Steve Sutherland, MiXTelematics
Director Sales, RSA and Africa
Industr y Insight |
by Stephen Mathews
Price Pressure
and Good Business
Businesses are starting to behave in similar patterns to pressured consumers, says Steve Sutherland, MiXTelematics
Director Sales, RSA and Africa. The upshot is that, just like the stressed consumer, not all decisions taken in the short
term price pressure environment are the best ones.
“Current pressure and instability such as rising labour costs,
petrol costs, e-tolls, the carbon emissions tax, etc, are causing
our customer market to look where they can cut spend.”
Understandably so, he agrees, but the bigger question that arises
is “whether they are positioning themselves securely for the future”.
He says much like the harried consumer picking up a reduced
offer at Woolies - who may feel they are getting a good deal - the
perceived value is only price
driven.
You can record all the relevant info on after-hours deliveries and
then plan whether to go that route, and achieve both a quicker
turnaround on the delivery cycle as well as reduce associated fleet
size and costs.
“A fleet manager trying to plan without all that information available
to him is simply going to find that the cheap price he bought into is
going to come back to bite him again and again.” It’s an impressive
list of data one has to admit, but
how does it translate into a usable
product?
Petrol is a deciding factor in our
business, he elaborates, so the
Fleet Manager looks around and
says, where can I cut costs?
“
“What they get from us is an
integrated information package
monitored and interpreted free
by a consultant with years of
experience in the business that we
provide at no cost. Our intellectual
property is constantly growing,
and constantly being integrated.
It’s no more just a simple
spreadsheet that the client has to
make sense of. We break it down
and it’s available on the executive
dashboard, and crucially, on
mobile devices immediately. Fleets
need this information to perform
optimally, but often don’t realise it
What am I going
to not do, he asks
himself.
”
Resistance from an already
struggling end user means
➲ With a simple tracking device, you can’t integrate the information
increasingly he cannot pass
that comes through later with further refinements - and so you can’t
grow with the platform – says MixTelematics’ Steve Sutherland
these rising costs onto the
consumer, so a less pricey
tracking option starts to look attractive. But in the long term, and
until we show them graphically.”
even in the medium and short term, the real value of a premium
Using a pie chart, the RFA numbers make the issue clear.
tracking programme returns many times more than the short term
The combined cost for fuel, oil, tyres and maintenance for a
savings he’s contemplating.
standard bakkie sits at under 39 per cent of total costs. For a
Knowing where your driver is, whether he has stopped or detoured,
Superlink, this jumps to over 60 per cent. If you bring these costs
or smuggled his own load, as well as his driving behaviour, are
down, there are other benefits – a better insurance premium - and
incalculable in cost saving for an operation in the long run.
of course, the luxury of filtering and keeping better drivers with
a solid pay package because driver costs are down to a relative
Driver performance is a huge cost cutter, but there are other
16 per cent from 33 per cent with a bakkie.
factors. A camera on board gives you visual proof of congestion on video - that matches up exactly with your time analysis. Or you
The improved driver profile feeds back into your costs,
may need to know if your driver is still in the distribution zone, or
so a virtuous cycle is created. The whole operation
why he is spending longer there than usual.
is streamlined and the refinements are so effective
You can look at turnaround times and at blockages in the delivery
cycle, which often mean extra trucks, adding massively to costs
and completely throwing out the streamlining of your operation.
| logistics in action
that they pay out hugely with a likely return on your
money in 18 months, Sutherland concludes.
79
april 2014