Fencing in Your Assets
As a landscaping company, you know without a doubt that your equipment plays an important role in the success of your business. You have invested a lot of money in your supplies — not to mention how much you have invested in running your business.
And when the cost of your equipment reaches well into the tens of thousands, making sure your equipment is accounted for and working properly at the end of the day should be a top priority among your crew. But that isn’t always the case.
While your crew is responsible for making sure that each piece of equipment gets loaded back onto the truck, what happens if those tools are misplaced — or worse, if these assets are stolen? And if your vehicle is stolen, you have lost thousands of dollars of landscaping supplies. What would it mean to you if you could recover your lost or stolen assets?
GPS fleet tracking technology can help you protect your assets from theft while reducing your overhead costs — fuel, maintenance, labor and insurance. Not only that, it can help you manage your business efficiently, saving you valuable time and money. Before we dig into fleet tracking technology, let’s look at some of the challenges landscaping companies face with their fleet operations.
What would it mean to you if you could recover your lost or stolen assets?
A Growing Concern—Daily Business Challenges
In addition to handling high volume calls and seasonal changes, you are still presented with the daily challenges of running a business. As mentioned earlier, your equipment plays an important role in the success of your business. Without your equipment, how can you get the job done? Let’s first take a look at protecting your assets.
Your assets are your business—especially in the landscaping industry. And if the majority of your investments are in your fleet and equipment, dealing with missing equipment or the theft of a service truck will ultimately hurt your bottom line. And while you may be covered under your insurance, there are still deductibles to pay and more importantly, assets to replace.
That’s not even taking into account your other costs. Though necessary to your business, your landscaping supplies and their high costs can make managing your overall costs difficult. Addressing your daily overhead expenses—fuel, maintenance, labor and insurance—is a crucial part of running a profitable business. But if you’re not balancing your costs, how can you increase your business’ bottom line?
As you look to positively impact your expenses, improving your fleet operations is a top priority. Unsafe driving behavior like speeding or an accident is a sure way to increase your insurance costs. And while riding shot gun with your drivers would appear to be an easy solution, it’s impractical. When you can’t monitor what is going on out in the field, it’s difficult to target your speeding offenders or address issues, including accident claims.
Another issue on the minds of business owners and managers is employee activity. With your crew spread out in different directions, it can be tough to locate their position. And while most of your staff are professionals, how do you know they aren’t taking a long lunch or running errands instead of heading to a job?
Lastly, as a landscaping business, your goal is to provide and maintain healthy landscapes. While your business focuses on having a green thumb, how environmentally friendly are your business processes? You’re in the landscaping industry to help improve, maintain and provide healthy lawn care. At the same time, a business that reduces vehicle emissions and follows greener business practices is more likely to keep existing customers and win new contracts than a business that doesn’t.
These daily challenges just trim the surface of what it takes to manage a landscaping services company. Additional costs like insurance and driver liability claims add more complications. But there is a solution to the problems addressed above: a fleet tracking solution.
Addressing your daily overhead expenses—fuel, maintenance, labor and insurance—is a crucial part of running a profitable business.
How a Fleet Tracking Solution Can Benefit Your Business
A GPS fleet tracking solution can give you the tools needed to resolve the issues stated above that interfere with the success of your landscaping business. GPS vehicle tracking technology allows you to manage your fleet operations efficiently so that you can achieve measureable results. With the ability to monitor your fleet 24/7, you can easily locate the areas of your fleet operations that need improvement.
Protecting your service vehicles as well as your trailers and the equipment on them can be challenging — especially when they are scattered across your coverage areas. With GPS fleet tracking, you can monitor your assets and gain insight into their location and usage.
That’s not all. In the event that your service vehicle or equipment is stolen, you can track and recover your assets, saving you thousands of dollars and lost productivity. One fleet tracking client was able to recover more than $400,000 in assets because they could track where its vehicles were stolen.
That brings us to our second issue: overhead costs. One of the most important issues concerning business owners and managers today is how to manage both equipment and overhead expenses. Fleet tracking gives you the ability to manage your costs that can seem uncontrollable.
With features like reporting and alerts, you can reduce your fuel costs and consumption significantly by monitoring vehicle idle times and identifying careless drivers. In fact, one fleet tracking customer lowered their fuel costs fleet-wide by 20 percent. GPS vehicle tracking also gives you the tools to manage your vehicle maintenance schedules, prolonging your vehicles life and saving you trips to the mechanic.
A growing trend among landscaping businesses is the focus on greener business practices. Did you know that the less you idle and release carbon emissions into the environment, the greener your business can be? In fact, many organizations that practice greener business processes, win new business because they can provide a sustainability statement.
The success stories that surround the landscaping industry are astounding. One business was able to recover $30,000 in stolen assets on more than one occasion. In addition to recovering their assets, they were able to decrease fuel costs through reduced idle times as well as decrease driver speeding by 92 percent.
An important, yet overlooked, benefit of a GPS fleet tracking solution is improving driver safety. With fleet tracking technology, you can weed out your stubborn drivers while rewarding your top performers by monitoring driver behavior. You can also keep your drivers safe with dispatching functionality. With turn-by-turn directions, you eliminate your driver’s chance of getting lost. Moreover, if an emergency situation were to arise, your drivers have a direct way to get into contact with the office or dispatcher. This is exceptionally important with the recent DOT ruling banning cell phone use in commercial vehicles.
Additionally, many businesses that utilize a fleet tracking solution receive discounts on their insurance premiums, saving significantly on overhead expenses. Fleet tracking technology gives you the information to fight false claims and in return lower your liability.
When it comes to your employees, you trust that during business hours they are out in the field doing their job. With GPS fleet tracking technology, you can monitor employee activity to make sure all jobs are completed each day. By validating your employees’ hours, you can gain accurate labor costs while lowering overhead expenses. Dealing with a customer dispute? Easily review your fleet tracking data to verify job completion and turn any dispute into an open-and-shut case.
These are just a few of the benefits a fleet tracking solution can provide to your organization. By automating your business processes, you have the ability to address the issues mentioned in this paper efficiently. With daily, weekly or monthly reporting, you can manage your business whether you are out in the field or in the office. You can measure your fleet operations to identify unnecessary expenses and problem areas so that you can take a proactive approach to optimizing your fleet.
One business was able to recover $30,000 in stolen assets on more than one occasion. In addition to recovering their assets, they were able to decrease fuel costs through reduced idle times as well as decrease driver speeding by 92 percent.
NexTraq – The Value Leader
Because the NexTraq platform is a cloud-based solution, there is no software to purchase or to install. It’s as easy as logging into our platform from any web-enabled device whether it’s a PC, iPad, PDA or smartphone. With our Fleet Metrics application, you can view your entire fleet as a whole or focus on a single driver to see where they are and what they are doing. Additionally, you can review key data on every vehicle, including vehicle start and stops, idling times, driver speed and more. Not only that, with NexTraq’s Asset Tracker line, you can keep track of your high-value equipment with customized updates and alerts.
With our Fleet Dispatch application, you can gain a clear understanding of where your fleet is and where it is going while improving driver communication and lowering costs. Use Fleet Dispatch to provide your drivers with voice-guided, turn-by-turn directions, daily itineraries, status updates and more.
With NexTraq’s Fleet Tracking platform and more than 20 reports and 17 real-time alerts, you can measure every aspect of your business, helping you identify which areas of your operations need improvement, including fuel usage and vehicle maintenance.
Because the NexTraq platform is a cloud-based solution, there is no software to purchase or to install.