Virtually all the commercial pavement sweeping business owners we talk with these days are using high-tech GPS-based vehicle function tracking with external cameras. Many use internal cab cameras as well. Today’s most advanced systems of this kind perform a stunning array of movement tracking, equipment gauging, and driver behavior monitoring. These systems are known to be spectacular game-changers for safety, supervision, efficiency, fuel savings, route scheduling, payroll timekeeping. But, they do so much more…
Real-Time Vehicle and Driver Performance Tracking
The current generation of GPS field services tracking systems monitor a driver’s activity and highlight anomalous events, like speeding, rapid acceleration, abrupt braking, running the engine without the driver’s seat belt on, and others. The system can generate a daily report with a safety performance score for the driver along with a summary of driving behaviors and safety alerts identified during the work shift.
The latest GPS technologies further track the use of equipment and other employee activities in and outside the vehicle. Such asset tracking enables business managers to increase the efficiency of the company’s service delivery and cost controls. Monitoring and data recording systems include tracking of:
- Vehicle movement and location
- Vehicle speed and handling
- Driver safety reports
- Driver work behavior reports
- Driver time used for activities in the vehicle
- Driver time used for activities outside the vehicle
- Numbers and locations of non-work-related stops
- On-the-job stops
- Job completion
- Vehicle chassis alerts
- Real-time observation through forward and backward cameras
GPS real-time performance tracking enables ideal management of service delivery and assets in the field to ensure that pavement sweeping business owners can fully understand what they need for business growth.
What Else Can State-of-the-Art GPS Systems Do?
There is so much critical information generated by the most advanced commercial GPS tracking systems today. Using such powerful platforms only for vehicle tracking or correcting blatant issues misses the larger opportunity to leverage the wealth of business intelligence that can be collected from the software for data analysis.
Such an abundant knowledge resource can make a very big difference in creating more realistic income projections, budgets, marketing allocations, and other financial estimates for strategic planning.
Advanced Software Platform Integrations
GPS tracking systems can make modern pavement sweeping businesses more profitable. Here are some more good reasons why savvy business owners throughout the industry are relying on this technology. They’re learning more every day about just how far its capabilities can extend to make a business more transparent and profitability more manageable. With the precise data yielded through real-time tracking, managers can:
- design routes that are more cost-effective.
- manage service delivery more efficiently.
- generate invoices more accurately.
- plan driver training more effectively.
- create well-grounded strategic growth plans.
Capabilities vary from one GPS field management system to another. There are fully web-based systems with every feature mentioned here and others with designs that are compatible with components to be added externally. Many can be integrated with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or complete Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms.
ERP Functionality
Every 21st century business needs comprehensive management systems technology that the company won’t soon outgrow. Implementing a GPS field operations tracking system that integrates with your ERP platform empowers you to track equipment, develop routes, manage workers’ time, organize account services, generate accurate invoices, and execute timely billing. With such expansive functionality, your advanced business GPS tracking system can serve as your highest-value resource for day-to-day management and long-term strategic planning.
CRM Functionality
Customer Relationship Management tasks are automatically managed with today’s software. Having CRM software integrated with the latest GPS technology forms a dynamic system of immensely powerful service platforms. It merges the customer communications database with:
- real-time service vehicle information.
- up-to-the-minute account service instructions.
- audible navigation.
- customer account file access (contract importing, etc.).
- service purchase orders.
- photo sharing.
Routing and Scheduling
Having an integrated GPS-based work center facilitates job planning per geo-fenced boundary controls and driver instructions communicated by hand-held devices. This supremely convenient dispatching model helps field services employees improve communications clarity, performance consistency, overall efficiency, and the customer experience.
Service Billing Reports
Auto-generated billing calculations help minimize human errors in the invoicing process. Networked GPS work systems can post job start and stop times, service descriptions, and other key information. They can then create editable reports of service fees based on the flat or hourly rates you set.
Such programs make it easy to review and edit customer invoices as needed. Just ensuring that every completed job is actually invoiced is a major advantage for a sweeping business. Accounting information from the field GPS business system exports directly to QuickBooks. Eliminating manual paper invoicing processes upgrades customer billing and payroll processing efficiency.
Overall Business Performance Data Generation
The incomparable resource for information about your business’s performance over the past quarter, month, week, day, hour, and minute yields extraordinary management power. As you gain proficiency with GPS tracking tools, you can make real-time corrections of issues as they arise, foresee and preemptively solve problems, reduce labor costs, fuel costs, and excessive equipment wear and tear, and gather critical intel for budgeting and growth planning.
You can further track your general business performance with a series of clicks to create information-rich reports on every involved function contributing to your ROI in service delivery. All of your key data is auto-generated and accessible in one place.
So you can rapidly populate reports and hand out ideally informed and timely directives to optimize your operations. That means more time to focus on growing your company and greater confidence in your maximum profit potential.
KPIs Informed by GPS Data
Your Key Performance Metrics fed by GPS tracking information reveal your business’s progress in the light of that interpreted data. For example:
Operating Cost
Never has calculating daily incremental costs of doing business been more convenient, accurate, or faster than now made possible through advanced GPS tracking software. The power to generate real-time calculations of costs as they are incurred is as efficient as controlling costs can ever get. Automatically producing comprehensive daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly totals and tracking those metrics is invaluable for budget and growth management.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Knowing this fascinating and essential ratio gives business owners the great advantage of a well-rounded perspective on the actual financial value of each customer account. This information can be applied to decision-making to streamline operations, reduce costs, and increase profit margins, as necessary. It also helps identify needs for increased customer engagement and emphasis on the quality of customer experience. Of course, directing resources to increasing the average CLV of your revenue base is normally a much smaller investment risk than relying on external marketing.
Return on Investment (ROI)
The GPS performance tracking and business management system will quickly prove its value. Arguably, its overarching benefit is enabling business managers to understand current field assets and customer accounts in terms of their individual ROI. Those metrics are verifications that the revenue generated in relation to those is worth the company’s investment in them and that it makes sense to keep them on a route.
Conclusion
Advanced GPS performance tracking data can drive your entire business management system with all the necessary and optional reports for daily operations analysis and long-term planning. That’s why most businesses featuring service vehicles now use these technologies to help upgrade the efficiency, quality, and profitability of their fleet operations. If you already have this technology in place, the initiative now recommended is to learn about more of the things it can do for you.
At minimum, a new GPS tracking and field services management software package should feature easy route scheduling, customizable performance reporting, and real-time billing generation. The system should be able to produce an electronic signature for proper documentation.
However, before investing in a GPS tracking service for your commercial pavement sweeping business, research to find the best value in a system that can do more than those modern basics. Invest for the future by selecting a system that can be integrated with a modern CRM or full ERP platform. Trying to compete in the industry over the next decade using manual systems for all of the above-mentioned functions is, frankly, probably an untenable risk.
Working with a modern system is essential for performing at the efficiency level of your competitors now and over the coming years. That’s what it takes to provide the most practical management of the employee experience, the customer experience, your ROI, and future planning for a company using some of the world’s most expensive field service equipment.