GPS Tracking for Field Service Teams: What to Track, What to Skip, and How to Calculate ROI

GPS tracking for field teams gets a bad reputation because most companies implement it wrong. They buy a fleet tracking system, install it in the vans, and use it primarily to check whether their techs are actually where they say they are. That’s surveillance, not management — and your team will resent it.

Done right, GPS tracking is an operations tool. It feeds data into your dispatch decisions, proves your service delivery to customers, reduces fuel costs, and gives you visibility you can’t get any other way once you’re running more than five or six vehicles.

Let’s talk about what’s worth tracking, what’s a waste, and how to calculate whether the investment pays off.

What GPS Tracking Actually Does for Field Service

Forget the sales pitch about “real-time fleet visibility.” Here’s where GPS data creates tangible value:

Smarter Dispatch Decisions

When an emergency call comes in at 2pm, your dispatcher needs to know which tech is closest, which tech is about to finish their current job, and which tech is heading in the right direction. Without GPS, this requires phone calls — interrupting techs who are mid-job to ask “where are you and how long until you’re done?”

With live location data, the dispatcher sees the answer on screen. No calls, no interruptions, better decisions. For a company handling 5-10 emergency or same-day requests per day, this alone saves 30-60 minutes of dispatcher time and gets techs to urgent jobs faster.

Route Optimisation

Your techs are not logistics professionals. Left to their own devices, they’ll drive to jobs in the order they were assigned, not the order that minimises drive time. For a tech doing 5-6 jobs per day across a metro area, the difference between a random route and an optimised one can be 30-60 minutes of windscreen time.

GPS tracking combined with route optimisation software reorders the day’s jobs based on location, traffic, and appointment windows. The tech follows the suggested route. Over a team of 10 techs, saving 30 minutes of drive time per day per tech adds up to 25 hours per week — that’s essentially a free tech’s worth of productive time.

Geofencing

Geofencing creates virtual boundaries around job sites, depots, or customer locations. When a vehicle enters or exits the boundary, the system logs it automatically.

Practical uses for field service:

• Automatic time tracking. Vehicle arrives at site, clock starts. Vehicle leaves, clock stops. No manual entry, no forgotten timesheets, no disputes about hours on site.
• Customer notifications. Tech enters the geofence around the customer’s suburb — an automatic “your technician is nearby” text goes out. No dispatcher involvement.
• Site compliance. For commercial or government contracts that require sign-in/sign-out logs, geofence data provides an automatic, GPS-verified attendance record.
• Depot monitoring. Know when vehicles leave in the morning and return in the evening. Spot the van that leaves 20 minutes late every day without singling anyone out — the data speaks for itself.

Fuel and Vehicle Cost Reduction

GPS data reveals driving behaviour — harsh braking, excessive idling, speeding, and unnecessary detours. You’re not trying to police your techs’ driving. You’re trying to reduce the $1,200-$1,800 per vehicle per month you’re spending on fuel, maintenance, and wear.

A 10-15% reduction in fuel costs from better routing and reduced idle time is realistic. For a 10-vehicle fleet, that’s $15,000-$20,000 per year — often enough to pay for the tracking system two or three times over.

What NOT to Track

Here’s where companies go wrong and damage team trust in the process.

Don’t track personal vehicle use after hours. If your techs take the van home, turn off tracking outside work hours or make it clear that after-hours data isn’t monitored. Nothing destroys trust faster than a manager commenting on where a tech went on Saturday.

Don’t use speed data for discipline. Speed data is useful for fleet safety trends. It’s destructive when used to write up individuals for doing 67 in a 60 zone. Use it in aggregate — “our fleet average speed has crept up, let’s talk about it as a team” — not as a gotcha.

Don’t micromanage stop durations. A tech who stops at a petrol station for 8 minutes doesn’t need a phone call. A tech who’s consistently taking 90-minute lunch breaks when they’re allowed 30 is a performance conversation, but it’s one you should have based on job completion data, not GPS surveillance.

How to Roll It Out Without a Mutiny

The difference between a tracking rollout that works and one that triggers a mass resignation comes down to framing.

Frame it as a dispatch tool, not a surveillance tool. “We’re implementing GPS so dispatch can assign emergency jobs faster without calling you mid-job” lands completely differently from “we’re installing trackers in the vans.”

Show techs how it helps them. Route optimisation means less driving and more billable work. Automatic time tracking means no more filling out timesheets. Geofence-based customer notifications mean fewer “where are you?” calls from customers.

Be transparent about what you will and won’t use the data for. Put it in writing. “We will use location data for dispatch decisions, route planning, and customer ETAs. We will not use it to monitor individual driving behaviour or after-hours movements.” Then stick to it.

Start with volunteers. If you’ve got techs who are keen on the technology, start with their vehicles. Let them report back to the team on whether it’s actually useful. Peer endorsement is worth more than any management announcement.

Calculating the ROI

GPS tracking typically costs $25-$50 per vehicle per month for hardware and software. Here’s how to figure out if it pays:

Fuel savings. Take your current monthly fuel spend per vehicle. Multiply by 0.10 to 0.15 (10-15% reduction). That’s your conservative fuel saving.

Time savings from better routing. Estimate minutes saved per tech per day (usually 20-40 minutes). Multiply by your effective hourly rate to get the value of recovered productive time.

Dispatch efficiency. Count how many calls your dispatcher makes per day to locate techs. Multiply by average call duration (2-3 minutes). That’s dispatcher time recovered.

Reduced unauthorised use. If you have vehicles being used outside business hours, tracking typically reduces this quickly once people know it’s monitored. Hard to quantify in advance, but often significant.

For a 10-vehicle operation spending $3,500/month on fuel with techs billing at $120/hour, the maths usually looks like this:

• Fuel savings: $350-$525/month
• Productive time recovered (30 min/tech/day): $6,000/month in billable capacity
• Dispatcher time: $500/month
• Tracking cost: -$400/month
• Net benefit: $6,450-$6,625/month

The productive time recovery is always the biggest number, but it’s also the hardest to realise — you need to actually fill those recovered minutes with billable work, which means your dispatch and scheduling need to be good enough to use the extra capacity.

Choosing a System

For basic fleet tracking, standalone systems like Teletrac Navman, Fleet Complete, or Verizon Connect cover the fundamentals — live location, route history, geofencing, and basic reporting. They cost $30-$50 per vehicle per month and work well for companies that just need visibility.

The limitation of standalone trackers is that they’re isolated data. You get a map of where your vehicles are, but it doesn’t connect to your dispatch, your job management, or your customer communication. You’re looking at a screen instead of making phone calls, which is better, but it’s still a manual process.

The real value comes when location data feeds directly into your operational systems — automatically assigning the nearest qualified tech, triggering customer notifications based on proximity, logging billable time from site arrival to departure, and feeding drive time data into your job costing. That integration is where GPS tracking stops being a monitoring tool and starts being an operations tool.

If your existing field service platform offers GPS tracking, start there. The integration is built in. If you need tracking that connects to systems your platform doesn’t talk to, that’s where custom integration makes the difference between data you look at and data that drives decisions.