries.

What are these benefits?

Here’s a short list:

1: Theft Prevention and Improved Asset Recovery

When a vehicle gets stolen from your fleet, the impact of such an event can be huge, whether your fleet consists of one vehicle or over a hundred.

Without the ability to track the location of the vehicles in your fleet, you’re relying on blind luck that someone will:

1. See the stolen asset;
2. Make a report; and
3. Recover the asset before it’s irrevocably lost or damaged.

With GPS tracking, once a vehicle is reported stolen, you can get an almost-instant update on the vehicle’s location and use that info to recover the vehicle quickly. With some GPS tracking systems, you can even remotely disable the vehicle’s starter. This can severely reduce your costs for new equipment.

In fact, merely knowing that your vehicles are GPS-protected can discourage would-be thieves from even making the attempt, as the risk of getting caught is massively increased.

2: Eliminating Wasteful Activity

Making sure that drivers are using company vehicles in an appropriate manner is an enormous concern for fleet managers in both public and private sectors.

Unauthorized side trips not only consume fuel and waste time, they add wear and tear to vehicles while increasing the risk of the vehicle being damaged or stolen. Using GPS tracking data allows you to see exactly where your vehicles are and where they’ve been. This, in turn, gives you the ability to tell if drivers are sticking to the schedule, or if they’re wasting time and resources.

Knowing that you’re tracking the location of your fleet vehicles helps to keep drivers on-task when on the job.

3: Improved Preventative Maintenance Scheduling

Keeping a fleet of vehicles running at peak efficiency is no small task. Let an asset go too long without critical services, and you run the risk of it breaking down and requiring highly expensive repairs. On the other hand, putting a vehicle in for service too frequently can cost you more money than you really need to spend on maintenance.

Having GPS tracking data not only gives the mileage a specific vehicle has driven, it gives you the amount of time the engine has been running. You can even get engine performance data to help identify the need for preventative maintenance.

By using this feature of a GPS tracking system, you can optimize your maintenance schedules for maximum uptime and minimum waste.

4: Improved Dispatch Control

When you’re responding to a service call or an emergency, it’s important to minimize the time the caller has to wait for help.

Using GPS data, you can access maps with the locations of all your drivers, and dispatch the closest vehicle to make the response with ease. This is faster and more reliable than waiting for individual drivers to confirm which one of them is the closest.

For some services, this means quicker service and improved customer satisfaction. For law enforcement and emergency response agencies, this can save lives.

5: Tracking from Anywhere You Have Internet Access

Some GPS tracking systems, such as RASTRAC’s system, can allow you to turn even your mobile devices into a portal for checking fleet activity. The PocketRASTRAC app allows you to log into your tracking portal to see where your fleet vehicles are when you’re on the go. All you need is an Android device or an iPhone/iPad with the app and internet access.

PocketRASTRAC supports secure, 2-way messaging so that you can communicate with employees and receive status updates on the fly. You can even program the app to only report during work hours, helping you avoid “spying” on your employees when they’re off the clock, if necessary.

With tracking access on your mobile devices, you’re never out of the loop.

These are just a few of the major benefits that using GPS fleet tracking can provide to fleet managers. Get peace of mind and greater fleet control with a reliable, customizable GPS fleet tracking solution today.