June/July 2003

What savings can you expect when you implement a vehicle tracking and fleet management system? The business providing the Dyno-Rod drain maintenance service in North Wales and Chester has some very specific information on this subject.

Overall, it says that since implementing the Minorplanet system it has cut its annual costs by £12,940 in wages, fuel and insurance. How does this break down?

In terms of fuel, the company had a policy of letting its drivers take vans home at night, and after the Minorplanet tracking system was put in, the fuel bill fell by £400 in the first month.

Then there was the wage bill. According to managing director John Fitzjohn, the Minorplanet reports showed that £500 was being over-claimed on drivers' time sheets " - something that we could never prove before."

 

Insurance proved another early beneficiary. "When we told our insurance company that we had installed Minorplanet's VMI system across our fleet, they immediately cut 10 per cent off our yearly bill," Fitzjohn says. That added up to another £700.

Communicating with drivers also became cheaper. "We use Minorplanet's text messaging facility to communicate with the drivers, so it now costs us 2.5p to talk to them, instead of 50 pence or a pound every time. We can say that this easily saves us around £120 per month."

This saving results from a deal negotiated by Minorplanet with mobile operator O2, reducing the cost of a text message to 2.5p per text message from a typical 10p.