A Maryland-based heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) service company has cut its fuel costs and increased dispatching efficiency with a GPS-based fleet tracking solution.

Service Today, a multi-million dollar provider of HVAC, electrical, plumbing and pool and spa services, needed a way to better manage its fleet of 35 vehicles and manage rising fuel costs. While its previous dispatching system worked well, the company felt it could be doing more to improve efficiency and better route its technicians.

The company had already begun deploying a fleet management solution, but the vendor was taking too long to complete the project. New service manager Randy Bosley did some research and decided to switch to the Navtrak GPS tracking system.

"Navtrak had a lot of functions and features we were looking for, and they are based in Maryland," Bosley said. "The other company had not been very attentive to our needs. With Navtrak, we had a company rep and service technicians who were close to us."

Service Today provides same-day service for all customer calls, across a wide geographic area that includes parts of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. Previously, the company built a daily schedule for its technicians. As calls came in, new jobs were assigned on the fly. But dispatchers had no way of knowing exactly where the technicians were at any given time, and there was no accurate way of determining which technician would be able to respond the most quickly to any new jobs.

"You didn't have any way of knowing how far certain jobs were from one another, so you didn't think about how much driving was required of each driver," Bosley said. "As a result, guys were spending way too much time getting from job to job." With fuel costs rising, and labor (including drive time) billed at $25 per hour, Service Today was losing money to this inefficient process.

"We wanted to be more efficient," Bosley adds. "When we deployed the system, fuel prices were close to $3 per gallon. We wanted to cut some time out on the labor side, and possibly get some extra calls in each day by saving drive time."

Navtrak installed its GPS units on all 35 vehicles over two days. The dispatchers were retrained on the new system as well.

Now when calls come in, dispatchers can locate the technicians with the proper skill sets, and determine which is closest to the new call. The company's Jonas Software dispatching system sends the new assignments as a text message to the technicians' Verizon mobile phones.

"Before, we'd set up almost the entire day for the guys," Bosley said. "That worked fine, but when you have the tools that Navtrak gives you with the visual map, you can see where everybody is, look up the address and dispatch the closest technicians. It's basically on-demand dispatching."

Now that the system has been in place for 18 months, Service Today has been able to document significant savings through better tracking and dispatch. The Navtrak system has saved the company an average of 1.3 gallons of gas per day, per vehicle, adding $21,000 back to the bottom line in the first six months alone. Dispatchers can now do a more effective job of locating, routing and helping drivers with the Navtrak system.

Since the system was installed, Service Today has saved an average of 1,500 gallons of fuel per month, and seen its fuel costs decrease by approximately 13%. More effective dispatching saved the company more than $100,000 in labor during that same period.

"Revenue has gone up, and our payroll and fuel costs have gone down," Bosley said. "It's great to be able to say that."

Bosley also added a parts delivery person to the staff, so that technicians wouldn't have to come in to the office to pick up needed parts. The Navtrak system helps guide these deliveries, and saves technician down time. This has also improved parts inventory accuracy.

This improved performance also caught the attention of one of the major oil and gas providers in the region, which asked Service Today to take over its service operations in the area.

"They liked what we had in place in terms of dispatch and GPS tracking," Bosley said. "They could see that we were at the top of our game."

Fleet management topics will be addressed during the annual Asset Management Conference & Expo, January 22-23, 2008.