 |
GPS: The Great Equalizer |
||||||
Global Positioning System (GPS) is a technology that allows you to determine the position of something on the earth with two numbers, a latitude and longitude. A sister technology is AVL or Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) and soon to come (Automatic Cell Phone Locator or (ACL). So what does this all mean to your business?
Think of it on the same level as your telephone, a simple device but one that you can never imagine being without. Right now, each of your businesses includes a person who knows your geographic area like the back of their hand. This single person is also the single point that all your business is controlled by. Just walk into any company and listen to the conversation and in a few minutes you can identify who that person is.
GPS is the great equalizer, a tool that makes every person capable of knowing where the customer is located, see the surrounding streets and roads, and be able to know, yes know, how long it will take the driver to reach the location or which stop should be first or last.
How do you bring this new tool into your business? Like any tool, it has limits and comes in different sizes, like shovels - small medium and backhoe. To start small buy Delorme mapping ($40.00) and any of the GPS hand-helds by Magellan, (Magellans run from $80.00 to a Gold model for about $300.00 that allows you to store and recall information stop-by-stop). This will allow you to get a feeling for the limitations of the mapping and tips and tricks in reading and writing down the latitude and longitude (the two numbers) that pinpoint a location. If you want one step up on mapping, try MapPoint from Microsoft ($400-$500) which runs on the PC and works with Magellan.
The next step up is Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL). This allows you to sit at you computer screen and actually see the path your trucks have taken either at the end of day or during the day (1-3 minute updates). We recommend that you bring this technology in as an operational aid to your office staff, so that everyone in your office knows where the trucks are and can use that information to help manage work and customer calls. It is nice when a customer calls about service and you look up on the computer and can see the service truck is pulling into your customer location and can tell the customer to look out the window… talk about service! Yes, there will be many new issues that this tool will bring up, like the drivers meeting to have coffee and breakfast after they leave the office or misuse of vehicle, speeding, excessive idling, etc., or out-right dishonesty. This tool allows you to know what the driver knows. If properly used, you can profit by significant productivity gains and an improved labor pool because now a driver does not need back of the hand knowledge of the area to be productive.
There are many vendors that provide AVL services; some of the leaders are @Road, FleetBoss and InSight. Expect to pay $600 to $1500 one-time capital costs per vehicle and from $1.00/day to $3.00/day for monitoring and tracking services.
Both GPS and AVL are add-on tools to your customer records management tools, the software you use to record customer name, address and to invoice for services provided. The next level is to combine these tools so that when you first enter the customer address you can get the GPS location with the customer on the phone and know the correct service route or service date to promise to the customer, just like FedEx or UPS or any of the thousands of companies that manage fleets.
|
|||||||
