State of the Fleet Management Market: Fair Rules = Fair Play

Daniel Morin resented GPS tracking when he worked for a lawn care company. “They tracked us every second of every day and if we went 37 miles per hour on a 35-mile-per-hour street, we were getting written up for it,” he recalls. That kind of micromanagement did not build trust, he says.

Today, the owner of All Green Pest Control in Indian Orchard, Mass., has mixed feelings about installing the technology in service trucks. “If I trust my people, I don’t think I should have to babysit them,” he says. At the same time, he sees value in monitoring vehicles as his fleet grows.

Technicians embrace GPS tracking when they see it backs them up, such as proving they were in fact at a property or nowhere near the scene of an accident. Tracy Rice of Rice Pest Control had an employee accused by an eyewitness of hitting a police car in a parking lot, but the technology proved the two vehicles were never in the lot at the same time.

“That one incident changed the whole outlook on the system,” recalls Rice.

Billy Blasingame, Blasingame Pest Management, says his team welcomes GPS tracking.

“We’ve had more instances where it’s really supported what a technician has said or done versus the opposite where we ended up terminating somebody as a result of it,” he says.