FleetBoss Report

July 2004

SERVICE STOPS vs NON-SERVICE STOPS
The Difference Between Making Money Or Throwing It Away!

"Sure, my service technicians put in eight hour days. But, how much time do they actually spend making money for my business?"

FleetBoss hears this question asked consistently by fleet managers across the country. Like you, these managers know that more time spent servicing accounts means more profits.

FleetBoss AutoGraphics takes the guesswork out of estimating workforce productivity and gives your business a powerful tool for maximizing service stop efficiency and profitability. A FleetBoss system gives you the ability to measure what percentage of the day your service techs are actually making money by letting you determine when a "Stop" is a Service Stop or a Non-Service Stop.

This determination can be made in one of three ways:

1. Input activation determines a Service Stop:
By adding inputs that monitor specific events that only occur at Service Stops (such as a power take-off (PTO) activation, cargo doors being opened, pumps being activated, tool cabinets being accessed, etc.), your FleetBoss system can determine which of the stops a vehicle makes are actually Service Stops.

Inputs may be added to most FleetBoss equipment at any time after that equipment is installed; usually, without any additional programming of the vehicle unit. Some common inputs used on FleetBoss systems are: power take off (PTO), cargo doors, passenger doors, tool box doors, ladder racks, boom truck sensors to monitor boom out of cradle, auxiliary motors, flow monitors on spray trucks, forks on front load refuge trucks, parking brakes, indicator lights, panic switches, emergency lights, vacuum head positions on parking lot sweepers and just about any other condition that can be activated by a voltage or ground input.

FleetBoss can also filter out stops where non-service events might occur, such as the company office or a maintenance facility or even a driver's home.

Since our Vehicle Units record the time of arrival at a location and the time of departure, these service stop times can be totaled for a single day and calculated against the total hours of operation for the day.

2. Stops Recorded at Client Locations:
Any company using AutoGraphics may submit their client list to FleetBoss and have this list set up to be imported into the AutoGraphics Landmarks Table. As the software converts the recorded Lat/Long for each stop to an address and lists it as a client's name, those same stops may also be defaulted as Service Stops.

This ability to automatically record Service Stops at client locations without using an event recorder has been particularly useful in industries such as pool service and maintenance since their vehicles do not use PTOs or other input types.

3. Service Stops based on Time:
Sometimes, a client list may not exist and there may be no input device or connector available to identify Service Stops. In these cases, the length of the stop may actually be used to identify Service Stops. For example, a vehicle might make stops at remote locations to perform equipment maintenance. The owner knows that the vehicle will be stopped more than 15 minutes and less than 2 hours. This time parameter could be used to identify those stops as Service Stops.

Once a method of identifying Service Stops is chosen, AutoGraphics does the rest. You can immediately begin improving the productivity of your company by running a simple graph (Service Vs Total Time) every Monday for the previous week or even the previous month.

Armed with baseline service stop values, you can begin to set goals and incentives to increase the percentage of the day that is actually billable service time.

EXPERT TIP: Some highly successful incentive programs have been created using FleetBoss AutoGraphics. Based upon newly measurable Autographics data, our clients have rewarded their workers with monetary bonuses and parties after certain targeted service improvements have been achieved .

Incentive Program Example:
Using AutoGraphics, a fleet manager identifies his company's service time baseline; which, for sake of argument, is 44%. He then offers his employees a modest challenge to improve that baseline by 2% in the next month, for a target of 46%. Such incremental success, tied to bonuses, will not only increase revenues but also motivates employees to even greater productivity and company loyalty.

Typical Service Time Graphs:

The graph above is typical of the percentage of billable time a company might find when they run their first weekly report from Autographics. As shown in this graph, Cleaner 2 (red) is spending more time at billable stops than the other three vehicles for this one week period. But running a weekly graph does not necessarily provide you with an accurate perspective on Service Time.

A more complete picture is viewed when the same graph is run for the entire month.

The monthly graph shown above reveals the true nature of the company's Service Time productivity. Deplorably, three out of this company's four pool cleaning vehicles are spending over 75% of their time performing non-billable tasks. As a result, the company is being drained of thousands of dollars in lost efficiency, productivity and profits.

4. Custom Selection of Service Stops with Enterprise Software:
FleetBoss solutions provide the user with the ability to assign a customized name to the stops your vehicles make for easier internal identification. With AutoGraphics, you also have the option of having these regular stop locations ALWAYS appear as Service Stops, NEVER appear as Service Stops or to follow Rules as to input activation or times spend at the site.

The Service Time vs. Total Time is just another example of the
tremendous power and profitability a FleetBoss AutoGraphics solution
can bring to your business.