For any business with mobile assets, one inevitable part of increasing business is increasing fleet expenditures. As business picks up, your fleet gets busier. All of your vehicles will almost certainly add mileage to their monthly averages, which is a good thing as it means that they are usually out adding to your company’s top line revenue. But how much will increasing fuel costs add to the overall expenses?

Diesel oil and gasoline prices have already shot up to their highest levels in two years, and most analysts are predicting a steady increase over the course of 2011 as the global economy picks up steam. The 2011 predictions from most analysts, including the U.S. Energy Information Administration are running in a fairly narrow range centered around a 10% increase over last year’s pricing. Given the global fuel markets, it is a fairly safe bet at this stage to put those figures into the forecast this year. While nobody likes to pay more in fuel costs, this sort of increase as the economy improves is relatively easy to swallow for most businesses as we all ride the wave of an improving economy.

Projections for 2012 Vary Widely

The more important question to answer for fleet managers is whether or not we will see a fuel cost increase in 2012 that mirrors the 30% plus increase we saw in 2008, and whether or not that increase will be permanent this time. While experts disagree on the timing, everyone agrees on the simple fact that supplies continue to dwindle as demand rises. Most of the increased demand in 2008 came from emerging markets such as China and India, and forecasts show that these markets will be increasing their demand again soon as they work their way through the latest downturn. While the timing is still murky, the inevitability of increasing fuel costs make it prudent to start planning for this eventuality.

Four Ways to Decrease Fuel Costs

Here are four ways that a fleet owner can work to reduce his or her fuel consumption over the long haul.

1. Smaller, More Efficient Vehicles: This one is obvious and most businesses are looking at overall cost of ownership on their new vehicles as they are added to the fleet. When you look at your cost of ownership projections, be sure to calculate them at several different fuel cost estimates.
2. Route Monitoring: Having the ability to monitor your vehicle locations allows you to insure that they are running their routes efficiently and that your corporate vehicles are not burning fuel for an employee’s personal benefit rather than your own. Personal side trip expenses in the work truck can really add up.
3. Reduce Speeding: Everyone knows that the faster a vehicle goes, the more fuel it consumes. Not only is this an operational cost issue, but it also greatly increases your risk liability for everything from speeding tickets to accidents .
4. Control Engine Idling: Studies have indicated that a typical work truck can consume anywhere from 0.7 to 1.2 gallons of fuel for every hour that the engine is left running idle. While this is sometimes necessary in extremely hot or cold environments, most often it is a cost that is easily avoidable when the proper monitoring measures are put into place.

So, What About That $5/Gallon Fuel?

My guess is that 2012 is not the year that we will see it. Only the most pessimistic of forecasters see it coming sooner rather than later. But I do believe that it will be here soon, certainly within the next five years, so it is time to start putting that eventuality into the strategic planning for your fleet. If you don’t, you could end up with a bunch of vehicles that cost you much more to operate and depreciate much more rapidly than your competition’s fleet.

The ST200 is our budget GPS tracker, designed for individuals and businesses who do not need all of the advanced features of our premium tracking systems. This economical unit comes attractively priced at a rate almost anyone can afford.

Additional information can be found at the ST200 Product Page.

“Virtual Fleet Director came into existence to meet a clear need”, says Don Sesler, President of Sageplan.  

Hire a Virtual Fleet Director

 ”Many of our World Tracking Solutions and SageFleet Services customers are business owners with small to mid-sized fleets.  For most of them, hiring a full-time fleet manager does not make business sense, but what they do need is an expert that can take charge of their fleet monitoring and fleet management tasks without having to add someone to the payroll.” 

If management of a small to mid-size fleet falls under your responsibility, your professional success will become our primary goal.  Our staff has a broad range of experience and expertise that can help make your field operations more efficient, and free up your time to focus on your business’ core capabilities.  

You can visit our new website at www.VirtualFleetDirector.com for more information, or give us a call at +1.512.542.9668.

LiveTrack is a game changer for web-based tracking, making it much easier to view all of your vehicle statuses in real time from any computer connected to the internet.

Testing is scheduled to run for a few weeks and a full release is soon to follow.  Stay tuned for details!

SageFleet for Business

Austin, TX- August 3, 2010 – Sageplan Inc., the parent company of World Tracking Solutions and SageFleet, is proud to announce important updates to its flagship business class service. SageFleet Business Class Service helps companies with employees and vehicles in the field reduce operational costs and improve productivity through the use of state of the art GPS monitoring technologies. Our professional-grade GPS tracking solutions save your organization money and increase profitabiltiy in many areas including:

• Decrease Fuel Consumption and Personal Use of Work Vehicles
• Cut Out Falsified Timesheet Hours Including Unworked Overtime
• Reduce Insurance Costs & Safety Risks Such as Speeding and Vehicle Theft

A typical result is to generate a net savings for the business of at least $1,000 per vehicle annually, which falls directly to your bottom line!

Too Busy to Monitor Your Fleet? Hire a Virtual Fleet Monitoring Director!

Many small businesses face a similar problem when it comes to technology, they know that they could benefit from it, but they don’t have anyone on staff that has the time and/or expertise to implement it.

Our Virtual Fleet Monitoring Director program is the perfect solution for any sized enterprise that is ready to make their fleet and field staff more efficient, but would prefer to outsource the task of managing a system. Our fleet monitoring solution is very easy to administer and most of our clients prefer to develop an in house expert, but if you would rather outsource this task we will be happy to assign one of our Fleet Monitoring Experts to your account.

Whether you are a concerned parent with a young, inexperienced driver in the family, or a fleet manager with assets around the globe, we can help you better monitor and manage the things that are most important to you.

Please contact Don Sesler in Fleet Sales for more information.

Which is more critical when considering your fleet’s fuel cost – the price of gas or the importance of each trip? Have you ever noticed that although your employees are clearly busy, they are not getting enough done to generate a profit margin for your business? One goal of installing a GPS tracking system is to monitor and reduce excess mileage by your fleet. However, the real concern shouldn’t be reducing mileage alone or improving trip efficiency, but rather creating a system that evaluates both metrics and allows you to optimize the quality of each stop in a way that creates an efficient utilization of your mobile assets.

Measuring Trip Costs

Let’s take the simple example of a vehicle with a 70 mile route- 35 miles out, 35 miles back-to make a delivery worth $100 with a $20 profit margin on the delivery. A fairly standard average for the fleet cost to deliver any product or service is $0.48 per mile, so this trip has a net loss of at least $13.

Now, obviously in this sort of scenario it is easy to see the problem. The company has just paid the customer $13 to deliver their product to them, but if you do not have a tool to look at your trip costs, how do you identify and fix even the simplest of cost creating problems?

Measuring Mileage per Customer Stop

To get a little more complex, let’s examine a field service organization that has several regional offices. Each office has an average of 12 vehicles. The company decides to install GPS tracking devices in each vehicle to measure daily activity such as the number of stops, the duration of and distance between stops, the total mileage, and start and arrival times.

Before installing GPS trackers, the company’s vehicle logs showed that each vehicle travelled approximately 850 miles each week and made 17 customer stops. With an operational cost of $0.48/mile, the fleet manager knew that each stop was costing his company $24, but without the ability to generate any detail on each vehicle’s weekly activity, it was practically impossible to find the savings opportunities. Once the units were installed, it became obvious that several trips that could be rescheduled or reassigned, allowing more trips to be completed by each rep. After a few adjustments the company saw its average vehicle mileage rise to 912 miles each week, but the number of stops also increased to 21 customers. The final result for this business was a reduction in the cost per stop from $24 to $21, or a 12.5% increase in overall fleet efficiency.

GPS Tracking is Now a Crucial Part of Fleet Management

The tools that are made available to the Fleet Manager from a full service GPS Tracking utility like our SageFleet monitoring system have become a critical component of every fleet manager’s cost containment and efficiency improvement strategy. SageFleet can be deployed on as few as 2 vehicles, and can be scaled up to cover literally thousands of mobile assets in the field. With no equipment to buy and no software to maintain, this service allows organizations to implement the very latest fleet monitoring service without the risk of purchasing hardware which may quickly be out of date.

Sound interesting?  Give us a call and we will be happy to show you how you can start improving your fleet’s productivity

Nobody likes the idea of having Big Brother looking over their shoulder, and you are not going to win any popularity contests by implementing a GPS tracking system into your company’s field operations. But the bottom line is that a lot of people will behave differently in an unsupervised work environment than they will when they know that the boss is (or could be) watching, and while changing a business culture can be painful, the overall benefit it brings often makes it more than worthwhile.

Take the example of a demo we did for a West Texas municipality recently. They took us up on our offer to borrow one of our battery operated GPS devices and put it into an employee’s vehicle that had been turning in overtime hours on every timesheet for months. They told the employee that he was participating in a pilot program, and that there was now a monitoring device on his vehicle that would be used for a variety of things, including timesheet verification. The employee was not very happy about this new arrangement, but was told that this was not a voluntary program and he had to live with it.

After about six weeks we got a call back from the supervisor. “You are not going to believe this”, he said, “but every timesheet that has come in from this guy since we started the demo has had no overtime reported whatsoever.” In fact, they were able to show an overtime reduction of over $400/month for this one employee’s payroll alone, and that was the easy thing to measure. There was also a decrease in mileage and engine hour usage on his vehicle, leading to measurable savings there as well.

And what did the supervisor do to make this happen? Other than tell the employee that the device was in the vehicle, the supervisor did practically nothing. Sure, he looked at the monitoring history occasionally, but he soon realized he did not have to. “As soon as the device was in the vehicle”, he says, “the guy’s behavior changed. It was that simple.” The reality is that quite often, very little effort has to be put into the service to get a good return on the investment, because the simple act of putting the device into the vehicle will make an employee think twice before padding a timesheet or using the company vehicle for their personal errands.

Of course, there are a lot of opportunities to get even more out of a fleet monitoring system. Our services range from basic, self service tracking to a full service option where one of our staff experts can serve as your outsourced fleet management supervisor, keeping an eye on all of the incoming data and distilling the information into comprehensive reports that you can use to better manage your operations. Any of our fleet monitoring solutions

can be deployed on as few as 2 vehicles, and can be scaled up to cover literally thousands of mobile assets in the field. With no equipment to buy and no software to maintain, this service allows organizations to implement the very latest fleet monitoring service without the risk of purchasing hardware which may quickly be out of date.

Sound interesting? Give us a call and we will be happy to tell you more about this exciting program. You can always find more information on this, or any of our line of GPS Tracking devices by visiting www.worldtrackingsolutions.com.

One of the key topics that we discuss with business customers early on is the potential productivity gains and costs savings surrounding improved timesheet verification of their employees out in the field.  For some organizations, this topic can be very uncomfortable. Not only are you bringing into question the trustworthiness of your employees, but perhaps even the integrity and loyalty of supervisors and payroll staff.

If human emotion was not a consideration, the cold, hard numbers would make any effort to improve timesheet verification a favorite topic for business owners. Saving just a couple hours a month per employee can have a significant impact on the bottom line, representing an opportunity to delay the hiring of additional staff, improve profit margins, and market competitiveness.

But rarely is the question of timesheet validity a simple clerical issue. Aside from the potential criminal implications (many states consider timesheet fraud a form of larceny) and civil repercussions (ie. having an employee sue in civil court), any attempt to implement an improved verification system runs the risk of disrupting the status quo in the organization. If employees are used to padding their timesheets with a few extra hours of overtime every paycheck, or taking time off during the day to run personal errands, it may be that they consider the extra pay an entitlement that they deserve. After all, they may have been doing this for years with no consequence whatsoever. And supervisors may have grown accustomed to looking the other way as well, seeing it as an opportunity to reward their staff and keep them happy.

It is important to remember though that the morale issue cuts both ways. For those employees that do not pad their timesheet, this behavior among their coworkers can be perceived as an unfair, even immoral activity leading to resentment towards both the coworkers who are taking advantage of the situation as well as of the employer who allows the behavior to continue. Left unchecked, even the most honest and loyal employee will eventually begin to question why they should not take advantage of the “fringe benefit” of padding their timesheet, or perhaps even leave the company in an effort to find a work environment that meets their higher sense of work ethic.

As tough as this problem can be to tackle, it is imperative for any organization with employees in the field to insure that the hours being paid to each individual accurately represents their contribution. While the traditional “honor system” or “supervisor verified system” can insure that the majority of the timesheets submitted are accurate, the addition of a tool like GPS fleet monitoring can significantly reduce the potential abuses in both systems. Fleet monitoring provides an exact record of where each vehicle was in over the course of the week, making it very risky for an employee to claim they were working when there is a record showing the vehicle was at home or at the mall, and supervisors will no longer have to choose between ignoring an extra hour or two on a timesheet vs. a confrontation with a coworker/friend.

If you have been considering the implementation of a fleet monitoring solution, be sure and ask us how GPS tracking can be used to improve the productivity of your field staff and level the playing field for your honest employees.

About Sageplan
Sageplan is an international technology consulting company providing services in GPS tracking, fleet management, and general technology consulting. Our fleet management services help organizations cut fleet operating costs and increase employee productivity through the application of environmentally sound and field proven technologies. Our free, no obligation consultation can show you how to reduce fuel consumption, lower insurance rates, and reduce wasted employee hours on the job. For more information about the company and their services, visit www.sageplan.com or www.worldtrackingsolutions.com.

We hear from a lot of customers who purchase cheap trackers like the Zoombak on the internet or in the local electronics store, only to find that the devices don’t meet their expectations, or in some cases, don’t work at all. If you are in the market for a covert tracking device, here are five important considerations to take into account when purchasing the device and selecting a service provider.

1. Device Sensitivity: The ability of the device to pick up a weak GPS signal can be extremely important depending upon the application. In some cases the device can be placed in plain sight, such as on the vehicle dashboard, but in other cases it needs to be concealed underneath the dash or under a seat. We’ve heard from quite a few people who have complained that some of the cheap devices being sold online and in the stores do not work well unless they are placed in a location where they have direct visibility to the open sky. If the application requires that the unit be concealed, you will need to consider a professional grade device, which generally works well even when concealed underneath a dashboard or passenger seat.

2. Coverage: Most GPS tracking devices send their data into the tracking server using a cell phone network, so it’s vital to understand which network provider is being used. Some tracking systems will cut costs by using a single provider’s network, which can lead to reporting gaps when the device roams outside of their coverage area. You also want to find out what happens to the data that is generated when the device is outside of its network coverage. Our tracking system will hold any tracking data that is generated until the unit is back in coverage and forward the data along as soon as possible, but a lot of providers simply drop the data in this situation in an effort to cut costs. Be sure to ask about this feature when considering any tracking system.

3. Battery Life: How long do the batteries last? This is one of the most important questions for a covert GPS device. The answer will depend upon several factors including the amount of time spent in motion, how often the device is updating its location, and how strong the GPS signal is. It can be difficult to sort out exactly how long the battery life will be, and it’s not uncommon for a retailer to be vague about this important parameter. We have even had some vendors use deceptive terms about their battery life to make a sale. One common trick is to highlight the device’s “standby time”, which defines how long the batteries will last as long as the device is not actively tracking!

4. Customer Service: What’s the point in purchasing a highly technical device if you can’t get help to learn how to use it? GPS tracking needs a complex mix of hardware, software, wireless, and mapping services to function, which means that the likelihood of needing professional help is higher than with a typical consumer electronics application. Sageplan prides itself in having the best customer service in the industry. If someone claims to offer service, test them on it! We talk to people all the time that have been stuck with a gadget that the sales guy said was awesome, but when it did not work there was nowhere to turn to for help.

5. Cost: Assuming all the other features are equal, the logical choice for the buyer is to go with the retailer offering the lowest cost. We know everyone is looking for the least expensive option, and we work very hard to provide exactly that. We are not the cheapest option out there! If you are surprised by that admission, then you have not had the same chance we have had to listen to the stories from people who got suckered into buying a cheap gadget because it was, well, cheap, only to find out after the fact that the device simply was not up to the job at hand. Make the effort to understand the full value of the service being offered by each provider.

If you have a need for a single GPS tracking device, or are thinking about deploying a fleet monitoring system across an entire business organization, be sure to talk to a reputable company before choosing your provider. If you choose to talk to us, we will take the time to go through the list of options with you to find the solution that is best for you. We know we are not always going to be the right service provider for every application, but we will always work hard to make sure that you get the very best value possible for your investment if you choose us as your GPS tracking solution partner.

Austin, TX December 4, 2009 — Sageplan has been named a state-wide approved vendor by Texas BuyBoard, an organization created to help local Texas governments and school districts find and procure the products and services they require from qualified, pre-approved suppliers. After a thorough evaluation process, Sageplan was chosen to help these organizations take control of their mobile assets. Since 2004, Sageplan has been providing state-of-the-art GPS tracking and fleet monitoring services to a variety of retail consumers and industrial clients including private investigators, law enforcement services, private business, families with young drivers or elderly drivers, and of course governmental organizations.

“We are very excited about the opportunity to help Texas communities improve the safety, efficiency, and longevity of their fleet operations.” said Don Sesler, Sageplan President. “With every organization looking for ways to reduce costs and eliminate wastes, our SageFleet monitoring solution can help any city, county, or school district save fuel, reduce insurance rates, decrease overtime, and improve employee productivity in the field.”

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Sageplan operates its GPS tracking business under the brand and website World Tracking Solutions. This service offers a broad range of professional-grade GPS tracking devices, from battery operated units designed for quick installation and covert tracking activities, to permanently installed devices with additional fleet monitoring features targeted towards business and government applications.

The new Sageplan contract award from the Texas BuyBoard streamlines the procurement process for Texas cities, counties, and school districts that have been considering the implementation of fleet monitoring and fleet management technologies. With no software to install and no hardware purchase required, Sageplan has made it easy for even the smallest of government organizations to take advantage of the productivity gains and cost savings offered by their service.

About Sageplan
Sageplan is an international technology company providing services in fleet management, technology import/export, and general business consulting. Our fleet management services help organizations cut fleet operating costs and increase employee productivity through the application of environmentally sound and field proven technologies. Our 15 minute consultation can show you how to reduce fuel consumption, lower insurance rates, and reduce wasted employee hours on the job. For more information about the company and their services, visit www.sageplan.com or www.worldtrackingsolutions.com.