How to Manage Highly Mobile Employees. Boosting Profits with Cell Phone GPS.

Imagine a company like UPS, Federal Express or DHL. They take your package, pass it through dozens of hands, trucks and planes - and it ends up at its destination the next day. Flawlessly most of the time.

Imagine your small business. You've got a fleet of vehicles. Products to keep track of. Employees to keep track of. However, unlike some businesses your employees don't necessarily have to report to an office and clock in. Ideally they should be with clients and/or on the road. Your product go in and out and warehouses and your vehicles could be anywhere in your state or traveling from state to state.

With this kind of scenario you really need a comprehensive solution to help you manage things.

One solution is Xora, with their suite of solutions you can manage your vehicles, your products and your mobile work force.

Focusing on the later, they have a neat solution to enable your team to use their cell phones to "clock in" and "clock out". This solution also links to payroll.

For example, maybe your consultants are paid based on the time they spend with clients on a particular job. Instead of them wasting time filling out reams of paper work (so old school) they can instead use their cell phones to indicated when they are beginning a particular job and when they've finished.

Although you might never see them, you know where they are and when, due to the cell phone's GPS.

When you've got to squeeze every bit of profit out of your business and compete with China, India and the guy down the block - technology like this can make the difference.

You can consider technology an EXPENSE or consider it can investment and a way to MAKE you money in the near, mid or long term.

Xora's solutions, TimeTrack and ADP's ezLaborManager has brought real results for its clients - such as R&J Construction. R&J has eliminated the paper-based timesheet and project status recording process from each worker's routine, creating an additional 12 hours of billable time every week. As timesheet data is now captured and transferred automatically between GPS TimeTrack and ezLaborManager, R&J office staff is spared the task of entering data into the payroll system. The result will be a time savings of more than 150 hours in 2007. That's REAL money that can go back into corporate development.

R&J also has reduced its vehicle mileage reimbursement costs since deploying Xora and ADP. What was once a manual process fraught with human error, is now a tamper-proof system that is saving R&J approximately six-thousand dollars per month.

Equally important, job-costing at R&J has never been more accurate. Access to specific information about how much time each worker is spending on every job enables R&J to estimate the cost of future jobs with greater precision.

And, lastly, ezLaborManager's powerful labor reporting capabilities allows R&J to easily document and defend itself against any employee grievances, while ensuring that the company remains compliant with federal and state hour and wage regulations.

If you're looking for ways to due more with less and boost profits while revenues stay relatively flat technology like this can help.

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