Pest Control Fleet Management

Benefits of Pest Control Fleet Tracking from MiX by Powerfleet

From improving the efficiency of your fleet to improving your billing, pest control fleet tracking can help your pest control fleet perform at its best. You can improve response times, keep track of employee hours, and improve service to your customers by telling them exactly what date and time to expect them. And, if one of your drivers runs into a delay, you can quickly reroute another without disrupting your customer's schedule.

Improve Efficiency

GPS vehicle tracking provide valuable data on driver behavior. You can pull historical data and real-time information to find out:

• How long a specific team is at specific spray sites?
• What is the average time your drivers are on the road?
• Are your pest control specialists going from job site to job site?
• How long does it take most teams to do the job efficiently?
• Do your team's timecards accurately represent their work?

These are just a few of the insights pest control GPS fleet tracking gives you. You'll know about delays in real-time and be able to reroute the closest team so that your customers are not inconvenienced.

Reduce Speeding Incidents

Your vehicles are branded and your employees most likely wear a uniform with your logo on it. They represent your company while they are on the road and on the job. They often drive through residential neighborhoods. Do you worry if they are speeding? Insecticides and high-speed travel don't mix.

When your trucks drive at unsafe speeds, they run the risk of getting in a dangerous accident and damaging your reputation. Even if they don't get into an accident, you don't want your company to be known as the one with a truck full of chemicals speeding through a residential area, possibly endangering the community.

With MiX by Powerfleet, you'll know when and where your drivers are speeding. You can set the system up to alert you when dangerous speeding and other activities occur. You can also set up in-cab alerts, so your drivers know to reduce their speed to a safer level.

Reduce Excess Idling

Pests thrive in warm, muggy environments. It's often hot, humid, and uncomfortable. Are your drivers using their vehicles to keep cool and idling when they shouldn't be?

With MiX by Powerfleet, you can find out if any vehicles are idling excessively on a regular basis. Reducing excessive idling can help reduce your fuel costs and save you money. While it may seem like just a few dollars here and there, over time, reducing excess idling throughout your fleet can add up to significant savings.

Customer Validation

GPS fleet tracking for pest control companies lets you verify the exact time a vehicle arrived at a site and the exact time it left. You can set up reports that tell you the activities of each of your vehicles, so you will know who went where when. You will be able to validate that jobs were completed and streamline your billing.

Using historical data available from fleet management software, you can verify for your customers the date, time, and how long your specialist was at their residence or business. You can easily pull a detailed stop report for any vehicle in your fleet and get all the information you need to clear up a customer dispute. Using this information for billing also makes the vendor-customer relationship stronger and more trusted. You can put your customers at ease when they know you have a system in place to validate the accuracy of invoices before they are charged.

Fuel Savings

One of the main things pest control fleets spend on is fuel. And often, fuel spend is determined by fuel prices, over which you have no control. But, you can control the fuel efficiency of your fleet, and reduce your overall fuel costs. By reducing things that waste fuel, such as speeding, rapid acceleration, excess idling, inefficient routing, unauthorized usage of vehicles and assets, and other driving behaviors, you can lower your fuel cost. We've already covered how fleet tracking software can help reduce speeding and excess idling. In much the same way, it can help reduce other unsafe and costly driving behaviors.

Ensure Payroll Accuracy

Because fleet tracking software gives you insight into each specialist's workday and eliminates inflated of false timesheets, you can use fleet tracking software to ensure payroll accuracy. You'll be able to track excess stops, detours from the approved route, and even monitor when some equipment is used. By accurately monitoring when your pest control specialists start and end their day, you can reduce labor costs.

By monitoring and reviewing electronic time logs, you can allocate resources based on actual, real-time insights, significantly reducing overtime. If a customer requires emergency service late in the day, you can send over a team member based on the amount of hours they've logged and their current location. This prevents sending over a specialist who is farther away or too close to going over their maximum hours. You will be less likely to have overtime hours on your payroll, your customers will be happy with your prompt service, and you won't be wasting fuel unnecessarily.

Improve Driver Safety

When drivers engage in risky behavior, it increases the risk of crashes. And that's especially dangerous when they are driving a vehicle full of chemicals. With telematics, you can manage risky behaviors such as speeding, distracted driving, and harsh braking. In-cab audio and visual alerts can be set to let your drivers know they are violating a safety parameter and to give them a chance to correct their behavior. Ranking and scores can be assigned and used to provide the appropriate training.

You can use the assigned scores to create a gamification training program. You can give drivers access to their scores, information about their risky behavior on the road, and their ranking on a leaderboard. When they see how they stack up against other drivers, their ranking can incent them to do better. When they see their ranking go up or down, it makes improvement or lack of improvement much more real, and therefore the consequences will also seem more real.

Improve Fleet Utilization

By tracking hours, arrival times, departure times, travel time between customers, stop duration, and the time a driver is inactive, you can improve how efficiently your fleet operates. All of this information can tell how long it takes for jobs to be completed, if there are delays, and where detours or stops have been made for personal errands. You can also track whether or not a driver is lost due to a lack of route knowledge. You can use this information to determine if any drivers are being underutilized.

Proactive Vehicle Maintenance

Your vehicles are your lifeline. If they are not in good repair, your fleet is going nowhere. Proactive vehicle maintenance can keep your vehicles on the road longer and reduce instances of unexpected downtime. Other benefits include:

• Proper maintenance so your vehicles run better and longer.
• Regular maintenance is less expensive than unforeseen repairs.
• Reduction in fines due to safety violations, since there will be fewer or none.
• Well-maintained vehicles use less fuel.
• Fewer breakdowns and accidents due to engine or brake failures will increase overall fleet safety.
• Reduced downtime and productivity losses due to unexpected breakdowns and repairs.
• Improved customer satisfaction when you keep more vehicles active on the roads.
• Improved performance when you choose the time for repairs, after hours, or during slower times.

With telematics, you can create a proactive and preventive maintenance schedule. You can set up mileage- or time-based maintenance alerts so that you can schedule maintenance at a convenient time that doesn't impact operations. In addition, because telematics hooks up to your vehicles' engines, you can get an alert if there is an emerging problem and fix it before the vehicle breaks down.

Trip Management

When you provide a service to customers, you need to know exactly what jobs are being done, who is doing them, and how much time they spend on them. The best and most effective way to get this information is to make activities more visible and to put processes in place to keep your employees accountable.

MiX by Powerfleet task management solutions can help you monitor trips from beginning to end. In addition, you can communicate with your drivers and team members about their next stop and give them any special instructions or changes if needed. Features may include:

• GPS vehicle tracking
• Paperless job dispatching
• Location of and assignment of the closest employee to a job
• Notifications on route deviations and progress
• Completed task tracking
• Two-way messaging
• Remote data capturing
• Turn-by-turn navigation

With MiX by Powerfleet, you can customize a system to your needs. And it's easy. No software to download and no complicated hardware set up. Just an on-board computer that collects and sends driver and vehicle information to a top-tier data center. You can access your data online or with a mobile app for iOS or Android. Simply install your device, login to the app, and you're ready to begin.