Going mobile: Motorola survey reveals significant savings from GPS-enabled technologies
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/2/2008 1:02:00 PM
North American information technology (IT) decision makers within the transportation, manufacturing, and trucking/warehousing industries say global positioning system (GPS) technologies are essential tools for their mobile workforces.
A recent survey commissioned by Motorola finds GPS-enabled technologies are increasing mobile workforce productivity and enabling enterprises to become more efficient via a reduction in annual labor and fuel operating costs.
The main cited benefit in the nearly 50 percent of enterprises currently using GPS-enabled technologies was a significant reduction in fuel consumption, which was reflected in a reduction in travel distance by an average of 231.2 miles per week and recording $51,582 in annual fuel savings. With more than one million trucking carriers in the U.S., the potential industrywide annual fuel savings could reach $53 billion.
The study says enterprises deploying GPS-enabled technologies saved approximately 54 minutes per day, translating into an annual recouped labor savings of $5,484 per employee or approximately $5.4 million per surveyed enterprise. In addition to the cost savings, locationing applications were credited with improving the organization of employee routes, allowing companies to examine routing scenarios before implementation.
Surveyed companies say GPS solutions enable the mobile workforce to spend less time in traffic or finding routes, while increasing the amount of time spent with new or existing customers. In fact, when asked why they would consider investing in GPS or other new technologies, those surveyed cited customer service as the No. 1 priority.
The survey identified other key applications—namely navigation for improved on-time performance and route optimization. Both types of applications address the difficulties field mobility workers often have locating new stops during the course of their shift, and streamlining deliveries.
“Field mobility workers in the transportation and trucking industry are experiencing difficulties in locating stops, reducing fuel expense, and improving on-time performance—resulting in a drain on financial and manpower resources of their organization,” says Jim Hilton, director of field mobility, Motorola Enterprise Mobility business. “With nearly 200,000 mobile computers with integrated GPS shipped in recent years, Motorola continues to address the industry pain points that were identified in our research [of] field mobility solutions that enable our customers to do their jobs more efficiently and drive measurable business results.”
Motorola says its MC75 Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA) not only expands the company's portfolio of mobile computers with integrated GPS capability, but addresses support for voice and data services; high-performance bar-code data capture on both 1D and 2D bar codes; a high resolution 2 megapixel auto-focus color camera for a variety of image capture applications; 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN (WLAN); and high-resolution VGA display.
