Handling Everyday Business Problems with and without GPS Tracking Rastrac Team | Jun 9, 2016 10:55:01 AM

GPS tracking systems are a great tool for making life easier for fleet managers. With GPS tracking, many everyday business problems can be solved faster and with less disruption than they could be without GPS.

How much faster and easier?

Let’s do a little roleplay of some everyday problems businesses face, and how these problems are handled with and without GPS tracking:

Driver Gets Lost On Unfamiliar Roads

Here’s a common scenario for transportation companies: a driver tries to take a detour or shortcut in an area they don’t know too well, and gets turned around/lost on backroads. They then call in for guidance back to the proper route.

Without GPS

If the driver doesn’t have a GPS tracking device on the vehicle, you’re relying on the driver to be able to effectively communicate important location data (street name & direction of travel) so that you can check their location relative to where they should be.

You give the driver a set of directions, and hope that they don’t miss a turn and get lost again.

With GPS

With GPS navigation features, your drivers shouldn’t get lost in the first place. However, if your GPS tracking solution doesn’t include a navigation display for the driver to check, guiding them back to the route will still be easier than without GPS.

A GPS tracker can let you ping the vehicle’s current position so that you know exactly where it is, and give the driver turn by turn directions back to their proper route.

Vehicle Breaks Down

Vehicles can break down on the road for any number of reasons. Random mechanical failures or accidents can happen to anyone, even without warning.

Without GPS

Without GPS, it’s up to the driver to call in the breakdown, assuming they’re able to. Once the breakdown is reported, you can then manually check with other drivers to see who’s closest to the other vehicle or its destination to have them pick up the stranded driver and complete the first vehicle’s task, if possible.

Manually calling different drivers to sort out who’s closest can be time consuming. All the while, your stranded driver, and their incomplete tasks, are left waiting. In a worst-case scenario, you might not find out about the breakdown until hours after it happened.

With GPS

Some GPS tracking solutions can provide you with remote diagnostic capabilities so you can get an early warning of when vehicles need preventative maintenance. Some systems can even send out alerts in case of events such as collisions.

With this in place, you’ll get an alert when a vehicle breaks down. This allows you to reach out to the driver and make sure they’re okay, or notify emergency response teams of the vehicle’s precise location.

GPS location trackers in your other fleet vehicles allow you to see which one is closest to the broken down vehicle’s location or destination. This lets you reallocate field resources faster to minimize disruption to your operations.

A Vehicle or Major Piece of Equipment Gets Stolen

Your fleet vehicles, generators, trailers, and other field equipment make tempting targets for thieves.

Without GPS

If you don’t have a GPS tracking system on the stolen asset, the most you can usually do is file a report with the police and hope that they can find it before it gets sold off or scrapped for parts. The longer it takes to recover your stolen property, the less likely it is that you’ll get it back intact.

With GPS

With GPS, you can help police narrow down the search area by giving them the tracking data from your device’s last update. This vastly increases the odds of you getting your stolen property back.

In this way, GPS makes for a powerful antitheft/asset recovery tool.

Simply put, GPS fleet tracking systems make life easier for fleet managers by giving them the information they need to prevent or resolve everyday business problems quickly and easily.

Find out how GPS tracking can improve your operations today!