Pay As You Go (PAYG) is a well-established sales model
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in the mobile phone market, so why not use it in other areas of IT? It gives the user the flexibility to try a system without a substantial commitment, it makes the investment transparent, and ever-cheaper hardware now makes it a practical proposition for tracking systems.
Quartix is the most high-profile firm offering PAYG tracking, and sales and marketing director Andy Kirk reckons it has become a market leader: “We’re doing more than 2,000 vehicles a month – we believe we are installing more tracking systems than any of our competitors.” The firm offers payment schemes from the traditional model of outright purchase up-front (typically £295 setup cost per vehicle plus a service charge of £10.90 per vehicle per month) via a 12-month rental contract (no setup cost; typically £22.90 per month) to full PAYG rental – an initial setup cost of £65, plus between £19.50 and £25.75 per month depending on features. There is some commitment with the PAYG scheme, in fact: payment is by direct debit in advance every three months, with a minimum contract term of three months.
Kirk says: “In order to be successful when you’re not asking for any commitment from the customer, you have got to have a system with exceptional quality and reliability. It needs to give the customer exactly what they want, and it’s important not to oversell the benefits.” The Quartix system doesn’t lack features: even the most basic PAYG package offers daily and weekly management reports in Excel format, and most schemes include driver alerts and the ability to integrate with other systems: “We produce so many standard reports that you don’t necessarily need to integrate with a back-office system,” says Kirk, but the Quartix product “can push the data live to the end-user. We provide data in an open format to any back-office system you want it to.” He emphasises that it is relatively simple to integrate the data at the platform end: “The days of having to employ a high-level programmer to do this are long gone.” Among the firm’s PAYG customers is Canute Group, which has fitted more than 300 of its vehicles with the Quartix system and estimates an annual saving of as much as £1,000 per vehicle. Canute IT manager Mark Longhurst says: “There is definitely a cost saving. Idle times have decreased and our depots use the system to re-route their vehicles to new jobs, while they are out on the road. Also, the less time our drivers and other staff are on the phone to each other, the more they can focus on other areas of business.”