An important part of your business if it involves fleet drivers should be driver safety. And safer employee driving can be supported by developing and implementing an incentive program. When you incorporate driver performance into the entire job performance evaluation, positive results follow.

Incentive and reward programs normally involve monetary rewards, recognition, use of rewards to increase participation in an event or a program or motivate the achievement of a set goal or special privileges.

Drivers don’t normally sit in the office next to their manager, easy to reach. Since they are not around physically all the time, it can be difficult to reward them for exceptional performance.

Of course you can use up a lot of time and resources tracking their performance and implementing ways to train them to exceptional performance. But it could be difficult to come up with an incentive program that will work for drivers. When you can, however, it can really benefit your company in ways such as:

• Improving Customer Deliveries
• Monitoring and Reducing Employee Driving Accidents
• Monitoring and Saving on Unnecessary Idling Fuel Costs

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During a fairly active fall for bears, GPS tracking technology was used by academic researchers and Great Smoky Mountains National Park to figure out ways to curb food related human-bear interactions.

Since there has been a decline in natural sources of food this past fall in the wild, bears turned to wandering the public Park areas, as well as other places in search of handouts or discarded food items.

Bill Stiver, Park Wildlife Biologist, said that figuring out where the bears are accessing human food is one of the easiest ways to put a stop to it.

The Twin Creeks picnic pavilion, the Metcalf Bottoms picnic area and the Cosby campground tend to be the perpetual trouble spots.

The bears that make an appearance in the populated areas are captured and fitted and tagged with a GPS radio collar. There have been 14 bears so far outfitted with these collars. Each collar costs $3,600. A federal grant funds the project. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of responsibilities that fleet business owners endure in order to keep their business growing. Having to track employees is just one of them.

According to the National Labor Bureau, about 5.7 percent of employees engage in side jobs (moonlighting). What is the repercussions of this for business owners? Employee moonlighting can result in extra fuel costs, more vehicle maintenance, and loss of income for your fleet business, not to mention loss in productivity from tired employees working multiple jobs.

A good solution to this is GPS fleet tracking, which can help you to prevent your workers from using your company vehicles for other side jobs.

How GPS Fleet Tracking Can Help

Fleet managers have to be careful when addressing concerns about side jobs. If you try to prohibit your employees from taking on side jobs altogether, it can get you in trouble for infringing on their privacy. Still, you do need to protect your business as well. GPS tracking is the answer to this concern and many companies are already using it to battle this type of situation. Since your employees and your company vehicles are your primary asset in your fleet business, having a GPS system installed and executed properly will give you a huge advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

At Reed College, bike thefts have become a big issue and police have begun a bait bike program to combat the issue.

The bikes are equipped with GPS tracking devices in the hopes that they would be led to whoever was stealing the bikes. What they found, however, seemed too bizarre to be true.

In an abandoned Southeast Portland home, they found a secret room with a chop shop hidden inside.

When this campaign was started by Reed in the 2014 – 2015 school year, and the GPS tracker showed one of the bait bikes being taken off campus.

And Reed’s security officers, with the help of the Portland Police, were able to track the bike a couple miles from the campus to the home with the secret room. An officer said he noticed an odd looking book case and found a hidden door behind it. The hidden door led to a secret room. Read the rest of this entry »

When you manage a business that has fleet vehicles, it is up to you to ensure they are working properly at all times. With all of your other work responsibilities, regular maintenance and upkeep can get lost in the shuffle. This is where the benefit of GPS fleet tracking comes in. You will be able to get alerts when vehicles need routine maintenance and get advanced warning that a vehicle’s performance is compromised and needs to be inspected.

Receive Routine Maintenance Alerts

In order to have flawless fleet vehicle inspections, you need to know when it is time for those inspections. This is one of the major benefits of using GPS fleet tracking devices. You can program it to send you an alert when it is time for routine service and maintenance on the vehicles. This might include a regular inspection, tire rotation, oil change or other types of maintenance. By getting alerts, you get maintenance done promptly and can avoid a lot more serious issues with the vehicles.

Stay on Top of Vehicle Activity and Performance

Some of the more advanced GPS trackers can help you keep track of the condition of your vehicles. You can use your trackers to see what vehicles are driving differently, which is often a sign that their performance is dropping due to needing maintenance or repairs. It can also be as simple as tracking how many miles a certain vehicle has been going before having the tires inspected or the battery replaced. Read the rest of this entry »