Years back, prior to GPS being standard in fleet circles,
Fleet Managers were forced to budget against historical consumption. You knew
there was waste, some operators more abusive than others, but really in spite
of whatever policies you could dream up you couldn’t control an operator’s
behavior after he or she pulled out of the lot in the morning. So you ran with
the prior numbers and didn’t look back.
In my own experience comparison of the historical data and
GPS deployed data was dramatic. My company light truck gas mileage had been in
the 7-8 MPG range/ class 7 trucks in the 3-4 MPG range. These trucks made
amazing strides in efficiency between 2006 and 2007, many 25% or better. No
doubt a small part of this savings was attributable to induction of newer
equipment, but not much. Routine annual inventory replacement amounted to about
10-12% gross inventory and had for several years, so increases from these
changes would have been evolutionary. What made the most change was deployment
of diagnostic-capable vehicle GPS across our work-truck inventory in late 2006.
Even prior to developing policy based on required usage
patterns, the general knowledge that we could see what the truck was doing at
any time reduced idle-time, eliminated erroneous trips, allowed superior safety
monitoring and efficient dispatching due to location reporting. The proverbial
win-win. Workforce acceptance of the program was, as you would expect, rocky
for the first couple of years. Resentment about “big brother keeping dibs on me”
was voiced by a small percentage of the workforce. This soon died off. As we
told some of the protesters at that time, if you have nothing to hide, you have
nothing to fear. Eventually monitored automotive GPS became accepted.
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