Cobb County Fleet Saves Big.  

Cobb County Fleet Management has a tough job. The group oversees a fleet of 2,600 vehicles that keep Georgia’s third-largest county running smoothly. Those vehicles support 13 different departments across the county, which in turn serve a citizenship of over 766,000. This is a tall order when it comes to management and organization.  

“We face tremendous challenges maintaining a county this size,” said Bill Shelton, former maintenance division manager for Cobb County Fleet Management. “We have a high level of expectation from our citizens. Elected officials demand that we respond immediately and give the taxpayers a dollar’s worth of service for a dollar’s worth of tax.”

To meet those demands, Cobb County needed to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. But the telematic system they were using for fleet oversight wasn’t providing the flexibility needed to make fast, effective decisions.

Cobb County’s existing fleet management program was cumbersome. Hardwired GPS units offered limited reporting, weren’t cost-effective, and were complicated to install. Fleet managers needed a more flexible, easy-to-use solution.

“Our T-Mobile for Government representative really understood the dynamics of the organization,” said Al Curtis, director of Cobb County Fleet Management. “He knew what we did as a fleet and he knew a lot about what departments do when they go out and perform their particular missions, so he had a really good gauge on why this particular solution would be a perfect fit for us.”

“Switching to T-Mobile Fleet Management from Geotab meant that the departments would be able to move devices in between vehicles as needed,” said Ryan Coover, utilities maintenance superintendent for Cobb County Water Systems. “It allows us to go from a large commercial vehicle down to a pick-up truck in just a matter of seconds—unplugging it and plugging it into another vehicle.”

Ryan Coover, Utilities Maintenance Superintendent for Cobb County Water Systems

Providing a broad range of data reporting through easy-to-use dashboards allows fleet managers to make real-time, cost-saving optimizations. “We put them in the vehicles, and in 30 seconds they were operating,” Shelton said. “I could pull them up on my computer and monitor them just a minute after they were installed.”

“T-Mobile Fleet Management from Geotab fell right into what we needed and of course, the price point we wanted,” Al Curtis, director of Cobb County Fleet Management, said. “We always look at solutions from the perspective of our citizens, because we are in charge of managing the citizens’ funds. The taxpayers are who we report to, so we have to try to be as efficient and as effective as possible in our deployment of technologies.”

Using T-Mobile Fleet Management from Geotab has already saved the county money—they conservatively estimate savings of around $50,000 per year. That number includes money saved by reduced idling, a decrease in fuel-consumption, better routing and resource deployment, and other efficiencies.

“Using modern technology, like T-Mobile Fleet Management from Geotab, helps us to be more efficient,” Shelton said. “And using that technology saves taxpayer dollars.”