One Fleet Manager to Another: Why I Will Never Run My Fleet Without a GPS Tracking System

Posted on the 23 January 2012 by Fleetmatics @fleetmatics

More often than not, once a Fleet Manager or Business Owner implements a GPS tracking system, they wonder how they ever ran their fleet and business without it. The following is one of those instances, in the words of one Fleet Manager to another…

“We implemented a GPS tracking system for the same reason many other companies do, to keep a close eye on our fleet. What I didn’t realize was how crucial gps vehicle tracking would become to running our business.

“The process we quickly developed with our GPS tracking system is to run a side-by-side comparison of the daily stop report with our time stamped fuel statement. During our routine audit of fuel purchases, we noticed a couple of charges that made no sense. We keep a fuel card at a gas station nearest our office, and the technicians fuel up as they come and go from the office.  During the audit, we noticed that several vehicle numbers were used on different days, within a general time frame, but those vehicles were never in the area.  We spoke to the gas station manager and asked him to please always confirm that a company vehicle was at a pump before running the card. The next statement reflected a drastic increase of the occurrences, exceeding $1000!

“After compiling the list of dates and times, we then approached the gas station manager again, expecting to find out that a current employee of ours was bringing in personal vehicles for fuel and car washes, or that a gas station employee was selling our gas to their friends.  The manager was very cooperative and used the time stamps from our fuel statement to pull a couple of the security videos.  To our dismay, we found out that a recently terminated employee, who knew the procedures and company vehicle numbers, was coming in 2-3 times per week and filling up his vehicles and getting car washes!

“If it wasn’t for our GPS tracking system’s easy to run and extremely accurate Stop Time Reports, we never would have been able to run this audit and catch the thief, and who knows how many others would have gotten away with this for a very long time! For this reason alone, besides the several other benefits we have experienced with our gps tracking system, I will never go back to running my fleet without gps vehicle tracking installed.