We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.
This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.
Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed
Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.
Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”
Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.
So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!
This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.” You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.
We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so! They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.
Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.
Good examples include:
- Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
- Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
- Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
- Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours
Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight. We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!
Thanks,
Rob.
August 14th, 2010 10:52 pm
I hope a few prospective clients who might be reading here catch the point of this, Rob. Rather than making management a ‘bad guy’, GPS, properly introduced and used for improvements rather than bludgeoning, can be a real asset.
A street sweeping client of mine once had to restrict access to his dispatch office at the end of the work day … why? The drivers on their way home were all crowding in and pestering the dispatcher to see which drive had the most total miles swept for the day. We had to design a custom report that the dispatcher would then print and post on the window for the drivers to see the next AM.
Now, really, how many businesses have their drivers enthused to see who did the best job? becuase of GPS’s anonymity, impartiality and reputation for dead-on accuracy, an owner can implement GPS tracking and find it boosts morale, not hurt it. Sending notes just to the offending drivers is a gangbuster idea … a quiet, timely reminder that doesn’t embarrass him/her in front of peers will always work best.
August 15th, 2010 9:51 am
Thanks for the post Dave. The street sweeper anecdote is exactly what we hope to see with our customers. I just had a conversation with a distribution company which fired several people after installing GPS Insight, including the manager who bought it. They had to “re-learn” why they bought it in the first place.
They initially considered GPS tracking to be a “negative” for their company because of this. After going through their data with them, using our new Driver Efficiency Report, I showed them how their drivers were systematically driving all over the place between stops in order to pad their hours and consistently achieve SIGNIFICANT overtime hours (based on the begin & end of day report).
If your drivers are doing negative things, GPS tracking can be perceived as a negative. It is a camera and if you are ugly, you are ugly! But if your drivers are doing the RIGHT things, it can be a big positive, as you point out.
Rob.
August 16th, 2010 2:17 am
Yep, exactly. There are several respected management experts who have suggested the technique of “catch your people doing something right”, and with a decent GPS tracking system, a manager can. For the 1% who didn’t get the word, draw a circle around the offending data in a copy of a report on their driving and leave it in their in-box as a first step of discipline/driver awareness.
Surprising how many guys will see what they have been doing wrong when it’s printed out on paper and decide to ‘self-correct’ without any painful ‘closed door’ counseling sessions.