Tracking Vehicles With An Eye In The Sky

Bad driving habits can be tough to break — and good ones can be even tougher to enforce. Cleaning companies with a large fleet of vehicles may have trouble keeping their drivers in check. Current fleet-management technology can help building service contractors keep track of their company vehicles, and also monitor their driver’s actions by using global-positioning satellites.

Savings and safety
BSCs can use a global positioning system (GPS) to monitor vehicle position, speed and idle time as well as the opening and closing of doors, seat-belt use and when onboard equipment is turned on and off.

“You can look at your business and measure things you couldn’t measure before,” says Julie Axelrod, marketing director for Fleetboss Global Positioning Solutions, Fern Park, Fla. Fleetboss is one company offering GPS vehicle tracking.

Fleetboss’s system can pinpoint a vehicle’s location with a 30-foot accuracy. BSCs can determine if employees are spending their day at the job site or at lunch. Also, by monitoring the opening and closing of the vehicle’s doors, employers can tell when a job was started and when it actually ended.

Using global positioning systems will not only determine the productivity of an employee, but also the cost. Is the vehicle idling for great lengths of time wasting gas? Is the employee taking the most direct route to a job site? Monitoring, then correcting, these habits can help increase profitability and fuel economy.

“The biggest reason to get the system is the increase in productivity which will lead to profitability,” says Axelrod.

Tim Murch, president of Mitch Murch’s Maintenance Management Co., St. Louis, Mo., has been looking into global-positioning technology. Murch says the accountability issues and cost efficiency are benefits he’s looking for in a fleet-management program.

Contractors can also use fleet management to enforce speeding restrictions for safety. The system is able to determine which employees were speeding and how much over the limit they were.

Murch sees the system as a good replacement of the bumper-sticker method asking other drivers to phone in any problems.

Nuts and bolts
Fleetboss offers two types of systems — passive and active. The passive approach mounts a GPS receiver, about the size of a videotape, in the vehicle and a GPS antenna on the vehicle to receive satellite-signal data. The receiver is able to store about three weeks worth of data at one time. When the vehicle is within about 100 feet of the base, the base unit will begin to download the stored information.

The active method includes the passive system, but is also able to page the vehicles with a cellular call. The information will come back to the base telling where the drivers are along with the other requested data. This method is effective for dispatching and finding out which driver is closest to a given location.

This data can be compiled into daily logs and summaries of driving trends and destinations.

Big Brother?
Some contractors may feel that GPS is a threat to privacy. Specifically, some BSCs worry that drivers would quit if the company used GPS technology, Axelrod says.

But, if employees have concerns over privacy issues, worrying that the company could find out about their bad driving habits, then it is all the more reason to have the system, says Murch.

Axelrod suggests turning the negative outlook on the system into a positive one.

“Have the employees look at it as a way for a business to stay competitive,” she says.
Building service contractors could introduce an incentives program to get employees more involved with the system and the company, adds Axelrod. Reward drivers for good behavior and for meeting goals.

Nuvek in Pocatello, Idaho, offers SpanTran.net, their English-to-Spanish translation Web site that can benefit BSCs with Hispanic employees. By uploading a file, Nuvek will translate the information and users download the file when it is finished. The Web site can handle translations for documents, presentations and Web sites.

Putting information in two languages can greatly increase safety on and around a job site. Dealing with dangerous chemicals and complicated machinery can be problematic to non-English-speaking employees and also to company owners and managers who have to deal with the aftermath of accidents.

“All the dumb stuff that can happen when a person doesn’t understand can be reduced by offering the translation,” says Kirk Magleby, Nuvek president.

Companies with a few Hispanic employees use SpanTran.net for simple things such as employee manuals and operating and safety instructions, but those with larger Spanish-speaking populations use it for everything, including e-mail and human resources procedures, says Magleby.

Translations can be done in little as eight hours for small jobs and translation type can be varied depending on budgets and quality requirements. For example, documents can be quickly translated for general use, or done more carefully and be certified to hold up in court.

The translations are a high school level Bolivian Spanish done by teachers at English academies in Mexico and Bolivia, but the user can include unique Mexican slang.

“Anyone, with a little effort, can understand the translation,” says Magleby. “It’s pretty neutral, similar to broadcaster’s English in America.”

Some services, such as Babelfish, also offer translation, but they work by machine instead of with a bilingual expert. This has both positives and negatives — the service is instant and free, but sometimes, the translation is inaccurate or incomplete. Still, it is useful for short words and phrases, or to get the “gist” of foreign-language Web sites.