GPS tracking offers many benefits to fleets that travel over the road. There’s no denying that. What you may not realize, though, is that your manufacturing plants can benefit greatly from the addition of GPS fleet tracking and monitoring tools on your property. These are just a few ways GPS can help you boost your bottom line.

Monitor Equipment Usage

Use GPS tracking tools to measure how much your business relies on certain pieces of equipment and machinery. GPS tracking can be used to monitor many things including each time the machinery is turned on or off, how often it is used, if it is overused or even misused. It can also be used to monitor unsafe behaviors and to determine if there are inefficiencies in your operation that could be costing valuable turnover time for finished products.

Reduces Product Theft

You can place GPS devices directly on high value products you’ve created or that you’ve purchased for your plant that will locate them quickly and efficiently if they are removed from your property. You can even set alerts to notify you via text message or email if the tagged items are taken beyond a certain geographic boundary. This can be anything from the products you’ve created to electronic equipment, power tools, powered assets, and more. In this way, GPS tracking for power tools and powered assets is essential for manufacturing plants.

Secures Equipment and Plant Assets

Many manufacturing plants have large pieces of equipment throughout the plant property. This equipment is expensive and often mobile in its own right. That means it can easily be driven off the property or loaded onto trucks and carried off the property – sometimes without a second glance from other employees. Commercial equipment is a surprisingly common target of thieves and GPS equipment tracking can help you recover stolen equipment faster and may help you enjoy reduced insurance rates as a result.

Extend the Life of Equipment, Machinery, and Vehicles

Scheduled maintenance is essential for maintaining vehicles as it is for prolonging the life of your plant equipment and machinery. Keeping up with routine maintenance can not only extend the life of your plant equipment, but it can also help to reduce unnecessary downtime by preventing many different types of equipment and vehicle breakdowns. Things like routine inspections, cleanings and lubrications, filter changes, and adjustments and repairs can help your organization save a huge amount of money from year to year.

With so many benefits for using GPS tracking in manufacturing plants is a wonder why more plants aren’t taking advantage of these many benefits.

If you own or manage a manufacturing plant, give us a call at LiveViewGPS to learn how GPS tracking can benefit your business. 1-888-544-0494

Businesses, particularly those with fleets that spend a lot of time on the road these days, could see an increase in automotive related expenses no thanks to a decrease, or reduction, in the business mileage reduction rate the IRS allows for 2017.

The IRS changes for 2017 taxes involve mileage rates as they related to business mileage, medical purposes, and moving purposes. The standard deduction rate for business mileage in cars, vans, pickup trucks, panel trucks, etc. is 54 cents per mile for 2016 taxes. Those rates will decrease to 53.5 cents per mile for 2017.

Medical and moving deductions will also decrease from 19 cents per mile in 2016 to only 17 cents per mile for 2017. Deductions for miles driven on behalf of charitable organizations remains steady at 14 cents per mile for the year.

The more vehicles your business keeps on the road each day, the more profound the impact of these deductions are going to be on your bottom line. There are things you can do, starting now, that will help to offset these new challenges without digging into your profits.

One of the best things you can do for the sake of your business is invest in GPS fleet tracking. Not only can this help to offset the increase in operating expenses for your business vehicles or fleet by reducing fuel consumption, but it can also help you track your mileage more accurately, reduce time spent on paperwork and record keeping, and help you to reduce the total mileage your vehicles travel from day to day throughout the year.

Other financial benefits GPS fleet tracking has to offer include the following:

• Reduction in fuel costs while vehicles idle.
• Planning more fuel-efficient routes.
• Improving dispatch to quickly identify and utilize the closest and most convenient vehicles for job site needs.
• Monitoring driver behavior for costly actions like speeding, excessive idling, and veering from their prescribed routes.
• Monitor drivers to reduce labor costs and overtime pay.
• Automate routine maintenance schedules to keep vehicles in good repair and improve their usefulness to your business.
• Track labor costs more effectively.

All these small savings add up to big savings for your business and can go a long way to offset the increases in costs brought about from these IRS deductions. GPS fleet tracking makes it possible.

To learn more about how GPS fleet tracking can help your business, talk to one of our experts here at LiveViewGPS by calling 1-888-544-0494, or emailing us info@liveviewgps.com or completing our contact us form here.

There are millions of shipping containers being used by the shipping industry today. With each container carrying between $10,000 and $1,000,000+ worth of goods, it’s surprising to know that very few of them are being monitored or tracked.

The goods news is that technology has evolved making GPS tracking for shipping containers, a viable option to consider.  These are some of the benefits that make GPS container tracking a worthy consideration today.

Real Time Tracking of Container

Containers that are stolen or lost can be tracked in real time with GPS technology on board. This means that you can not only identify the fact that your container has been misdirected but follow where the container is taken so that it can be recovered, by the authorities, as quickly as possible.

Easy to Use

Most GPS tracking sensors designed for shipping containers are plug and play devices. You don’t have to jump through a series of complex hoops to make it work for you. The easier it is to use GPS technology like this, the more useful that technology becomes.

Keep Clients Informed

Depending on where your shipping containers are coming from or being delivered, there are many obstacles that can affect the shipping schedules like storms at sea, natural disasters on land, and even things like train derailments or traffic events (like the winter storm in 2014 that essentially shut down the Interstate in Atlanta).

You can allow the clients receiving the containers to view the same GPS information for their containers in real time so they know, without a doubt, where their containers are located and when they can anticipate its arrival. If you’re not willing to go that far, you can use GPS information to provide more accurate delivery windows and to notify clients, quickly, whenever the timeline needs to be altered.

Schedule Exception Alerts

Exception alerts can be established for many different, and highly useful, reasons. You can set alerts to notify you whenever the container is accessed by the door, of unplanned stops, deviations in scheduled path, and for things like attempts to tamper with the device itself. These events often signal potential problems with your container and the alerts provide a warning so you can investigate properly.

Now that GPS tracking technology exists in a form that works wonders with shipping containers, the only question remaining is why haven’t you made the move to embrace the many benefits GPS has to offer your business?

Learn more about GPS tracking for shipping containers by speaking with a LiveViewGPS expert today.

• Call us at 1-888-544-0494
• Email us at info@liveviewgps.com
• Complete our online form
• Chat with us via live online support.