Trucking remains one of the most popular blue-collar jobs in America with roughly 3.5 million people driving rigs daily. As trucking showcases its resilience, even in the face of the pandemic, smart business owners in the trucking space know that given today’s conditions, their freight has never been more vulnerable.
Desperation leads to crime and crime in trucking means theft. With cargo theft costing shippers up to 30 billion dollars per year during normal times, extra precautions are being taken in 2020 and beyond to limit that exposure.
Enter trailer tracking technology.
Trailer tracking has emerged as one of the most trendy devices in logistics. If you own a truck or a fleet of trucks and are curious to know more about trailer tracking and why it has become prevalent, keep reading to discover more.
Trailer Tracking – Defined
When you pull out your cellphone and use your GPS to locate where you are on a map, your cellphone’s internal tech bounces signals off of satellites. How those signals bounce give satellites the information they need to pinpoint you within a few feet of your location.
Trailer tracking leverages that same technology.
A trailer tracker is a small device that fleet owners discreetly place on the bottom of their trailers. These trackers leverage adhesives to stay in place and then constantly ping satellites to aggregate location data. Once that data is pulled in, trailer trackers re-transmit it to your trucking company’s data-bank which then illustrates your truck’s location on a map.
That process enables truck owners to, second by second, see where their trailer is at.
What if You Swap Trailers?
Anybody who trucks knows that occasionally, trailers need to get left at yards or swapped via “drop and hooks.” In these cases, you can remove your trailer tracker and place it on the new trailer you’re going to be pulling or you can affix your trailer tracker to your tractor rather than your trailer.
That way, you’ll know the location of anything that gets hitched to your company vehicle.
Why Fleets Love Trackers
By this point, we hope you’ve thought up some compelling reasons as to why a GPS trailer tracker makes sense. To help make sure you understand all of the most common use cases, our team has compiled what we see as the five most valuable reasons trailer trackers are loved.
Here they are:
Driver Monitoring
It can be hard to keep drivers on task. That’s particularly true if you have large fleets of trucks picking up and dropping off loads across multiple locations.
Having trailer trackers on your trucks enables you to see the routes drivers are taking, how often they’re stopping and if they’re performing in the fashion you need them to.
Without tracking trailers, you’d be left in the dark when it comes to several details surrounding your employee/contractor’s performance.
Theft Protection
Imagine your driver parked to pick up a meal late at night. They step out of their truck, go inside to order food, and by the time they get out, their truck and trailer are gone.
What would you do?
Beyond calling the police, with trailer tracking enabled, you’d be able to quickly pinpoint your equipment’s and cargo’s location which would be vital in avoiding or limiting your losses.
Lowered Insurance Rates
Truck insurance that covers cargo is expensive. If you have trailer tracking on your truck, you may find that your rates drop.
The less risk your insurance company feels they’re taking on when insuring you, the less they’ll charge you. Since trailer tracking enables you to quickly determine the location of stolen property, insurers will see that as a huge mitigation of their risk.
Customer Updates
Do you have customers that are constantly pinging you for updates on where cargo is? Rather than constantly texting or taking those calls, you can enable them to tap into your trailer tracker’s GPS data which will show them where your drivers are.
That saves business owners from needing to play the role of constant information purveyors and frees them up to focus their efforts on growing their businesses.
Data Analytics
As GPS data pours in from data trackers and into applications that let you know where your trailers are, some applications will store that data. With that data in hand, you could theoretically figure out which routes drivers are taking that are most effective, where bottlenecks exist, and how best to streamline your logistics solutions.
Data is power in logistics. By leveraging that power to make just one or two adjustments, you may find yourself better able to serve customers and capable of increasing your bandwidth to pull in more money.
Saved routes can also be showcased to new drivers for training purposes.
Trailer Tracking Tech Is Equipment You Can’t Afford to Not Have
With a small upfront investment for your tracking device and a nominal monthly investment to have a company capture GPS data, you can start tracking your fleet’s trailers. After having gone through the information we’ve shared with you, we hope you can understand the value in that.
Bottom line, trailer tracking offers trucking companies an opportunity to save and make money. Out team implores you to choose to leverage that technology to achieve those ends and continue to follow it as it improves!
Curious to learn more about how to trailer track? Have other questions on expanding your business? If you do, browse more travel, logistics, and similar content on our blog.