Landscape companies often struggle to reconcile customers’ billable hours with employee labor hours – especially when using manual time cards to record the data. To improve billing accuracy, S&S Landscaping needed a way to document driver arrival and departure times at customer sites. They also wanted a better way to locate drivers in the field. Since installing Verizon Networkfleet’s GPS solution, the company can track its vehicles with precision, allowing it to automate much of the billing process while eliminating excessive calling to locate drivers, according to a Verizon Wireless case study.
Verizon IoT Networkfleet uses GPS to track assets
Source: S&S Landscaping
A Fargo, North Dakota-based business, S&S Landscaping provides residential and commercial landscaping services. Its service fleet includes snow-moving payloaders, skid steers, dump trucks, tractors with snowblowers and three large semitractor-trailers. S&S Landscaping selected Networkfleet for its GPS tracking and coverage as well as its geofence feature, which identifies when drivers arrive and how long they stay at specific locations.
Asset tracking means more accountability
Using geofences – user-defined virtual boundaries placed around a location or landmark – has changed the company’s billing process while making drivers more accountable, according to Jill Huber, retail manager for S&S Landscaping.
“Geofences can illustrate the time of arrival, time of departure and time spent on the job for each location,” Huber said. “By comparing geofence reports to driver time cards, we can accurately track driver hours, automate customer billing [and] reconcile driver/customer disagreements using reliable information documentation.”
Additional features, additional safety
Geofencing also assists S&S Landscaping with quality control. While working on a highway soil erosion project, for example, geofencing helped ensure the company serviced every drain.
Source: Verizon
“We realized we had skipped some drains because we could see where the vehicles had been,” Huber said. “This allowed us to go back and complete the job.”
Additionally, the company has found that its dispatchers rarely have to call drivers to determine their locations. This improves safety by eliminating the need for drivers to talk on their cellphones, and enables them to get to job sites faster.
And if a customer calls with a specific issue – to say their parking lot hasn’t been salted, for example – managers can verify when the driver was there and for how long.
“Thanks to geofencing, we now have timely billing and accurate documentation of jobs performed,” Huber said. “We no longer have to call to find lost vehicles, and our drivers get more work done in less time. Networkfleet has done exactly what we wanted it to do.”
Networkfleet benefits for geofencing
According to Verizon Networkfleet’s geofencing capabilities, S&S Landscaping has:
- Increased customer billing accuracy;
- Improved quality control and driver safety;
- Reduced fleet idle times;
- Increased driver accountability; and
- Virtually eliminated phone calls to locate vehicles.
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