GPS: A Helping Eye From The Sky

The most important word in real estate — location — is also becoming paramount in the jan/san industry, thanks to bounding advances in Global Positioning System (GPS) technology.

Instead of houses, though, distributors are interested in pinpointing the location of their own sales vehicles and delivery trucks. And, increasingly, they’re using GPS technology to monitor and guide their fleets throughout the day’s appointed rounds. In fact, as GPS programs become more streamlined and affordable, more distributors are using them to track every vehicle in their company’s sales and delivery fleets.

The actual industry-by-industry growth in commercial use of GPS may be difficult to gauge, but users and observers alike say this technology has taken hold wherever vehicles are used for commercial purposes. A 2005 study by ABI Research, an international technology research firm headquartered in Oyster Bay, N.Y., estimated that worldwide sales of GPS equipment for that year totaled more than $20 billion.

“Certainly, a lot of the traveling industries are using GPS a lot more,” says Anthony Munns, a partner with St. Louis-based business consulting group Brown Smith Wallace. “It’s become almost a standard, especially on the delivery side of sales or service. The days of having a big book of maps no longer apply.”

It’s been more than a decade since technological and regulatory advances made GPS programs both very precise and widely available. Since then, it seems as if two kinds of professionals have developed in the jan/san industry: those who have already incorporated GPS technology into their businesses, and those who think they will ultimately do so.

From Point A To Point B
The location of a company vehicle on the road has always mattered to distributors, but until recently there just wasn’t much that could be done about it.

Before the advent of GPS technology, a delivery truck was wherever it was, and it would “get there when it got there.” Managers were dependent on the skill and savvy of their drivers, and a long-time driver with an institutional memory of the ins and outs and alleyways of a given territory was worth his or her weight in gold. Now even the greenest employee can navigate like a seasoned pro.

“Our drivers get point-to-point directions because the system knows exactly where they are and exactly where they need to go next,” says Chris Householder, executive vice president of distribution services for JanPak Inc.

His company, based in Davidson, N.C., operates 12 distribution points throughout the southeastern United States and started using a company-wide GPS package earlier this year. From a productivity standpoint he says it saves his drivers and customers time.

The time saving aspect of GPS is the most obvious benefit of this new technology, and is most fitting because time is how GPS works. A receiver in a sales vehicle, for instance, picks up signals (via a ground receiver) from three or more of the 31 GPS satellites that orbit some 12,000 miles above the Earth. Each satellite is equipped with an atomic clock that is precise to within one second every 70,000 years. The clocks on all these satellites are synchronized so that

signals are transmitted in unison. GPS works because no matter where the vehicle is, it will not be equidistant from every satellite — even though the signals transmit at the same moment, they will not be received at the same moment. Thus, location is easily determined by multilaterization, or synthesizing the different speed-of-light times of each signal transmission to the receiver.

Time saved is almost always money saved, but in the case of distributors who manage fleet vehicles with GPS, time is money saved and then saved again — and again.

“The addresses for some of our customers can be deceptive,” Householder says. “We deliver to large hospitals, for example, and drivers would end up on the wrong side of the building. Now we zero in on the delivery point, whether it’s this alley or the one around the block, and we can actually save 15 to 20 minutes of delivery time.”

Drivers also save time by avoiding construction and traffic tie-ups because a GPS system will provide an alternate route to the same end point. They also save time by getting computerized messages via their cell phones or GPS units that notify them if a customer is running late or a stop needs to be added.

Dan Ott, co-owner of Facility Supply Systems Inc., West Chicago, Ill., says his new GPS saves him the extra time he used to allot himself simply so he wouldn’t run late from one appointment to the next.

“My big thing is I never want to be late,” says Ott. “One of the things I’ve noticed about using GPS is that it’s real good about how long it’s going to take me to get from Point ‘A’ to Point ‘B’, so now I’m on time instead of being 25 minutes early.”

The system Householder uses not only tracks every truck in his company’s multi-state network via cell-phone GPS, it also meshes with software that allows his customers to go online and locate the truck with their shipments. In addition, data for each delivery is downloaded into an average of the five most recent deliveries for each customer. As a result, GPS generates reports and also provides his managers with a constantly updating standard for transportation times.

“It is now essentially a smart system that gets better and better at learning our customers,” says Householder.

The Problem Of Surveillance
Other savings occur because more efficient travel uses less fuel which, in turn, allows drivers to go longer between fuel stops. Then there’s the probability that minutes saved will add up to enough time to schedule an additional delivery or sales call each day, thus increasing productivity.

Some insurance companies offer discounts because vehicles equipped with GPS are more likely to be tracked and recovered.

Despite the obvious benefits, and while he uses GPS to get to his own sales calls, Ott hasn’t made the GPS jump yet with his employees. He says the idea of remote-controlling his drivers’ travels is one of the things holding him back.

“How much of an electric collar do you want to put on your employees?” he asks.

The GPS industry would answer: “As much of one as you want .” GPS products are capable of recording and reporting many types of data, and a wide variety of settings can be managed by the employer. A screen may show whether trucks are moving, stopped or even idling, for example. GPS can be used to generate maintenance alerts as well as instantaneous reports on speeding, unauthorized travel and overtime.

Householder’s system allows the company to set a limit on deviations from a planned route: two miles. Anything beyond that generates a warning e-mail, which notifies a manager.

“As much as you like to think you have good associates and drivers, we’ve occasionally had one that goes off a specified route to visit a long-lost grandmother,” he says.

But it was important that his employees, especially his veteran employees, not have GPS simply foisted on them. So his company implemented a comprehensive series of face-to-face meetings and training sessions. Now his drivers say they appreciate the ease of the system and the understanding it fosters — they don’t have to deal with the frustration of a co-worker slacking off, or of fighting traffic only to arrive at the wrong address.

Mary Erpenbach is a freelance writer based in Rockford, Ill.