A commercial door specialist has revealed savings of around £60,000 after introducing vehicle tracking to its fleet.
Midland Door Services invested in technology from Navman Wireless, the UK's largest provider of vehicle tracking*, in a bid to cut costs and has been staggered by the "phenomenal" savings it has made.
"I've calculated that the system is saving me £28,000 a year in overtime costs alone," said John Lunt, Managing Director, Midland Door Services.
"As a former field engineer I know that overestimating the time a job takes is a common practice, but because vehicle tracking allows us to see where all our vehicles are at any one time, there's now no room for doubt."
As a consequence, exaggerated overtime claims have been totally eradicated and the company estimates it is saving around two hours a day for each of its eight engineers.
Vehicle tracking is also helping the company save money in other areas:
"Knowing exactly where our vehicles are has meant staff have stopped using company fuel when driving vans out of working hours," John added.
"It used to cost the company about £100 a week per vehicle, just for fuel used by staff outside work. By prohibiting private use of our vans and being able to monitor that with total accuracy, we're saving around £31,000 a year in fuel."
For their part, Midland Door Services' employees have benifited from the technology thanks to the role it can play in preventing substantial benefit-in-kind tax payments on company vans.
For a company allowing employees unrestricted private mileage in their vehicles, each employee can be hit with a bill of as much as £3,500.