Extract NRMA Magazine August 08

If you aren’t already using some form of dedicated vehicle management software program, then it’s time to at least look at the options – it doesn’t cost money to look. Max Berry checks out some of the most popular vehicle management systems available for any fleet size, including those for as few as five vehicles.

The sharp hike in fuel prices in recent months may be the factor that forces you to give serious consideration to alternative vehicle management software.

Modern fleetware packages allow any organisation to adopt professional logistics – the ability to analyse information about planned vehicle movements, consolidate separate trips and plan the optimal routes with the lowest kilometres driven overall.
For organisations that don’t consider transport a core activity, route planning may have been left to driver guesswork in the past, but the 30 per cent rise in fuel prices over the past 12 months is bringing the fleet budget to the attention of company accountants and senior management.

Security: is GPS an answer?
Another serious problem facing fleet managers is the high rate of vehicle thefts, highlighted recently on the ABC’s Four Corners. The program related how cars stolen by a gang targeting Sydney’s south-western suburbs ended up in the Middle East, usually disassembled into parts that ended up on rebirthed cars. At the peak of the problem in 2001, more than 20,000 cars had vanished without trace until Customs became suspicious about the contents of shipping containers bound for Lebanon.

The sharp rise in car theft is no doubt exercising the minds of fleet managers and leading to a close examination of fleet solutions involving GPS technology, allowing a vehicle’s location to be pinpointed. The lack of a private owner’s loving care and the generic nature of many fleet cars (think white Commodore/Falcon sedan) may make them more vulnerable to theft.

John Durante, business development manager at Intellitrac, says the company’s business has been growing rapidly but only about 15 per cent of customers are primarily interested in preventing vehicle theft.

“They’re mainly fleet managers wanting to know where their vehicles are during the day and whether drivers are really working overtime.”
Mr Durante says theft of the units is rare because they’re hard-wired into the cars (he declines to explain where they are fitted). Providing real-time monitoring of vehicle positions, the Intellitrac service also incorporates a black box recorder such as passenger jet use, recording the time, date, position and speed of devices fitted to the vehicle, and actions such as the opening and closing of doors.

If a vehicle breaches a designated “geofence” and enters a no-go zone, an alarm is sent to the Intellitrac Response Centre. Depending on the customer’s instructions, the business can be notified or a security patrol sent. The service is even capable of immobilising a vehicle or unlocking vehicle doors to prevent a lockout.

GPS fitted to council garbage trucks can be used to identify bin collections and even record the bin weights. Reconstruction of accidents is another useful GPS application.

Mr Durante says many companies prefer to lease GPS devices for their fleets and a combined monthly leasing and monitoring charge from Intellitrac would be about $70 a vehicle.

In the end, it’s the long-term rise in fuel costs that is most likely to motivate fleet managers to turn to fleet management software programs. A $100,000 business fuel bill in the past year would be at least $130,000 this financial year. And Fuel Trac says the trend will continue, predicting diesel to rise from the current $1.60 a litre in Victoria to $1.80 by February 2007.

At that point, the total cost of distributing goods in Australia will have risen 24 per cent since July 2004 because of fuel costs, now up by 83 per cent.

The company notes in its Fuel for Thought paper: “While it is difficult to find any positives in a price rise, it may act as a catalyst to produce efficiencies that may have otherwise remained unexploited. Questions are now being asked by customers and distributors as to how their products can get to market cheaper.”

Intellitrac
Ph 03 9 467 6188
www.intellitrac.com.au