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.
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.
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.
Jun 18 2011
Some ROI models are harder to define than others. In the case of a road-sign customer, you really need to dig before tracking your assets saves you more than it costs (which is typically only $15/month).
Here’s what drives ROI in that world (and many like it):
First, we set each device to report its location and voltage ONLY once a day in the AM.
Then we detect if the road sign is being moved using a motion detector switch, and once it stops for 15 minutes, we report the NEW location and voltage.
We added several voltage capabilities recently which allow us to meet these requirements.
To help customers visualize their assets’ voltage, we added a new “location and voltage” dashlet which color-codes each vehicle based on its voltage (green/yellow = good, orange/red = bad, grey = really bad). The assets show these colors along with the actual voltage on the map as well, shown below:
Tracking Road Signs
Then we modified our device performance report to add voltage, which is sortable. This report is then scheduled to arrive daily to let the customer know which devices need to be visited with fresh batteries to ensure they don’t stop working — here is that report:
Voltage tracking report
Last, we added a voltage alert which is initiated by the device itself (to save on transmission costs). Any time the voltage drops below 11.7 V (the magic number where the sign has only a few more hours left) the device initiates a transmission, and our alert notifies the right person to go out and change out the batteries. Additionally, if the voltage is ZERO, you know that the asset’s batteries have been disconnected, and if that isn’t due to a worker changing them, it’s a theft in progress (apparently a big problem in this industry as the batteries are very expensive).
Here is that alert within GPS Insight:
Low/No Voltage alert for road sign tracking
This particular customer worked with state troopers to immediately identify a theft in progress, and 4 official-looking individuals in hard hats and road-crew vests were arrested for stealing their competitor’s road sign batteries.
All these things combined really help to drive ROI.
These voltage capabilities have many other applications in GPS and asset tracking, and are ready for our customers at this point.
Rob.
May 18 2011
We have added a new report in beta to GPS Insight which details your drivers’ aggressive driving habits.
[ This report ONLY works with the GPS Insight 3900 and 4000, and if you are an existing customer, you will need to ask your salesperson or support to turn it on, as it requires a firmware upgrade to your devices, which we are happy to do remotely (over the air). ]
You run it here:
Run the new GPS Insight Acceleration Reports
(Note there are both Acceleration and Acceleration Summary reports)
Here is the Summary Report, which helps you to identify your most aggressive accelerators (“gunner”) and decelerators (“braker”):
GPS Insight Acceleration Summary Report
As always, you can sort by clicking on any of the blue column headings. By clicking on one of the histogram graphs on the right you can compare the average acceleration/deceleration profile to a single vehicle:
GPS Insight Acceleration Histogram comparison
And last, you can click through in the “Avg” columns to get detailed data about where the acceleration/deceleration took place:
GPS Insight Acceleration Detail Report
Hovering your mouse over any address or location will then show you a map of that activity’s location.
In this case, I am accelerating very quickly to get onto the freeway from an on-ramp.
You can also (as always) export the locations to either a browser based map, Google Earth, or a spreadsheet, and scheduled the report to be sent to you automatically per your exact schedule.
With our GPSI-3900 and GPSI-4000 we will be adding more acceleration and deceleration capabilities, reports, and alerts, and will also support an accident “black box” functionality where if a significant G-force (e.g. accident) happens, we buffer and send the last 15 seconds of exact location/speed/acceleration/deceleration/direction information as well as the 15 seconds following the impact. This should be available later in the year, but purchasing a GPSI-3900 or 4000 will ensure you have that capability when it becomes available.
Thanks,
Rob.
