Has anyone got experience of vehicle tracking?

We run a small fleet of vans for service engineers and are thinking about tracking.

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We run a small fleet of vans for service engineers and are thinking about tracking the activity.

The purposes are twofold:

1) to assist in billing the customer correctly

2) to provide some monitoring of productivity.

I am interested in anyone with direct experience - and I am interested to know what costs are involved. For example, do I need a mobile phone type connection in addition to buying the product.

 

Thanks,

Replies (6)

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RLI
By lionofludesch
17th Jul 2019 15:29

I've got a client who does this. It costs about £30 a month. The vans show up as blobs on Google maps (or something similar) on his smart phone.

The advantage is he can tell if the engineer is at the customer's house or outside the pub or on the move.

I've got my doubts whether it's worth it but he thinks it is.

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By Payrollgal
18th Jul 2019 08:48

I come from a transport background and was heavily involved in the fleet management and in particular using the trackers (for KPI purposes - checking for late deliveries).

From memory, the initial cost is quite high, around £1000 per tracker to be fitted. This was for lorries though, vans are a little less I think. Then you pay a monthly charge for the tracking service. You get access to a website and away you go!

Was also great for spotting someone that was filling up his wife's car on his fuel card as we were able to identify where his lorry was at the time!

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aqilla cloud based accounting
By Chris Tredwell
19th Jul 2019 10:52

Hi Tom 123

I used to work in vehicle tracking and telematics. The cost of this has dramatically reduced in recent years - solutions can start as little as £5 p/m and scale into the late teens. Your should no longer need to pay anything up front. It really depends on how much info In addition to vehicle location you wish to track. Ultimately it should pay for itself with inside a few months. Some solutions are PAYG whilst others would be on a fixed term contract (3 years for example) Beyond the hardware you should only require access to the internet (on mobile or desktop) to review the information.

Contact Daniel Cowie at Masternaut ([email protected] or 0113 281 400) He’ll be able to give you more information

Chris

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By taxisvtaxing
22nd Jul 2019 11:11

We chose ABAX as they pride themselves on being HMRC compliant: https://www.abax.com/uk/vehicle-tracking

We fit a small bit of kit in each van and then monitor the fleet online or on mobile. We pay about £15 per month, per van and easily recoup that in loads of ways. Our biggest saving was to fuel - mainly from stopping unauthorised trips when the vans went home with the drivers!

Our contact is Luke: [email protected] | 07841460055

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By davefor1
03rd Feb 2021 16:37

To answer one of your key questions, many of the modern fleet tracker for vans solutions use a small IoT device installed in the vehicle.

These in turn have an integrated SIM card to upload their data using a mobile network themselves - which means they do not need to be connected to a mobile phone in order to function.

Modern fleet telematics devices will offer far more than location. Helping to reduce fuel costs is a big one. Additionally, you can now even spot risky driver behaviour such as speeding, aggressive cornering, rapid acceleration/deceleration, etc.

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