company car tracking

[spacedust]

hello
does anyone have trackers fitted to their company cars ?
if so what are the pros and cons to them ?
and what info can be obtained from them ?

thanks

[BIG PAPA]

Re: company car tracking

Yep. Speed, If the car is running, location... My bosses can watch us move around like pacman. lol. They believe it keeps people working and not stopping to run errands, but in my opinion it is a waste of money. The people that you need to worry about always find ways.

[Herrmann]

Re: company car tracking

As nearly all items you can use it for good and for bad.
If you need to control your Techs on every Step, they make, there is something generally wrong in the Company
We have GPS Trackers in the Cars not to watch every Step, but because we have a relatively big Radius (Approx 200 KM) it becomes very useful, if a >100KM Customer call comes in and you see a Technician nearby, so you can redirect him. Saves a Lot of Time and Money.

[10871087]

Re: company car tracking

Most GPS Tracking software can give you:

Total miles driven (good for reimbursements)
Avg Speed (detect chronic speeders)
Location (you can tell who is not at their 1st call at 8)
"breadcrumb" maps (you can replay their whole day)
best routing alerts (alert when a driver take the longer "scenic" route)
Off hour movement alerts
Fences & corrals (alerts when a tech stops at his house for a nooner or leaves a certain geographical area)
Insurance discounts

[Eric1968]

Re: company car tracking

Only one respond possible : Big Brother is watching you!When my boss is going to install this in my car, I'll quit right away!

[michaelc]

Re: company car tracking

We never used to get tracked until people started taking the pis* and got caught. We get tracked through our phones not via our cars. I spoke to my manager when this happened and all he said is. If you do your job you have nothing to worry about.

The straw which broke the camels back at our place was a tech who is no longer with use bragged in the workshop, within ear shot of our directors and dispatchers that he was at home most days at 3pm-4pm and no one knew and that he had been doing it for ages.

When I saw him I went a lil crazy with him to say the least. I work late a lot and this is probably due to him finishing early and me getting the calls. Bad team player.

It is always the same thing. A few guys take things to far and we all get punished.

[fixthecopier]

Re: company car tracking

My biggest competitor has trackers in thier tech cars and trucks. They have to clock out to cash thier checks. My company has no such thing. We stay so busy there is no time to goof off. It is nice to be able to stop somewhere to do a personel errand and know the boss does not care as long as we do not abuse it.

[jmaister]

Re: company car tracking

Suddenly, you know every supermarket near your job site in the city. What's the harm of walking a lil' bit.

as mentioned, if you work hard, nothing to worry about. If its slow tho...what can you do.

[Ollie1981]

Re: company car tracking

I don't have one in my vehicle at my current job, there's too much of a mix of circumstances with people having company vehicles and some others claiming back expenses for the use of their own cars. There's not a lot you can do if the company wants to install a tracker in it's own vehicle, but most people would balk at the idea of a company tracker being installed in your their own cars.

I did however, in the dim and distant past work for a company that instituted a policy of installing trackers in vehicles and boy it didn't take long for senior management far from the coalface to get a serious hard on for poking around with the management tools. Such hilarity ensued such as emailed reprimands for not "showing up" to the on-file address of the customer you were supposed to be attending, never mind the fact that a simple look on multimap or similar would have showed that the address you did park at was a neighbouring street and/or multi-storey car park as a lot of city centre customers have no actual on site parking facilities. There was all the usual big brother type nonsense about speeding, shortest/quickest routing and reprimands for getting stuck in traffic jams when "there was clearly several other routes that could be taken to the customer".

It was a cheap crappy system and easily defeated, the tracker itself had it's own separate wiring routed directly onto the vehicle battery via it's own inline blade fuse, pop the bonnet, pull out the blade fuse and you are suddenly invisible. Also this was 8 or 9 years ago before the proliferation of GPS and was based on the cell phone network hence some of the routing was wildly inaccurate, sometimes you would travel to your customer via the sea and/or over hills with no roads when the signal was weak, even the dumbest stuffed suit couldn't explain that away!

[Ianizer]

Re: company car tracking

No company rig, but there is GPS tracking on the Ball & Chain (mobile phone).

Sure, I have no love of having my movements monitored by Little Brother, but at the end of the day, you're operating on their dime.
I put in an honest days work for an honest days pay and my time off the clock is my own. I don't worry about such things, but do have my lines in the sand.

The technology is neither good nor bad -- it just is.

If the information is used for statistical and tracking data that can better the department's ability to service the customer, then it's being put to good use.
If they have nothing better to do than to micromanage your every pee break, well, they have bigger problems than what you're up to.
Time to look for another situation.

-I

[Ollie1981]

Re: company car tracking

If they have nothing better than to micromanage your every pee break, they have bigger problems than what you're up to.
Time to look for another situation.

-I

Well the company with the trackers was a previous employer, an employer that almost completely folded a couple of years ago (undoubtably due to market forces rather than the lack of my considerable talents but there you go ).

In my experience, the micromanagement decline starts by holding all techs accountable for the misbehavior of a few. This leads to a sense that management hold techs as a whole in contempt as an "expense" that needs to be constantly monitored, rather than individuals that need to be managed as such.

As you say, technology itself is not the problem, it's how it's used. If it is used as a tool constructively to improve service provision then it's good, problem is my experience has shown that they are most often used as yet another stick to beat you with.

[Ianizer]

Re: company car tracking

Well the company with the trackers was a previous employer, an employer that almost completely folded a couple of years ago (undoubtably due to market forces rather than the lack of my considerable talents but there you go ).

In my experience, the micromanagement decline starts by holding all techs accountable for the misbehavior of a few. This leads to a sense that management hold techs as a whole in contempt as an "expense" that needs to be constantly monitored, rather than individuals that need to be managed as such.

As you say, technology itself is not the problem, it's how it's used. If it is used as a tool constructively to improve service provision then it's good, problem is my experience has shown that they are most often used as yet another stick to beat you with.

I'm with you, Ollie.

The long and short of it is, from a management perspective, micromanagement simply isn't effecient. And what does it really accomplish? Really? Confirms that there are some who just aren't too keen on the whole Work Ethic bag.

You've now dealt a (in some cases, mortal) blow to morale, and expended enormous amounts of energy confirming what you already knew.

If not GPS or LoJack, then some poor schlub gets the duty of ambushing you at your first and last scheduled stops.

Inspect what you Expect to a degree, but I've maintained that a certain amount of integrity has to be assumed with a skilled field tech. I'll repeat, if you can't assume that, you've a whole nest of problems greater than the guy that takes the occasional 105% lunch...

The behavior of the guy who wants to play games will come out in the wash. Without micromanagement, it may take a bit longer, but has the added benefit of allowing him or her greater lenth of rope with which to hang themselves in the end.

I was a young tech. I've played the games. It's exhausting. I've been busted for it, too. I've learned that a good work ethic is not only less strenuous, but the rewards are far too great to ignore.

-I

[Ollie1981]

Re: company car tracking

You've now dealt a (in some cases, mortal) blow to morale, and expended enormous amounts of energy confirming what you already knew.

If not GPS or LoJack, then some poor schlub gets the duty of ambushing you at your first and last scheduled stops.

Years ago when I first started as a field tech repairing domestic goods (televisions, VCRs, washing machines etc) for a rental company my first manager gave me these words of wisdom:

"Always remember that to the company bigwigs you'll always be looked on as a necessary evil, the very fact that they have to employ you is an admission that sometimes things go wrong, customers are unhappy and time and money has to be spent in retaining their buisness. To make matters worse, unlike sales where it's a simple matter of checking till reciepts to find out how much money they've brought through the door, it's virtually impossible to work out how much money you've saved the buisness verses the cost of employing you. Bear that in mind at all times with senior management and above all watch your back."

This has had an absolute ring of truth for every large buisness I've ever worked for. Salespeople who can get customers' names on contracts get allsorts of sweet incentives and even have "team building" days going paintballing paid for by the company on company time. Whereas in service there's hardly ever a "carrot" approach to anything, it's always been "Achieve x or face getting fired", this has a bad effect on morale when a saleman is smugging it up about how he spent the day go carting and got paid more than you for it whilst you loaded 50 broken, stinking washing machines into a truck and drove them to the city dump.

[Tricky]

Re: company car tracking

Some of our field service guys would complain about the way calls were assigned to engineers.

Fred is sent 50 miles to a location near Mike, 10 minutes later Mike is sent 50 miles to a location near where Fred was.

Management called all the engineers together and introduced the tracking system saying it will revolutionize the service call system and enable the call controller to place engineers calls much more efficiently.

Afterwards..

Fred is still sent 50 miles to a location near Mike, 10 minutes later Mike is sent 50 miles to a location near where Fred was.

[charm5496]

Re: company car tracking

you have to have a good dispatcher in place who knows how to make good decisions...that being said the techs also need to communicate clearly when they expect to finish a call and move on to the next.