Brian Ryan, director of product marketing at Navman, seems happy to talk about commercial vehicle tracking solutions even though he says he is minutes away from rushing for a flight to the UK.

Ryan has every reason to sound happy – after all this is a market that is growing by about 40% to 50% per year. What’s more, he claims, the pace of growth is so fast purely because businesses are getting a return on their investment. “Apart from whether you want it in pink or blue it’s not an emotional purchase. We are able to say that we can save you this amount of money per day, or per month. We can provide tangible returns that our customers can see in the first month.”

The Navman company is divided into three parts; the marine, handheld (consumer car) navigation, and the wireless business solutions division. Navman’s wireless business solution consists of a tracking device and a PC application which can track and report on the performance history of a fleet of vehicles and/or their drivers. Add-ons allow communication between the office and vehicle, remote diagnostic monitoring and more.

Apart from the maps, it’s pretty much the same offering all over the world. According to Navman it allows dispatchers to review drivers’ behaviours and manage issues such as excessive personal miles, over speeding or idling of vehicles. The company says the real saving comes when you can review the performance of your vehicles and make efficiency changes for the long term, but there are short term efficiency and productivity gains to be made too. Dispatching the nearest vehicle to a site for example.

Navman’s wireless business solution is usually run as a standalone application, though it can be integrated into other systems if need be.

“If you wanted to extract job acceptances and roll them into SAP say, then there are third party software integrators that can do that but it’s a fairly small, niche part of the business,” says Ryan.

Locate+ product manager Eitan Silverman, says Locate+, which is Telecom’s re-branded version of Navman, is beginning to appeal strongly to companies in the five to 10 employees range. Such companies used to consider the cost of Locate+ would be out of their reach but they are changing their minds, Silverman says “mainly due to the price of petrol going up almost on a daily basis.”

With oil prices as they are, the costs incurred by drivers who are travelling at excessive speeds or who are making more than reasonable out-of-hours use of their vehicles have become a huge burden on companies. Avoiding these costs also helps to make the ROI for Locate+ look more attractive.

Another benefit of Locate+ is that it allows companies to prove to their customers that contracted service levels are being met. You can prove that a vehicle arrived on site as per the agreed time for example.

Meanwhile, traffic congestion in the major centres is also helping to make the case for packages like Locate+ as an aid to efficiency in the navigational sense.

“A lot of our customers are in the service industries and typically they might charge staff out at say $65 an hour. But they can’t usually charge for time spent stuck in traffic so anything that can tell drivers the best way to get from A to B while stopping off at C and D is therefore going to make sense.”

Silverman claims that after they have installed Locate+ it is “not unusual” for companies which used to achieve around four chargeable hours in an 8-hour day to reach five or six hours chargeable.

But what are your drivers going to think? Silverman admits that staff reaction is a “definite concern” for many companies but his advice is to be “totally up front” with employees. “Show them the app, show them the reports, show them that the dispatcher knows how much fuel they’ve used and where they’ve been.”

Silverman agrees that speed reporting is a feature that might be viewed with some suspicion by staff but he knows of one trucking company where performance reporting has been turned into an informal gathering over a few beers. The drivers who have performed best are awarded vouchers while the worst ‘offenders’ get booby prizes.

While Locate+ provides no more or less functionality than an ordinary Navman system Silverman says the main advantages of going through Telecom are that you only get one bill, and one service provider providing everything from connectivity to leasing.

Jeremy McLean, a director of Snitch, says his company’s Armada system is a tracking tool rather than an in-vehicle navigation system While other systems might show the position of a vehicle five or 15 minutes ago, McLean says Armada operates almost in real time, giving the dispatcher the accurate position of every vehicle every 15 seconds. This means that a dispatcher can tell from the screen if a vehicle is only travelling at 10 km/h along a certain stretch of motorway and so can warn other drivers to avoid that route.

The relative simplicity of the in-vehicle hardware means Armada is affordable for any size of company according to McLean, and the package is proving to be popular in service industries such as cleaning firms, electricians or plumbers.

As for the ROI, McLean claims that one customer, a company with 20 vehicles, decided to install Armada in half of its fleet as a trial. Before the end of the first day the firm rang up to order the other ten.

For more information visit the Mobile Business Research Pavilion

August 2006