Family Business with 400 Vans Taps $300,000 Savings with GPS Insight

One family owned transportation business with a 40-year track record of success with 400 vans was looking to further improve performance— and new technology from GPS Insight provided the solution.

Here’s the context: During a time of high fuel costs, AAustin Express wanted better visibility into how much fuel was being purchased vs. how much was being used. They were unsure of where the extra fuel costs were coming from (outside of the price of gas increasing) but had a few ideas of where they could look.

To start, they needed a telematics solution that would provide more efficient routing to reduce miles driven and look at off-hours usage. They would also look at metrics such as speeding and idling. “We wanted to look at the bottom 20% of performers and work on correcting those behaviors,” said Adam M., VP of Operations for AAustin Express. They knew that if they could correct the behavior of the bottom 20% of driver behavior, the dividends would be tremendous.

There were two integrations that AAustin Express wanted a telematics provider to be able to do. The first integration was with their WEX fuel cards. By integrating their fuel cards into a telematics system, AAustin Express understood that they would have better visibility into their fuel spending and overall costs vs. what was being used and could also help in determining a more accurate mile per gallon (mpg). Without their fuel cards integrated into a telematics system, there was no way to verify if the vehicle that should have been receiving the gas was actually at the location where the gas was pumped.

The other integration that was important for them was with MacroPoint, a load tracking software. Before implementing GPS Insight, they would track their loads by tracking driver’s cell phones. This method was unreliable because cell phones can be turned off, lose power, etc. Because ETAs were being sent to the shippers and receivers, they needed a more reliable location service outside of cell phones to integrate with MacroPoint. They needed a more reliable system of tracking the mileage of their vehicles that would feed that information into their load tracking software.

Electronic Logging Device (ELD) Mandate Compliance

AAustin Express were early adopters of electronic logging devices (ELDs). They were using a separate ELD solution for years before they turned to GPS Insight for vehicle tracking on those vehicles that didn’t require ELD. However, that first ELD system was extremely cumbersome to use and to pull data from. It wasn’t adopted by all of the drivers initially and management knew at some point they would have to look at other options.

The results from GPS Insight have been dynamic:

• Decreased Fuel Costs, Off-Hours Usage, and Speeding Instances
• Increased Productivity and Efficiency Through Integrations
• Provided ELD Compliance and Ease of Use

Decreased Fuel Costs, Off-Hours Usage, and Speeding Instances

By sticking to their goal of focusing on the bottom 20% of performers within the fleet, AAustin Express reduced fuel costs in these three key areas and saved $15 per vehicle, per day, which translated into $300,000 within the first year!

Using the GPS Insight system, AAustin Express was able to determine any wasted miles driven or wasted hours by looking at route efficiency and declining the number of falsified hours. Telematics empowered management to have coaching conversations about speeding and the benefits that come from safer driver behavior. This resulted in a speeding violations reduction of 175% year over year! These speeding violations were predicated on a threshold of the vehicles traveling at least 10 miles per hour over the posted speed limit. In December of 2016, AAustin drivers were averaging 108 violations per vehicle. By December 2017, these violations reduced to 7 per vehicle.
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“We wanted to look at the bottom 20% of performers and work on correcting those behaviors. After implementing the system, we did just that and the dividends were tremendous,” noted Adam M. VP of Operations for AAustin Express.

Increased Productivity and Efficiency Through Integrations

Because of the partnership between WEX fuel cards and GPS Insight, setting up this integration was easy and the rewards were reaped quickly for AAustin Express. They now run automated fuel reports to see how and where fuel is being purchased vs. how much is used to detect if any fuel fraud is taking place, as well as calculate more accurate mpg data for each vehicle.

By integrating GPS Insight with MacroPoint software, AAustin increased the reliability of their tracking information they received from their vehicles. Now that they could easily input the truck number instead of the driver’s cell phone, then have MacroPoint pull the vehicle data from GPS Insight, the vehicle data being pushed through MacroPoint has become more accurate and reliable.
ELD Compliance and Ease of Use
It didn’t take AAustin Express long while piloting GPS Insight and looking at it side-by-side with their initial ELD vendor to determine that they needed to switch. This was because of how GPS Insight delivered the data compared to their initial ELD vendor.
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“The drivers have adopted it [the GPS Insight ELD system] because of how easy it is for them to use,” further noted Adam M.

Unexpected Benefit

Using GPS Insight, AAustin Express realized that vehicles were being driven home for personal use after work hours and/or on the weekends when there were no jobs to be done. Vehicles were required to come back to the yard or to the maintenance garage by 9:00 p.m. every day. Once they saw this behavior taking place, they were able to use GPS data to enforce policies that were already in place to correct this behavior.

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