Fleet Management

Fleet management, also known as telematics allows you to see where vehicles have been, where they are now, what route and speeds they’ve done and when. They can also monitor various things on the vehicle, such as the chiller on a freezer van, when the brushes are operating on a street sweeper, doors opening, running time on plant, etc. There are numerous systems available, we tend to recommend the Utrack by smartack as it’s easy to use and economical to buy and run but we do offer other brands.

 If nothing else there is a strong business case for these devices and invariably they pay for themselves with fuel savings. The price in singles is £400 +vat fitted with better pricing for quantities and £72 per year (£6 per month) subscription at the time of writing (22/11/10). 

 Let’s look at a hypothetical mid size van that does 40mpg with fuel at £5 per gallon so 12.5p per mile fuel only, 35/40p total cost per mile (depreciation, maintenance etc).
Over 3 years the cost of the utrack is equivalent to £17.11 a month (one off) so about 70 pence a working day (6 day week). So only doing 6 miles less a day saves the equivalent amount of money in fuel but only 2 to 3 miles in total running costs. 

Take the vehicle out of the equation and look at HR costs for unsupervised workers who travel to jobs or drive for a living. Human nature being what it is people won’t necessarily admit to starting late or finishing early, is someone claiming unsubstantiated overtime? even just phoning them to find where they are has a cost and are they where they say they are? nipping down the shop in the evening/weekend, unauthorized use, the list goes on. If your driver earns £8 per hour even 30 mins spurious overtime a week saved at say time and a quarter pays for the unit and the savings get bigger as the vehicle gets more costly to run.

There is a on line demonstration for your perusal, the link is www.smartrackmap.net the user and password are utrack. These passwords do change from time to time so if you can’t log on, have any tracking questions or a particular requirement please contact us.

Stolen vehicle tracking

We offer various types but they all work on the same principle that if the vehicle is stolen the device is activated and tracked.

With GPS based trackers (Cobra trak, Smartrack, Trackstar, etc) a secure operating centre can see where the vehicle is, similar to sat nav except they can see it and hence liaise with the Police. (turned left, right, parked in x location Etc) Transmitting devices (Tracker) are different in that a signal is sent from the device when activated and the Police home down on it using equipment fitted to cars.

Both have their pros and cons. We generally think the GPS units are better as they normally offer European coverage and don’t rely on specialised equipment for the police to find it. The main criticism of the GPS devices was that they didn’t work in covered areas (car parks, lock up garages etc) where the car might be put to stop the unit being “seen”. But this is become much less of a problem recently with the technology of  GPS receivers moving ahead in leaps  and bounds  which now don’t need a clear view of the sky to work. The transmitting devices have barely changed in 10years and only transmit for about 5 miles and of course not all police cars have the tracking equipment fitted.The upside is they’ll normally transmit to outside from a underground car park or if the car is in a container. We can also add remote immobilization to some of the GPS products so that by sending a text to the vehicle it won’t restart after the engine is turned off.

All of these devices involve a subscription which is normally around £135 a year or £350/£380 for duration of ownership.