Fleet Tracking and Management for Plumbing Contractors

If you’re in the market for a plumbing fleet tracking system, there are two main types of software available:

1. GPS fleet tracking and management apps: Software made for the sole purpose of fleet tracking and management. These solutions generally provide real-time location data for your vehicles, and diagnostic data to help stay on top of maintenance.

2. Plumbing contractor software with fleet tracking: Holistic business software that offers fleet management in addition to the other digital tools plumbing businesses use. For example, CRM, scheduling and dispatching, estimates and proposals, technician mobile app, timesheets and payroll, and more.

While apps dedicated solely to fleet tracking offer considerable benefits to plumbing companies, they fall short in comparison to integrated plumbing contractor software that includes fleet tracking.

The drawbacks include:

• The necessity for plumbing businesses to adopt another software, which involves mastering a new user interface, and dealing with another provider for payments and support.

• Fleet management solutions often won’t integrate seamlessly with the other apps you use to run your business, such as your CRM, dispatching, or payroll systems. 

• Decreased workflow efficiency due to staff having to switch between multiple, disconnected platforms, leading to wasted time and increased overhead costs.

As a result, many plumbing contractors can benefit more from holistic plumbing software solutions like ServiceTitan, which offers built-in fleet tracking and management through Fleet Pro.

In this article, we’ll explain how ServiceTitan Fleet Pro streamlines fleet tracking and management, and seamlessly connects these processes to surrounding plumbing business workflows. 

The Key Challenges That Fleet Pro Solves for Plumbing Businesses

Vehicles are some of the most valuable assets in any plumbing business. Without a fleet tracking system, plumbing companies lack crucial information about:

• The exact location of their vehicles during the day

• Upcoming vehicle maintenance requirements

• Potential or imminent vehicle component failures

Moreover, without this technology, owners and managers of plumbing businesses are unable to monitor their technicians' driving behavior. This means they're in the dark about:

• The safety of their plumbers’ driving habits

• Compliance with company-driving policies (e.g. no cellphones, smoking, eating while driving, etc.)

• Whether there have been any driving accidents, incidents, or close calls

These are just some of the problems that a fleet-tracking solution like ServiceTitan Fleet Pro can solve for plumbing businesses, allowing you to extend the life of your vehicles (and protect your bottom line) through timely preventative maintenance, as well as monitor driver behavior to ensure your technicians are held accountable for having safe driving habits.

Now, let’s look at how Fleet Pro works, and how it ties into the rest of ServiceTitan. 

How Plumbing Fleet Tracking and Management Works In ServiceTitan

GPS Vehicle Tracking: Track Your Entire Fleet at All Times

With Fleet Pro’s GPS tracking, business owners and dispatchers can see a live map of where every plumbing technician's vehicle is throughout the day, including where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re going.

In the left-hand column, you can see at-a-glance vehicle data such as the last GPS timestamp, current address, and last known traveling speed of the vehicle. By clicking on an individual vehicle card, you can access a complete “breadcrumb” trail of where that vehicle has been.

This data gives business owners, managers, and dispatchers full visibility into the usage and location of their vehicles. So, when they want to investigate a particular issue such as a potential accident, or a delay that led a technician to show up an hour late for a service call, they have the data they need to figure out what was going on, when, and where.

In addition, companies have the option to set up geofencing, which allows you to: 

• Create unique and custom geographic boundaries within North America. 

• Create alerts to get notifications for whatever vehicle activity happens in that area.

By setting up a geofence for each technician’s home, companies can see when their techs arrive at or leave their home with the company truck. Or, by setting up geofences at your local supplier locations, companies can see how often (and for how long) technicians are visiting your suppliers. Whatever specific locations you wish to track, you can do so with geofencing. 

Technician Driving Data: Monitor Speeding Events, Hard Braking, and More

In addition to gaining visibility into where your vehicles are, Fleet Pro also provides data into how your vehicles are being driven. This allows businesses to hold their technicians accountable for driving safely, treating their vehicles properly, and representing their brand appropriately while on the road. 

Fleet Pro measures driving data such as:

• Distance traveled

• Drive time

• Idling time

• Speeding

• Hard braking

• Acceleration

• Harsh cornering

• Accidents

• Fuel consumption

Businesses can even set up scorecards to track these driving statistics for individual technicians: 

With this information, service business owners and managers can see which technicians are driving safely and which aren’t. And they can use this data to coach technicians who need to drive more carefully, ultimately improving driver safety across the field staff. 

Vehicle Camera Data: Monitor Driver Behavior and Document Incidents

For more insight into how your vehicles are being driven and treated, Fleet Pro offers dashcam functionality that will record events taking place inside and outside of your vehicles. 

With this feature, in addition to the driving statistics discussed above (speeding, hard braking, etc.), businesses can also monitor whether or not technicians are following company policies while driving. 

For example, if you have rules for not eating, using cellphones, or smoking while driving, our dashcams can pick up and alert you when this behavior is taking place. It can also trigger a beeping sound that lets technicians know they’re doing something they shouldn’t be, which can decrease the prevalence of the issue and help prevent accidents. 

The dashcam also includes a forward-facing camera. This way, if an incident or accident occurs, it’s documented. Managers have the information they need to determine who is at fault. And companies can also receive insurance discounts for installing these dashcams.

All of these clips can be accessed through the camera data section of Fleet Pro, where you can view details such as when and where each event happened. 

Vehicle Diagnostic Data: Prevent Breakdowns and Improve Fleet Maintenance

Lastly, Fleet Pro provides plumbing companies with detailed insights into the health of every vehicle in their fleet. Telematics tracking devices monitor vehicle diagnostic data such as battery charge, exhaust issues, electronic component malfunctions, sensor problems, and more.

Instead of finding out about vehicle issues before it’s too late, businesses can receive real-time alerts when a vehicle needs maintenance or has a failing part or system. With this information, plumbing services can prevent downtime of vehicles, tailor vehicle maintenance schedules, and keep operating costs down by preventing vehicle system failures within their fleet.

How Fleet Pro Seamlessly Integrates Fleet Management with Surrounding Plumbing Business Workflows 

As we discussed above, the biggest advantage of using Fleet Pro instead of standalone fleet- or asset-tracking software is that it can be accessed from the same platform where your office and field staff are already operating, and it integrates seamlessly with surrounding workflows such as dispatching and payroll.

For example, as Fleet Pro tracks your technicians throughout the day, the ServiceTitan dispatch board is automatically updated according to technician statuses, and dispatchers can use their real-time location data to better communicate with customers about technician ETAs (creating better customer experiences!), as well as make informed decisions and schedule adjustments on the fly to avoid delays getting to job sites. 

Furthermore, Fleet Pro’s proprietary Automated GPS Timesheets Integration intelligently updates technician timesheets according to GPS data, saving you time and protecting you from excess wages or wage theft claims.

Then that data automatically flows into your payroll and accounting systems without the need for manual or duplicate data entry into multiple platforms. 

Automation such as these can save office staff significant time, prevent errors that can affect profitability, and help plumbing businesses scale operations more efficiently and effectively. 

Want to See These Features in Action?

For a free, live, one-on-one walk-through of the features we describe throughout this article, schedule a call today. We can walk you through our Fleet Pro product in addition to the other foundational features of ServiceTitan that have been tailored specifically for the plumbing industry.