How to Select a GPS Vehicle Tracking System for your Business

A GPS-based vehicle tracking system can be a highly effective tool to help lower costs and manage your fleet more efficiently.

But with so many different systems to choose from – each with a different array of features, functions, and benefits – how can you determine which will best fit your business?

Identifying the right GPS fleet management solution for your organization isn’t as hard as you might think.

In fact, it can be done in three steps:

1. Understand the different types of GPS vehicle tracking systems
2. Identify your fleet management goals and objectives
3. Match GPS system capabilities with your goals and objectives

We’ve created some useful checklists to guide you through these steps and help you achieve a positive return on investment for your telematics fleet management system.

Understanding the Basics
There are two basic types of GPS vehicle tracking systems. The first offers vehicle tracking capabilities allowing you to determine the location and speed of and direction in which your vehicles are traveling at any time of day.

These systems also typically include a variety of mapping,

dispatching, reporting, and alert features to help improve vehicle routing and other fleet utilization metrics. This type of system is best for fleets that primarily need to keep tabs on where vehicles are in order to route them more efficiently.

The second type of system combines GPS technology with sophisticated onboard engine diagnostics to offer a much broader array of fleet management capabilities.

With this type of system, in addition to knowing where your vehicles are and what they’re doing, you also receive extensive data on the performance of the engines in those vehicles.

This includes everything from fuel consumption to idle time, greenhouse emissions, driver behaviors such as speeding, and potential engine problems.

This combination of vehicle location and performance data enables you to monitor and manage many aspects of fleet performance.