ForConstructionPros.com

Atlanta Sweeping Services, Atlanta, is a parking lot sweeping company with 46 employees and 27 Nite-Hawk sweeping trucks. The company's size pretty much necessitated a means to monitor sweeping and employee driving, says General Manager Jimmy Wettlaufer. As a solution, in 2006 the company integrated a GPS system into all 27 Nite-Hawk trucks.

The two main reasons influencing the use of GPS were controlling employees' speed and monitoring sweeping in case of customer complaints, Wettlaufer says.

"We limit our drivers to a certain fuel mileage requirement every night," Wettlaufer says. The GPS is reviewed every day by Operations Manager Nathan Walton to monitor drivers' speed and fuel consumption. Any driver not following the fuel mileage rule can then be quickly reprimanded, says Walton. Another benefit: GPS can help cut fuel costs through monitoring drivers and allowing management to stop drivers from bad driving habits that waste fuel.

GPS also allows management to verify if customer complaints are legitimate. "Before GPS, if an employee got a complaint, by the time we could get out to verify the complaint sometimes it would be 8 hours old. You can't justify that complaint. The GPS eliminated that problem," Wettlaufer says.

"Now we can overlay the GPS with Google Earth, and it pulls up the properties we sweep on each route," he adds. "It shows on the parking lots exactly where drivers went, how long they were there, and where they swept. We're not out there auditing routes, but the GPS is."