In an earlier article I mentioned I would do a blog article about the GPS Insight route report. Here I will create a simple route (from my house to work) and run the report to see which of our vehicles ran that route. It should only be (and is) both my vehicle as well as my wife’s, since she sometimes comes by the office, or I sometimes take her car to work (I did the other day).
We construct the route by creating, then selecting a begin & end landmark, in this case “Rob House” and “GPS2″ :
Then we run a report for a range of dates, a group of vehicles, and a particular route:
Which yields this report, which shows that the only two vehicles making this trip between Rob House and GPS2 (our office) are mine (Rob) and my wife’s (Navigator). I have put red boxes around strange entries, where I either leave my car at the office for days (e.g. someone drops me off at the airport), or it takes me a long time to drive the 6.6 miles I live from work (e.g. I go to a customer meeting before heading to work), or it takes me a while to get home from work (e.g. I go out to dinner with a customer or my family).
At the very bottom I put a red box around the only time I’ve used the Navigator to go to work, this being because my wife took my car to the airport for a trip and left hers so I can take the kids to school/soccer/etc.
Perhaps I want a “median” time it takes me to get to work, and how long I usually stay at work. In this case, I would pull the data easily into Excel like this and run whichever custom calculations I need to:
Now I know it takes me 19 minutes median for me to get to work (the middle of all the samples, sometimes better than an average), and 10 minutes median to get home.
This is because I typically drop my sons off at school on my way to work, which takes around 10 minutes, but I come straight home.
This is a simple example of how you can use GPS Insight to calculate route statistics and use them to gain valuable insight into your fleet and your drivers.
Thanks for your interest, & call us at 866-GPS-4321 to talk about how we can help your company to do similar analysis with its GPS tracking project.
Rob.
November 8th, 2007 2:39 pm
Interesting, Rob,
This points up something I’ve told folks for years … GPS tracking is profitable even for a one vehicle “fleet” … let’s say a real estate sales person.
We know that business use of the auto is a significant area that must be documented for tax purposes and also that clients and/or supervising brokers might need to know how often a property listing was visited, etc., etc.
One could, of course, use one of those little Dome accounting books and be disiplined so that not a single trip goes unrecorded … and that end of month a non-productive hour or two will be spent making the books balance … but one could, instead, be a realists and realize business is more thna putting tally marks on paer and instead put a simple tracker on the vehicle and be able to pull up reports with a mouse click or two.
I kept one of my old demo units from my previous business and now that I’m actually making money from some of my online ventures I think I’m going to install it on my personal car … it occurs to me I’m going to have to pay taxes on profts this coming year and I certainly had business-related miles … and using a pen to track and tally is sooo 20th century
November 8th, 2007 7:51 pm
I have one on my car also Dave, it’s invaluable, and really helps to put together what days you were at certain clients when you might otherwise have no idea. For $2 a day, you document EVERY move your vehicle(s) make.