Saving $40,000 In Idling Costs By Converting To SageQuest
GPS tracking might seem like a pretty basic concept – put a VTU in a truck, see it on a map. But in today’ s market, leading companies are finding out a dirty secret – better products that deliver next generation functionality are emerging at better prices. And the insights they deliver are mission critical – and well beyond track and trace functionality.
Midwest Underground Technology (MUTI), a leader in telecommunication construction, is ranked as one of the top 5,000 fastest growing companies in the United States for the past 10 years. The quality of their work and the satisfaction of their customers have helped their business continue to grow, and they’ ve been adding vehicles to their fleet.
But the vendor they relied on for years required that they purchase hardware up front to install in each new vehicle they added to the fleet, and those costs were adding up bigtime. And that wasn’ t the only issue – their previous vendor didn’ t operate on a real-time basis. With a full five minutes between updates, the accuracy of the map was completely unreliable. Even worse, because the system they formerly relied on wasn’ t designed to make insights and performance trends easy to understand, it masked expensive and risky long-term problems. That’ s when they reached out to SageQuest.
Big results happen fast
After contacting SageQuest, MUTI was able to get up and running with a new system in a little less than a month. The best part? Not having to pay any hardware costs for their 84 vehicle fleet. With all in pricing, and no installation or training fees, they were up and ready to go for one simple monthly price. As their business grows, they don’ t have to tack on unnecessary costs for hardware they’ ll just have to replace – SageQuest takes care of all of it.
But getting business results was the most important goal. To stay ahead of the competition and keep costs low for customers, they needed a system that made it easy to get business insights without having to search. After just one week with SageQuest, MUTI uncovered a problem that had gone unnoticed in all their years with NavTrak – excessive idling. In only 7 days, the company’ s trucks had idled more than 259 hours and 52 minutes, burning more than 180 gallons of fuel. If that had been allowed to continue, it would have cost MUTI nearly $40,000 in completely wasted fuel for the entire year – the average salary of a full time employee. “We were absolutely shocked when we saw the numbers, and our company president promptly started enforcing new rules about idling when he saw how much money it was really costing the company. SageQuest immediately paid for itself", states Mott.
Next generation functionality delivers next generation insight with accuracy and mobility NavTrak created two big problems at MUTI. One was that employees knew they couldn’ t trust the accuracy of the system because it had a lengthy delay between updates. Two was that it didn’ t deliver easy to understand insights, much less allow mobile access to key information. Because employees knew they couldn’ t trust the system, they began to use it less and less. They knew they it couldn’ t reliably tell them where their guys were, much less help them identify long-term performance trends like idling and start times. But now that they have SageQuest, which provides real-time insight about what’ s going on, staff know have a system they can trust. They depend on it to make better decisions, faster. Because SageQuest boils data down to the most important facts to run a better fleet, MUTI has benefited quickly from their conversion – and expects to continue to find more ways to save.
Better yet, SageQuest lets them take these insights with them anywhere with SageQuest Mobile. A fully functioning mobile app for both iPhone and Android, MUTI managers rely on it heavily in the field. It delivers important, accurate insights that help them stay on top of what’ s going on when they aren’ t in the office. Mott explains, “With the mobile app, field managers love how they can quickly figure out what has happened in a driver’ s day without having to call the office and ask questions. It makes it so much faster to solve problems when they need to find a guy for an emergency job".
“Converting to SageQuest was a pretty simple choice once we understood all the benefits. Once our executives saw that we were getting a better product, at a lesser cost, they decided to make the change immediately", explains Mott.
