How On Board GPS Systems Can Reduce Your Fleet Maintenance Costs

As a fleet maintenance manager, it's up to you to optimize the use and care of your company's vehicle fleet. As the fleet size grows, it can be an overwhelming prospect if you haven't set up some reliable systems to help you control costs and make the most of the vehicles that you have. One of the best things you can do for your vehicle fleet is to install GPS tracking in each one. Here are a few ways that GPS tracking can help you manage your fleet maintenance costs.

Efficient Route Planning

When you have onboard wireless GPS systems in your fleet vehicles, you can integrate it into a management platform that will help you to optimize routes based on driving habits, traffic patterns and predicted idling.

An onboard GPS system allows you to view real-time locations for all of the vehicles in the fleet at any given time, and it even provides you with current speeds, estimated arrival times and other performance data. You can use the integrated GPS systems to locate the nearest vehicle to an urgent pickup to help save you time and driver investments.

Most GPS systems will even let you pull reporting that provides you with weekly mileage per vehicle and full vehicle histories for each truck in your fleet. With so much information available at your fingertips, you can plan your vehicle usage and maintenance schedule more effectively.

Clear Boundary Establishment

When you are trying to control your fleet maintenance costs, keeping each vehicle in its predetermined operation zone is important. After all, when you assign your fleet vehicles to specific zones, it's typically done so that you don't have vehicles driving repeatedly across the city.

With an onboard GPS system in each vehicle, you can not only clearly define those boundaries, but you'll also be able to spot when a driver violates them. If this is happening repeatedly, you may find that you're seeing additional wear and tear on the vehicle from added miles and potential road hazards.

The more you know about where your vehicles are going, the easier it is to identify the maintenance and care needs for each one. When you're looking to control your maintenance costs, this is a key part of the process.

Identification of Older Vehicles

Since you can track vehicle activity with an integrated GPS and fleet mapping system, you'll also be able to track the usable life based on how many miles each vehicle has recorded. Over time, you'll face increasing maintenance costs as vehicles age. With reporting so easily accessible, you can evaluate the connection between vehicle mileage and maintenance costs to determine at what point your fleet vehicles become more costly to operate and need to be replaced.

As your small business fleet grows and you need options to keep control of it, an onboard GPS system and management software package may be just the thing for you. With the information presented here, you can see the potential savings it may bring for your business.

Share