Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry
LJN's Business Objectives Group (BOG) is for any Pro serious about building their business.
For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.
Replies
Look at the cost benefits first.
1/ Talk to your Broker and understand what, if any, discounts are available for a professionally installed Tracker
2/ Look at your fuel bill - what's average usage over a year / divided by 12. Ask to see or read any case studies to see potential savings. Whatever the figure is - half it.
3/ What's your operating area - geographical spread, is it practical/do you need to monitoe ?
4/ Do you believe you have a staff problem ? If so, maybe a valid option. If not, likely you can loose goodwill.
5/ Are you in a vehicle high- theft area. If using for that reason can you geo-fence the tracker etc, what response (if any) do you get from them or is it a self tracking system with alerts?
Our sums reckoned you need double digits of vans fior it to be a viable fuel saving solution if you have no inkling of a staff/downtime problem or other concerns.
We looked at the possiblity a ew years ago and discounted it. However, I have used a 'temp' tracker on one or two occasions to check (with staff;'s knowledge - which I suggest is a moral, if not legal requirement.)
Forgot to say, it does mitigate/provide a level of Duty of Care for lone workers under HSE guidelines.....
We use https://www.rewiresecurity.co.uk
Cost is around £50 per year per vehicle once you've purchased the trackers (first year is included in the subscription from memory). The front is powered by www.gpslive.co.uk and is excellent.
They are useful not only from a theft point of view but we use them to monitor our vans around the day and if a team is running late re-assign another to them.
You also need to let your drivers know that they are present.
As Gary says, is it worth losing the goodwill of your staff? No-one likes to feel they're being distrusted with "big brother" looking their shoulder all the time. It's worth thinking "Would I like it in their position?" .
We have trackers in most of our vehicles. No negative impact on good will re staff. Ours ar £13.95 pm inlcuding VAT. Helps meet HSE requirements re lone working, also enables us to monitor driver performance in a positve way - again duty of care to employees. In the event of an accident can provide support information re vehicle speed and driver behaviour at the time, we have used this to deal with a claim successfully. Saves fuel over a period of time improved driving behaviour leads to less eratic driving, speeding and braking.
We had a vehcile stolen and the tracker facilitated the police chase and enquiry - but we did not get the vehicle back sadly.
Aids customer service as we can advise customers if vehicles stuck in traffic and or late giving estimated time of arrival without bothering the driver.
All in all a positive thing to have - we believe.
Question for Nick / Richard : with your tracker solution do you have access to your own 'portal' in that you can see all your vans live on a single map, or do you log-in and out for each van/tracker ?
We log in on a single portal and can choose to see all of the vans or routes for a specific van. We can set up alerts for geo fencing, speeding, when the engine is started etc etc and will also tell us the voltage of the vans battery!
We tried this for a year. Our objective was mainly to improve journey planning efficiency, which it really helped with, thus reducing mileage and fuel bills. A secondary advantage, was that we we received a complaint like 'your guys were only on site for an hour' we could interrogate the system, and 9 times out of 10 prove to our client that they had got it wrong. At first the team were wary, but they saw the benefits too.
we ran the system for two years and then realised they had served their purpose and removed them just before Covid hit.
Summary - useful as a short term objective, but not long term.
Richard