Every delivery containing life-sustaining equipment must be delivered in less than four hours. That’s the goal that MedCare strives to meet when delivering emergency equipment.

MedCare, a Pennsylvania-based company that has been in business for more than 20 years, delivers medical equipment and supplies to medical centers and homes.

Prior to the implementation of a robust telematics solution, the company had an 80% success rate in delivering within the four-hour goal. After implementing a more robust telematics solution — via GPS Insight — that success rate has improved to 99%.

“Before we had this feature, our dispatchers would pick their favorite driver to go make an express delivery. That’s not always the best choice. That driver may not have the right equipment on the truck and they might be the farthest one away,” said Zac Shannon, network analyst for MedCare.

The way that MedCare improved its delivery times for life-sustaining equipment was by analyzing its past. MedCare used historical data on past deliveries and identified that there were some big inefficiencies in its four-hour deliveries. Often times, vehicles closer to a delivery’s address weren’t being prioritized as the one making the delivery over vehicles much farther to the end destination.

Route optimization was also something that propelled Parks and Sons of Sun City, Inc. to implement GPS Insight’s telematics solution into its operations. Located in Sun City, Arizona — a retirement community located north west of Phoenix (over 60,000 residents) — Parks and Sons is a family-owned waste and recycling hauling company that operates roughly 75 vehicles and has been in business for over 50 years.

One thing that many of its residential customers have come to expect from the company is consistency. Customers that have lived in the community for years expect their pickups at a certain day and at a certain time. Stray from that schedule and they will call to complain.Telematics data provided by GPS Insight has helped the company drivers stay on schedule.

Along with operational improvements, both companies have also achieved measurable cost-saving benefits through the use of telematics.

For all non-life-sustaining equipment deliveries, MedCare asked its drivers to essentially create their own routes every morning on paper. Drivers were provided the addresses of where they need to go, then it was then up to them to come up with their own routes. Prior to the implementation of GPS Insight, this morning ritual would take upwards of an hour to complete.

Spread this out across the roughly 80 drivers the company employs, and it quickly adds up to a lot of wasted time. Through the implementation of the GPS Insight telematics solution, drivers enter the addresses into the system and get optimized routes. This has cut down the manual process, getting drivers out the doors in 15 minutes on average. Over the course of their first year, the company recovered roughly 11,000 working hours.

The telematics solution also helped the company identify that a subset of some newly acquired drivers from recent company acquisitions were idling for four to six hours a day.

Being able to identify these drivers and cut idling down within that group saved MedCare about $35,000 in fuel costs.

For Parks and Sons, the route replay features provided by GPS Insight provided data that resulted in fuel savings of $150,000 in the first year.

“Fuel is our company’s fourth highest expense — so any marginal change in that cost significantly affects our bottom line,” said Shawn Parks, business manager, Parks & Sons.