Town tests employee tracking

Moorcroft Councilwoman Heidi Humpal has been pushing for plug-in GPS tracking tools in all town-owned highway vehicles.

“We’ve been discussing it back and for the for a while and we just want to be able to track some work progress, looking at different things that there may be questions about – it’ll just be real easy to tell for more productivity,” she said.

Her fellow councilmen agreed at last week’s regular meeting to a trial period.

The town will be ordering and installing the simple plug-in tracking systems for the maintenance and police vehicles, eight in all.

Humpal apprized the governing body of the positive results other companies have had with the system.

“The positives to having GPS in your fleet include factual fuel tracking, driver’s speed and location in case of questions regarding incidents, increased productivity, employee compliance, it reduces down time, decreases the number of unnecessary trips – we’ll be able to deem if they are necessary or not, and at budget time, we would have absolute data regarding areas of need like more or fewer workers,” she said.

She explained the monthly charge of $2000 is a relatively small amount for the potential benefit in savings to the town. “I know personally some companies here that use it and it has made a huge difference in what’s going on with having facts.”

The trial will probably begin in April, according to Councilwoman Heidi Humpal. “We’re just tidying up some details with the company we’re going to go with…then we’ll get them ordered and installed. I think it’s going to be a great thing for the town to have in our vehicles.”

The trial period is a month-to-month service allowing the council to discontinue the application at any time, but the council has about a year to see the results before making a contractual decision.