A basic fleet management system used to mean simply tracking where the vehicles in your fleet were using things like GPS Tracking. But today it should be so much more. Still many if not most of the fleet management systems on the market today still only track where your vehicles are.
What more can a fleet management system do?
For many if not most businesses, particularly in field service industries knowing where your vehicles are is important, but there is so much more that would be much more practical. Some of the things a modern complete fleet management system can do are:
- Show on a map the current/most recent locations of all vehicles
- Show details of where they have travelled
- Know where they are scheduled to be later today or later this week
- Know how each is, or will be, from an appointment being scheduled with a customer on the phone now
- Daily Mileage of the vehicle
- Maintenance history of the vehicle
Can it do even more?
Absolutely, and a fleet management system often should do more. When managing a field service company there are many other things that would be very useful to be part of the complete system. How about:
- Assign the skills the tech of that truck has so when scheduling an appointment the only recommendations are for the people with the skills needed to do the job
- Inventory of items on the vehicle
- Time spent on a job site
- Ability to have the tech complete a job order/appointment and create an accurate easy to read invoice
Why should it do all this?
Sure it’s great to know that your tech is at a certain location right now, but a when a service call comes in for you to schedule, how much more important is it to also know where all of your trucks are supposed to be in the next few hours or days for already scheduled appointments? Armed with this information you can easily schedule a new customer appointment based upon not who is closest just at this moment but now, later today, tomorrow… Many of your techs may already have a full schedule for the next few hours, but who is going to be near by any time today or even in the next few days. This is valuable information that can save money in fuel and time driving.
Doesn’t it just make sense to see everything about your fleet of vehicles, their history as well as the tech you have driving it with the inventory within it and the work history all in one place rather than in two or three separate systems.
Our Field Service Trakker does all of this and much more. Take a step past a simple GPS Fleet Management System and move to a complete Field Service System with the GPS Fleet Management System built right in.
Sure many basic GPS Fleet Management System advertise they are only about $1 a day, but that’s $30 per month per truck. For a fleet of 10 trucks that’s $3,000 a year and all you know is where your truck is. For a little more Field Service Trakker can tell you this and save you money in fuel costs and wages paid for driving time and even ensure that invoice prices are all calculated properly which often saves our customers far more than the cost of our system.