Fleet tracking systems allow you to manage your two most important resources--your vehicles and employees. The implementation of GPS technologies not only helped Orkin Pest Control manage those valuable assets, it netted significant savings for the company. Orkin has over 8,000 employees covering 400 locations, and its 5,100-vehicle fleet covers more than 150 million miles each year.
"Our biggest fleet concerns were related to accident claims," says Michael Gibney, director of claims and loss control for Orkin. "These claims would include primarily workers' compensation and vehicle accidents. Those claims represented an unacceptable percent of our revenue." Paying out to worker's compensation, auto, and casualty risk claims equated to a loss of approximately 7 percent of the company's overall revenue.
GPS was not new to the company. Orkin used GPS before but found the legacy system to be too easily tampered with, making it unreliable. The components installed inside the vehicles were exposed and accessible to fleet drivers, and disabling the system was as easy as unplugging the component. The advantage of having previous experience with the technology was that Orkin knew GPS could work; it just needed to find the right product and the right provider.
Orkin now uses a GPS monitoring system, which consists of RF transmitters installed in the company's fleet vehicles, and database software to manage incoming information. The transmitter is installed behind each vehicle's radio, where employees cannot tamper with it. Data collected by the GPS system is transmitted via 900 MHz to Orkin's computer database.
Source: Integrated Solutions, http://www.integratedsolutionsmag.com