Dec 12 2011
We finally have an Android App under development.
I can’t guarantee it will be available soon, but hopefully by January we’ll have something our customers can start using.
Here’s a very simple preview:
GPS Insight Android Application
We’ll let you know when it’s available in Beta.
Thanks,
Rob.
Nov 27 2011
Would you do away with email for your company to save a few dollars?
Of course not!
Email is an invaluable tool for any organization, and its value is known to be far more than its cost.
But many companies don’t realize that by delaying the inevitable purchase of GPS Tracking for their fleet of vehicles, it’s essentially doing away with email. For their vehicles.
And these vehicles have lots to tell us, but without GPS Tracking Systems, they can’t.
They might want to tell you, the fleet administrator or supervisor:
And these emails can come automatically, just by subscribing to scheduled, regular reports:
Odd Hours Driving Report
Or they can come in real time as alerts which let not only you, but also your driver know about the idling, speeding, odd-hours, or inefficient driving behavior.
Or maybe they would only say:
And most importantly, you get instant chat for free with GPS Tracking — you never need to wonder where the vehicle is again, and you can communicate with its driver in real time if desired.
Someday soon, if you don’t have GPS Tracking on your vehicles, and aren’t using it to its full potential, you’ll be just as in the dark ages as if you didn’t have email. Just like when you needed to use the USPS to send and receive information (we’ll even skip the FAX ages).
And for the price of 2-3 stamps or so per day, you can track a vehicle using GPS.
If you’re not already doing so, give it a try to see what you’re missing.
The ROI of having your vehicle email you regularly is something you’ll realize is as invaluable as the email you receive from your peers. Actually, maybe even more valuable.
Rob.
Oct 02 2011
Since alerts are sent in the USER’s time zone, and can be “copied” to the driver him or herself, there is sometimes a time zone conflict with the alert.
We have enhanced GPS Insight to ensure that alerts are sent to the driver in the time zone they are associated with in the system.
Here is a typical alert which has been set to send straight to the driver when they idle for more than 15 minutes:
Copy a driver with a generated alert
Here is the driver admin screen, where you can set the time zone:
Set a driver's time zone
And when the alerts come in, they will adjust depending on which time zone the driver or user (depending on who is receiving it) prefers:
Time zone adjusted alerts
Bear in mind that our choices ALSO compensate for daylight savings time (DST) which is why Arizona and Indiana are choices, as they do not celebrate DST.
This will help to ensure that when drivers receive data, it isn’t an hour or two “off” from the time they actually were idling/speeding/entering landmarks/etc.
Learn more about our fleet tracking alerts.
Rob.
Oct 02 2011
We have a customer that really needed to precisely measure how much fuel and CO2 emissions their idling was costing them.
Not all vehicles are created equal, so at the individual vehicle level, we made the fuel type and estimated number of gallons consumed per hour idling something our customers can set.
Here’s how you get there:
Open Vehicle Administration
There is a new option in vehicle admin called “Update fuel and emissions info”:
Update fuel and emissions info
We have a “liters engine size to gallons idled per hour” converter which allows you to plug in your engine size and determine a fairly accurate number of gallons idled away per hour:
compute and override the # of gallons per hour spent idling
Here I am editing a SALES vehicle driven by KEVINJS:
update fuel type and gallons per hour idling
Once you have overridden any defaults necessary (we default to unleaded and .4 gallons per hour spent idling), then you can run your report:
Run an idle report with fuel usage/CO2 emissions
I ran it for the September for the Albuquerque group (ALB) which contains the newly changed 5.0 liter F-150 which burns .55 gallons per hour of diesel:
How much fuel / emissions is idling costing me?
In this case, KEVINJS had roughly 7 hours and 3.863 gallons of idling, which we compute (based on the properties of the different types of fuels) to equate to .034 tons of emissions.
Together, the ALB group idled 512 hours, costing 209.6 gallons of fuel and 1.846 tons of CO2.
Now by using GPS Alerts, you can notify your drivers that they’re idling and ask them to shut down the vehicle with a text message or email (and since they’re idling and not actually driving, there are no distracted driving issues).
Then later on, you can easily determine your fuel and CO2 savings by running this or other idling reports available within GPS Insight.
Enjoy!
Rob
Aug 10 2011
GPS Insight has supported traffic for years via Google Earth.
Finally we’re bringing real-time traffic data to the dashboard and 2D mapping.
Here’s a screenshot:
GPS Insight releases traffic data in maps
Just a single click and you’ll get real-time, color-based traffic overlays in your maps.
Enjoy!
Rob.
Jul 29 2011
With our new timestamp functionality you can now check the time a Garmin Message or Dispatch Item (stop) was:
Here’s how:
The other day I Dispatched myself by texting “gps rob dis robhouse” which is short for “gps [rob 4000] [dispatch] [landmark named robhouse].”
Here are the timestamps of each of the status changes (available under the “Custom->Garmin” menu):
View Garmin Dispatch Status Change Timestamps in GPS Insight
Note all I need to do is “hover over” the “Done” status at the end of the Message field, and the date-stamped statuses are visible.
After dispatching myself at 4:09, it instantly appeared as a stop on my Garmin.
I saw it, but then drove a bit so it would have a different timestamp when it became “active”, at 4:10, as I was about to turn North onto Scottsdale Road. Note the change to “Active” at 4:10. Here is where everything happened, after running a 3D history like this:
Run a 3D Map History for a day for my vehicle
Leaving Work, accepting a stop to go home
It took me until 16:18, and 5.8 miles to get home, where I was prompted by the Garmin to mark that stop as “complete” (we shorten it to “Done”):
Getting home and marking the stop as "complete"
Even if I didn’t mark the stop as complete, we still have the timestamp of when I reach that landmark available in the landmark report, and will eventually incorporate all of this information into a single “dispatch report” which allows our customers to get a single-stop summary of all their Garmin dispatch activity.
Here’s how to run that landmark report:
Running a GPS Insight Landmark Report
Note that our “1 day” landmark report extends backward and forward automatically to show you how long the vehicle was there prior to LEAVING (if it started the day in that landmark) and how long it stayed there through the end of the stop, if it was parked there at the end of the day. These are the kind of “nice to have” features our customers (and we) insist on, so we provide it.
You can easily tell I left (late for the day, really…), then forgot something, came back, then left, and eventually came back, precisely at the same 4:18 PM time I marked the stop complete via the Garmin interface:
Times in and out of my house, matching the Garmin "Done" timestamp
At least I left early the next day to make up for it — 6:22 AM.
This new capability is very helpful for proving service to a customer, determining how quickly your drivers react to dispatch items, and other investigations about your drivers’ daily activity.
Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
Jul 23 2011
We made the new GPS Insight Dashboard available last week to customers (in Beta).
Here is the new demo!:
New GPS Insight Dashboard Demo
Click on the image to watch the video and enjoy the new GPS Insight Dashboard. It’s several months of hard work and REALLY good. Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
Jul 19 2011
We received this fax yesterday:
GPS Insight helps police arrest 2 carjackers
Our customer’s son was carjacked at gunpoint. The vehicle was quickly recovered and 2 suspects (and their firearm) were taken into custody.
The Press got it wrong — it was the customer’s cellphone which helped her track the vehicle and lead police to it. She was using our iPhone app to track the vehicle every 2 minutes. The GPS Insight device was inside the vehicle. Had it been a cellphone, they probably would have thrown it out the window.
So 2 bad guys should be going to jail for a long time.
We love these stories, and usually get one or two every month.
GPS Insight: $32.95 a month. Not losing your car, and putting the 2 guys who put a gun to your kid’s head in jail: Priceless.
Rob.
Jun 30 2011
Using your smart phone, you can now attach a picture from the field to any stop’s detail.
Here’s how it works:
Take a picture that you want associated with your stop (or someone else’s stop, if you’re a supervisor in the field) — this can even be a screen shot from a dispatch system, etc.
Send that picture to our GPS Insight notes email address [you generate this in the system here under User Management:]
Add an inbound email address for GPS Insight queries/notes
You want to use our “gps [vehicle] note here is my note detail” format to annotate the note and minimally let us know which vehicle the picture should be associated with.
send a picture to GPS Insight to attach to a vehicle's activity
Once we receive the photo and note, it becomes available on our mapping and on the stop notes report:
Picture under the "notes" tab of the vehicle detail in mapping
When you “hover over” the note, the picture pops up to give you more information — this could be a picture proving service, showing a problem which justifies further time/billing, or just a reference photo to remind you later on about your customer.
Field pictures show up in Stop Notes Report
Adding pictures from the field into our mapping and reports will help better document (and verify) working conditions as well as pick-ups/drop-offs from stop to stop.
Close up of added Photo
Give us a call if you have any questions regarding this functionality. There is a “wizard” which is launched when you choose the option at the top from the Admin->User tab. It asks you to choose a user and a vehicle group, then provides you the email to use (and store in your phone for easy access in the future). For your convenience, you can click on that email to send to it, cc’ing yourself or your drivers so that they can just save it as a contact for future use.
Then all they need to do is email photos to that address in order to have them associated with their GPS tracking records for the day, available in both mapping and reports.
This is included in basic GPS Insight functionality, and available for all users at this time.
Enjoy!
Rob.
Jun 27 2011
We have added 2 new alerts, bringing the total we provide to 12!
2 new GPS Insight Alerts
The DTC alert will send you an email (or SMS text) when your vehicle experiences a diagnostic alert (diagnostics devices only).
The Maintenance alert will send emails (or SMS text) whenever you are X miles/hours/days within a mileage/hours/calendar-based maintenance alert for a vehicle’s scheduled maintenance (within GPS Insight’s maintenance module).
You set it like this, and can override the number of miles/hours/days:
GPS Insight Maintenance Alert
When you receive the alert, it looks like this:
GPS Insight Maintenance Alert email
As with all our alerts, you can specify “push” as the recipient address (or one of them) and we will “push” that data to your system for you to work with it programmatically. This requires your developers to expose a web service and provide us the details, and then all your alerts can be automatically populated in your systems (ERP, dispatch, maintenance, etc.).
If you’re not using our alerts, you’re missing a key benefit of GPS Insight. They’re available to all customers.
Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
