Thursday 21 August 2014

Where are my Trailers?



These are just some questions that we ask Transport and Operation Managers as we know that there are huge savings to be made through having a standard trailer tracking unit installed on to your fleet with the option of a temperature monitoring device if you have refrigerated trailers.

Question: Do you know where your trailers are and are they being utilized?

Answer: Not sure, need to dig through the paper trail and make a few calls to see what is free and where they are?

Solution: This is the normal reaction and generally results in the need to hire another one but at what cost? The Trailer tracking system would highlight to you all trailers that are currently not in use, meaning you can identify instantly a trailer that you can use elsewhere with no extra charge, if you determine that no trailers are free then you can then look to hire one knowing you are not spending unnecessarily.

Question: If a loads temperature/goods are questioned how long is it taken off the road for? Are you then charged to cover the loss of a load and at what cost?

Answer: Normally they are off the road for up to 48 hours, by the time it has been resolved the goods have perished; this can lose us in excess of £10,000 on a full load.

Solution: Having to cover the cost of a lost load due to the temperature/goods being questioned can run into the £1,000’s. The trailer tracking system with Temp Monitoring can give you real time information back to the end-user; this will solve any disputes instantly and will allow the trailer to be released without the loss of goods or to assist you in unforeseen claims.

Question: In man hours how long does it take you to do a trailer audit?

Answer: We had to ask each depo to submit trailer locations, and it involved around 10 people overall, however we finally got all the locations and we submitted it after 2 weeks.

Solution: Paper auditing is the most common way to locate trailers but it isn’t efficient. We can set up the system to do a trailer audit every day or you can run a report that will give you an instant audit, meaning you and your workforce can focus on other business issues.

Question: What security measures do you have in place if a trailer is lost or stolen?

Answer: We have no security measures in place; if a trailer gets stolen we normally concede we will never see it again.

Solution: Through having an internal battery on the tracking unit we can track the trailer once it starts moving, therefore if stolen we will always have a location stamp to go by and then to recover the stolen trailer.





Case Study: Undisclosed

Fleet Size (Trailer): 120

Requirement

We had the following goals when finding a Trailer Tracking Solution:       See the current and historical location of our trailers – Our trailers are not tracking therefore we have to rely on paper system

·         Automated auditing – Currently paper audit is taking up to 3 weeks to complete, once completed many trailers have moved location

·         Optimise Trailer Usage – There are instances where our trailers are pending collection from the last job and we are still renting additional trailers, a tracking system would ensure we can utilise our own fleet before additional costs need to be spent

·         Lower the cost of renting additional Trailers – We have rented trailers as we haven’t got a system in place to identify trailers quick enough that aren’t being used

·         Monitor the Temperature within the trailers to protect from customer disputes / insurance claims – When a query is raised against a trailer road it has to be immediately put aside and inspected, in the past this has taken up to 48 hours and by the time is has been analysed the stock has perished

·         Increase Security – It has been known that trailers have been stolen and it has taken 14 days before it has been brought to Management

Solution
           
The Business Vehicle Tracking trailer tracking solution allows us to audit where our trailers are at any point at a click of a button and a full history of where it has been and what time it was there. Paired with the temperature monitoring this will be invaluable information for the running of our business and iron out any disputes that previously have cost us downtime and money.

We now get an email every morning highlighting vehicles that are not being utilised which allows as to put the trailer to work that have been overlooked.

Implementation

Business Vehicle Tracking installed trackers into our trailers which were located at 5 branches across the UK. We had a few stragglers that couldn’t get back to our offices at the agreed time so these were done separately, in some cases on our customers sites.

Once installed our account manager imported our customer address database into the system and now, when running reports, we can get customer names appearing rather than an address that we have to look up and verify. Everything has been well designed to optimise the time to get the required information out of the system.

Results

We chose the Business Vehicle Tracking trailer tracking system as it delivered what no other provider could and within our budget. Since having the system installed we have been able to get on top of our trailers and utilise them rather than renting trailers which in itself will pay for the system in the first 6 months. We have also seen a reduction in claims for contaminated loads as we are providing our customers with load temperature data which seems to be working as a deterrent from fraudulent claims.

Overall we have seen great results from having the system installed and our only frustration is that we didn’t do it earlier…

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