For small businesses every penny is vital. With fuel costs esculating, it has never been more vital to ensure that your drivers take the most direct route - and therefore the most fuel efficent - when they are travelling on business.

TomTom WORK's mission is to provide practical, innovative and affordable solutions for the management and control of vehicle fleets of all sizes across all sectors. The company offers a range of fleet management solutions from basic vehicle tracking through to full connected navigation. The fully integrated solution includes vehicle tracking, two-way communication, job dispatch, user interface and reporting.

Whatever the size of fleet or the nature of the business, the TomTom WORK solution can deliver real and immediate efficiency improvements and savings. Customers report that driving distances can be reduced by 11%, fuel consumption by 15%, and phone costs by a startling 40%, resulting in real savings that go straight to the bottom line.

Measurable efficiency improvements lead to greater productivity and therefore greater profitability as the number of deliveries or jobs that can be made in a day increase. The result of all these savings and improvements is that the payback period can be as little as six to eight months, representing a good investment, particularly in these challenging times.

Lower mileages and fuel consumption also help to reduce a company's carbon footprint as well as delivering cost and time savings. And there are important benefits in meeting health and safety obligations, such as the Working Time Directive or Lone Worker legislation. Information from the systems can also gather data on business and private mileage that can be used to satisfy the tax authorities in relation to Benefit In Kind use of vehicles.

Best-in-class routing
TomTom's recent acquisition of Teleatlas, one of only two digital mapping companies in the world, puts the company in a prime position to deliver best-in-class routing. This has been used to develop unique technology such as Map Share^TM through which users share corrections to routes daily, resulting in the most accurate maps available. To date over five million corrections have been made and the service is absolutely free to TomTom WORK customers.

Development of IQ Routes and HD Traffic functions, translate directly into more accurate ETAs for business, which can help ensure that service level agreements are more easily met, customer satisfaction is improved, and time and fuel wasted sitting in traffic is minimised.

A recent development, specifically for commercial vehicle application, is the Truck Navigation solution. It features a specially developed algorithm to direct trucks away from unsuitable roads and works in conjunction with HGV route information such as bridge clearance heights, weight and road width restrictions. This can help truck operators avoid costly and time-consuming delays caused by the need to re-route as well as ensuring that their vehicles stay safe and within the law.

Key Performance Indicators
Earlier this year TomTom WORK launched a new reporting tool, the WEBFLEET Dashboard. This is easy to use, visually intuitive and presents performance measurements that are critical to the operations of a commercial vehicle fleet. With one single overview, the user sees trends and exceptions that help to monitor fleet policy, enabling quick decisions to be made when necessary. Additionally, users can create their own bespoke dashboards by specifying up to 15 different ‘Key Performance Indicators' in order to judge the performance of their business against its objectives.

Fleet operators considering introducing a telematics system should consider their choice of supplier carefully. Clearly you need to look at the technical capability of a system in relation to your needs. But you should also consider the track record of the company and look at things like how much is spent on product development.

TomTom WORK is a flexible and affordable vehicle management solution that can easily be tailored to any business circumstances and which is totally scalable so that it can adapt to the changing needs of today's business.

For more information visit www.tomtomwork.co.uk