The crane hire industry is highly competitive. If you operate a crane hire company, you’re under considerable pressure to provide safe and high quality equipment, while at the same time identify efficiencies and reduce your overall costs.
Without the right systems in place, however, it can be very difficult to determine where - and how - your business could be operating more efficiently.
This is particularly the case when it comes to billing your customers for the time they utilised your crane and your crane operators or drivers.
If, like many crane hire companies, you rely on your employees completing manual job sheets to determine how much you should bill your customers, you are likely exposing your business to considerable financial risk.
What happens, for instance, if an employee can’t quite remember what time he arrived on site, or exactly what time he started work? Even if he arrived at 8.45am and started working immediately, he may simply just enter 9.00am on his job sheet out of habit. This is 15 minutes of his time - and use of your expensive equipment - that simply isn’t being on-charged to the customer.
Also, what happens if the same crane operator consistently rounds his hours up or down to the nearest 15 minutes? In your line of work, every 15 minutes of wet hire means considerable potential profit. If your employee makes a mistake on his job sheet, or consistently forgets to add an increment or two, you’re missing a significant revenue opportunity.
In your line of business, small increments can very quickly add up, and too many missed increments can become a big problem.
Similarly, any inaccuracies in your billing also have the potential to damage your client relationships. If a customer receives a bill for hours that don’t match the exact hours your operator spent on site, the customer may justifiably start to question your level of service and accuracy.
If you’re relying on a manual system, your profit is tied to the accuracy and honestly of your employees. These mistakes can be very costly.
How GPS tracking can help
With a crane vehicle tracking system in place, you can very easily and rapidly determine when a staff member arrives on a job site, as well as, what time they leave.
This means that you can confidently bill your customers for true hours, helping to eliminate the risk associated with hand-written job sheets.
An automated fleet management software also takes the manual data entry out of the process, which means greater accuracy and efficiency overall.
More importantly, it means you are billing your customer for true times and are far less likely to be losing money on inaccurate billing.
Also, if a customer disputes a bill, a GPS fleet tracking solution can help you provide them with data to resolve the issue.
Automated time stamps, can help you determine - with great accuracy - exactly when your vehicles are utilised, and what times your staff are working. This can help you earn greater revenue and provide a far more efficient way of working overall.
See how COSA Crane reduced their crane company costs with Fleetmatics vehicle tracking solution.
You can also can check out Cosa Cranes' fleet of plant and equipment available for hire with PlantMiner here.
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