A few years ago I owned a small route service company, Nature Scent Environmental Services, each day my employees would come into the warehouse get their route for the day and load up their business trucks. Then they would set out to take care of our customers. We had done things like this for years, and it seemed to work well. One morning one of our employees was in an accident on his way to the office. I told him to take care of himself and that I would jump in the truck and care for his customers exposing a weakness in our model that I hadn’t realized existed.
You see the company had been growing rapidly since our inception, it had started out as just my wife and me, but due to our success, we had been adding customers and employees. My employees were loyal and hardworking, and almost never took sick days. This day as I was filling in for my employee, I realized that we had grown to the point that I know longer knew where all of our customers where. This success was a good thing, but as I struggled to find customer locations, I knew this was a weak point that had to be addressed.
I decided that we needed a GPS tracking solution, but those were the early days of the internet and tech as we know it today. Mobile data networks barely existed, and AVL was prohibitively expensive, so I had our system built. It was a simple system we couldn’t see anything live it would only update over wifi when the trucks pulled back into the warehouse at the end of each day. Our goal was not to catch employees doing anything wrong; I had good employees. I just needed to make sure if someone called in sick or quit that we knew where all of their stops were and could easily fill their absence.
Free white paper on improvements to driver safety with in-vehicle GPS.
What I learned from this shocked me! Sure I could now see our customers locations, and that was invaluable, but the back and forth driving to see customers looked like a preschooler scribbling on a map. We optimized the routes our employees were driving and saw an immediate bump in the number of customers each employee could see by 30%. We were getting ready to hire another employee to keep up with demand, but with this new found efficiency we didn’t have to. Not only that but we were able to grow considerably more again without adding the expense of another salary, truck, fuel and everything else it took to make that employee satisfied.
Today we have an amazing system that allows you to manage your team from any location. Whether from your office or on the road we have the tools to make your company more profitable. Here’s to a fantastic year for your business. We would love to leverage our experience in GPS and AVL tracking to help you fill in the gaps. Whether that’s improving your employee’s safety, improving your customer impressions with on-time arrivals or adding money to your bottom line. Contact us today to for a no pressure demonstration of our GPS tracking software.