A new research report published by the Aberdeen Group found that leading organizations are turning to companies like Intergis, Cranford, N.J., for GPS-enabled service workforce and fleet management solutions to drive efficiencies into their service organizations. Industry-leading service workforce companies rely on these solutions to maintain customer satisfaction levels and boost resource utilization levels while controlling service-related costs.
According to the research report, titled “Service Workforce and Fleet Management: Driving Utilization with Location Intelligence,” those companies are actively looking to increase visibility into all service resources via GPS.
“Organizations indicate that they currently monitor and track the location of 35 percent of their workers and 47 percent of their vehicles,” said Sumair Dutta, senior research analyst, Aberdeen Group. “This is up from averages of 23 percent for workers and 35 percent for vehicles in 2008 with indications of further investments in 2010. These results are indicative of the value offered by GPS-enabled tracking, navigation and routing solutions in meeting cost containment and customer management pressures faced by today’s service and manufacturing organizations.”
Intergis, a provider of mobile resource management and logistics solutions to SMB and enterprise companies, is used by American Signature Furniture, a major furniture manufacturer and distributor. According to the study, American Signature realized a 15 percent reduction in miles traveled per store and a 20 percent reduction in overtime for the delivery teams.
With the decreases, delivery workers now return to stores earlier and are able to complete additional tasks. As well, taking advantage of the enhanced routing made possible by the Intergis solution has yielded the company an 11 percent improvement in dollars of merchandise delivered per mile traveled. Additional findings in the Aberdeen Service Workforce and Fleet Management report indicate responding firms have experienced significant improvement in key service performance indicators since the adoption of GPS-enabled solutions:
On the average, respondents report a 32 percent increase in fleet utilization; a 22 percent decrease in fuel costs; a 31 percent drop in daily mileage; a 25 percent reduction in idle times; and a 23 percent boost in workforce productivity. The report also finds that leading service organizations are nearly two times as likely as all others to be leveraging fleet management applications and more than three times as likely to be using intelligent routing systems. In addition, leading firms are significantly more likely than all others to actively integrate captured location information and intelligence into their field service scheduling and parts management systems to drive overall service delivery efficiency.
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