GPS Insight Blog » Extreme Return on Investment

Aug 14 2010

GPS Insight has sent out over two million alerts based on driver behavior!

Category: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, Identifying and eliminating speeding, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage, reduced idling — rdonat @ 5:06 pm

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.

Tags: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, two millionth alert

Comments (3)

May 18 2010

Sneak peek at our new Trip Efficiency Report!

Category: Alerts, Company Efficiency, Driver Accountability, Extreme Return on Investment, Fuel Savings, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Reporting, Reports, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 10:21 pm

This is a REALLY exciting report, and is the culmination of months of work on top of years of getting ready for this report.

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

This suite of reports will essentially pinpoint your inefficient drivers on an overall as well as a trip-by-trip basis.

Here’s a an early version (the final reports are on the way & will also include an overall vehicle-by-vehicle comparison/summary):

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

Up comes a graph showing all your drivers’ trips for that period of time (a work week in this case) & how efficient they are relative to both SHORTEST and FASTEST routes which we determine WOULD HAVE BEEN IDEAL:

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

Then looking at the detail, we pick on the top “most inefficient” driver (sorting on # of unnecessary miles beyond the fastest route from A to B):

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

Then hovering over an entry, it tells us that the “James – Garmin” vehicle went 34.2 miles, but only needed to go 19.03.

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

By clicking on the 3 entries, we instantly pull up the actual (pink), shortest (red), and fastest (blue) routes for a visual comparison:

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

In reality, the “turnaround” out of the way is where several of our employees meet to car pool every day:

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

So this behavior is all right, since it saves a lot of miles and cars on the road.

But look at #2 and #3 on the list (and there are countless more inefficient trips):

Driving way out of way (in Purple) to get from A to B

Driving way out of way (in Orange ) to get from A to B vs. fastest/shortest routes in blue & red

These are our employees & our own cars, so it’s not exactly the end of the world that we’re sometimes driving all over the place inefficiently, & we have our reasons.

But if you run this against your fleet, you will find drivers who:

Get Lost
Make Wrong Turns
Intentionally Take the Long Way (padding hours)
Literally Drive In Circles (and should be probably be fired for fraudulent wasting of fuel/mileage and padding of hours)

This report will be available in late May, and is going to surprise a lot of customers. And probably a lot of drivers too.

It will save our customers a HUGE amount of money on drivers they didn’t know were this inefficient, or were specifically defrauding them of labor hours.

Additionally, it will be available in June as a real-time alert to supervisors as well as drivers to “coach” them on better ways to complete their trips when they do so inefficiently.

Oh, and by the way, on a slow development server, for all 50 of our vehicles for a full work week, that report only took 1/3 of a second to run:

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

For more information on our main GPS Fleet Tracking Reports visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: fleet tracking comapnies, gps fleet reporting, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking reports, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (0)

Apr 14 2010

Great Anti-Idling Commercial & Saving a Customer $10k a Month by Cutting Idling 75%

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Extreme Return on Investment, Fuel Savings, Humor, Reports, reduced idling — rdonat @ 3:45 pm

This is very to the point:

Our reports and proactive alerts help you to ensure your drivers are not idling.

It’s both wasteful and impacts our environment.

I pulled up a relatively new customer at random & ran an idling report for them & was happy to see that they CUT THEIR IDLING 75% WITH PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT!

Here is how I ran the report:

Run a GPS Insight Idle Time History Report

The report came up in 1.6 seconds & quantified 33,400 hours of driving since January, and the Purple Line (the important line) shows a marked decrease from a high of 20% idling to a current low of 5%:

75% Reduction in idling percentage

The full report shows all the particulars & shows very clearly the effects of both using GPS Insight as well as managing the drivers to stop idling:

Decrease from 20% to 5% idling over 3 months

Note that this is only one of our thousand customers, and only 234 vehicles. I like the fact that GPS Insight truly is helping our customers make a big difference both in terms of saving fuel money, and the environment.

Another report shows that they have saved roughly TWO THOUSAND IDLING HOURS across their fleet of 234 vehicles by eliminating that 15% idling (based on 13,000 hours driven in the past month). With fuel costs plus wear & tear easily costing $5 per hour, they’ve seen a $10,000 PER MONTH savings, which is $42 per vehicle. We charge them $32.95. So they make $9 per month just by reducing idling, and now they have all the other benefits of GPS Insight for free – efficient dispatch, proof of delivery, proof of driver hours worked, reduction in speeding, theft recovery, and so on.

Plus they’re not pi$$ing on the planet anymore…

Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (0)

Aug 26 2009

GPS Insight’s 5th birthday!

Category: Extreme Return on Investment, GPS Insight Employees, Miscellaneous, UNRELATED TO GPS — rdonat @ 10:17 am

I just realized GPS Insight turned 5 years old 2 days ago (8/24/09).

In the past 4 years (2005-2008), GPS Insight’s revenue grew 7800%!

We don’t officially qualify for the Inc. 500/5000 until next year, and we are shooting for the top 100 (this is very realistic — our 2006-2009 growth in on track for 1800% growth, and that was #83 this year).

I appreciate our customers’, employees’, and partners’ help getting to this point, especially given the way the economy has been for the past several years.

It’s a wonderful job I’ve got — working with fantastic customers, developers, salespeople, tech support, and support staff, all of whom have helped us to develop the most technically advanced and most adaptable GPS tracking product on the market.

I really appreciate everyone’s help and support in the past 5 years, and we look forward to many more years of high growth and delivery of an outstanding product and exceptional ROI to our customers.

Thanks again!

Rob.

Comments (3)

Aug 15 2009

GPS Insight alerts pass 350 million checks and 419,000 alerts

Category: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment — rdonat @ 9:02 am

Alerts are probably the best way to proactively gain ROI (Return on Investment) with GPS Insight. I am glad to see our customers using them as much as they are.

We passed the 350 MILLION alert checks mark recently, and have sent out over 419,000 alerts since making alerts available to all our customers.

Note that our system takes less than 1/100th of a second to make those calculations. The reason we are able to process alerts in this volume is our overall system speed and scalability. We do this at only 20% peak utilization, and add hardware constantly to provide the fastest, most powerful GPS tracking system available today. Really — test us out vs. any other system on the market and you will see the difference.

Less than 5 months ago, we only had checked 100 MILLION checks.

This is a huge increase in alerts usage, and is probably due to our next generation alerts which were introduced in April.

Keep on using our alerts, and if you’re not already a GPS Insight customer, please call us at 866-GPS-4321 and find out how to get a trial device or a pilot going (or just outfit your fleet now & start getting instant ROI).

Rob.

Comments (1)

Jul 26 2009

Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping is here! — Assign drivers (historically) to vehicles, and report on drivers, not just vehicles

Category: Driver Assignment to Vehicles, Extreme Return on Investment, GPS Tracking, New Features, Reports — rdonat @ 4:37 pm

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

Since many customers have drivers which use different vehicles, we have added DRIVERS to GPS Insight in addition to VEHICLES. This has the following benefits:

Driver-centric reports (e.g. idling/speeding/odd-hours by driver, not by vehicle)
Administrative control of which drivers are assigned to which vehicles
Historical accountability for which vehicle was driven by which driver (e.g. for parking tickets, toll violations)

Vehicles may be assigned to drivers, and drivers may be assigned to vehicles. A driver may be assigned to multiple vehicles at one time, but a vehicle can only be assigned to one driver at a time.

In other words, if John drives car1 and truck2, and no one else ever does, he can be assigned to both. However, if Sally moves from car2 to car1, John must be unassigned from car1 before Sally can be assigned. This way, if someone drives a couple vehicles exclusively, they don’t need to be re-mapped every time they start driving a different vehicle.

Any activity performed by that vehicle during the time that driver was assigned will be associated with that driver for reporting purposes. Maps will have driver information available, and alerts/messages will have the appropriate driver’s contact information as an override to the default vehicle information (e.g. email address & cell phone number for SMS).
A driver may be assigned to a vehicle in 5 different ways:

Manual assignment via the web interface
Touching a driver keyfob to a reader in the vehicle (if installed)
Sending the driver id via Garmin
SMS text message gps 1234 assign david.smith assigns david smith to truck 1234 at that time)
API (Application Programming Interface)

Here is the workflow for assigning a new driver to a vehicle. Bear in mind that the times you can choose to assign a vehicle include now or the beginning of any vehicle trip (e.g. when that driver first started driving the vehicle). The times you can choose to unassign a driver from a vehicle include now or any begin or end of trip. These options are conveniently shown in a pick list for you to choose from, as shown in the screen shots below:

First, open the Driver Administration tool:

Click on Create New: Driver:

Then complete the form for a new driver:

Note that you can then select a vehicle to assign the driver to here, as well as create/modify a driver group (e.g. parts drivers, supervisors, etc.):

Adding a Supervisors group with 3 members:

Alternatively, you can create a driver association when looking at all vehicles under the Vehicles tab (at top):

Choose an existing driver or create a new one on the fly:

Then choose a start time for the driver-to-vehicle association (always, current date, or from a particular date/trip):

And either allow them to stay assigned or end their assignment at a particular vehicle stop time in the past:

Now that the driver is assigned (shown below), this association will be evident in relevant maps, reports, and alerts:

Driver-centric reports, mapping, and alert functionality will be added continually to the GPS Insight product to make use of this driver-to-vehicle mapping capability.
Here is an example for a day where 4 different drivers used our company car (Scion):

Trent drives to work
Elliot drives to a customer site with a salesperson (Jason)
Elliot drives to his house to pick up his vehicle
Jason drives back to work
Trent takes the Scion home

We have entered the appropriate mappings and here are some screens/reports which show these mappings:

Here is an idle report (which conveniently breaks out idling/stops/mileage/etc. by driver, by day:

The driver activity is shown (in order) on the Activity Detail report:

Historical mapping has the driver information as well:

More driver-specific functionality and capabilities will be added to GPS Insight within the next few weeks and months, and we welcome customer input and requests.

For more information on this new feature please feel free to call us at 866-477-4321, option 2 (for support).

Rob

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

Comments (1)

Jul 01 2009

Gas prices are rising — get on top of your fleet now!

Category: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, Fuel Savings, reduced idling — rdonat @ 9:43 am

I saw this graph today in an Automotive Fleet email newsletter:

When fuel spiked last year, GPS Insight helped our customers save fuel by curbing idling, reducing speeding, ensuring the most appropriate vehicle was sent to a job, and that the efficient routes were taken.

Here is an article about how we saved a customer $100,000 EACH MONTH in fuel during the Summer when fuel prices were at $5 per gallon of diesel. Then the snowball effect saved them literally millions throughout the year.

Here is another article about how we send alerts to your drivers themselves telling them to stop wasteful behaviors.

Get GPS Insight in your vehicles and get control of your fleet. There are so many benefits, you will not regret the decision. Start with a unit or two to and see what kind of insight you will gain into your fleet. Call one of our reps at 866-477-4321 (1 for sales) and find out how we can help.

You can be up and running within 1-3 days with GPS Insight. Really!

[or you can buy a 1/2 gallon of gas with the money you don't spend on the product, per day -- that will go down to 1/3 gallon shortly]

Thanks,

Rob.

Comments (1)

May 14 2009

Really Cheap GPS Asset Recovery (from the House of Voodoo)

Category: Extreme Return on Investment, Humor, UNRELATED TO GPS — rdonat @ 12:14 pm

We just exhibited NAFA in New Orleans in April.

During our downtime on Bourbon St., I wandered into Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo.

I found an alternative for customers unwilling to pay for a good GPS Tracking product:

Only $8.95! Seriously, we rarely try to sell our product strictly on the asset recovery aspects, since there are many more significant drivers of ROI (idling, speeding, efficient dispatch, off-hours usage, maintenance, etc.). But we generally hear about a vehicle or two each month which was recovered because they used GPS Insight. That probably means there are several we don’t hear about either each month.

Using the odd-hours alert, and cc’ing the driver of the vehicle, you can alert drivers to the fact that their truck is being moved (stolen) in the middle of the night as well, which is a very proactive way of avoiding theft. Additionally you can tell the alert to exclude homes so that driving it from the street into the driveway won’t trip a false alert.

Or you can use the Saint Anne figurine…

Rob.

Comments (0)

Aug 10 2008

Instant Idle Time Reduction — saves $100,000 in a MONTH

Category: Company Efficiency, Extreme Return on Investment, Fuel Savings — rdonat @ 2:58 pm

A large customer recently shared some statistics with me the other day. They estimate that in July, they consumed roughly 20,000 fewer gallons of fuel than they did 2 months prior.

What changed? In mid-June, they asked us to start notifying them (programmatically) whenever a vehicle idled for longer than 7 minutes.

Once they got that notice, they would turn it into an email to the driver and the driver’s supervisor, and have it sent to them via blackberry.

INSTANTLY, the unnecessary idling stopped.

Here is a graph of the dramatic reduction. Bear in mind that in this industry and market, 25% idling is considered normal (stop lights, traffic, powering the lift gate, etc.) — that equates to roughly a 90% decrease in UNNECESSARY idling:

In June, this translated to roughly 10,000 fewer gallons of fuel (mostly diesel). In July, the first “full month” it was more like 20,000 when the final fuel bills were in. We helped this customer ensure their numbers were correct this using our fuel consumption report as well. Believe it or not, this is less than a gallon of fuel savings per day on average, per vehicle, but it has a massive effect on bottom line.

The rough cost savings for this fleet is over 3 times the cost of GPS Insight’s monthly service fee.

Bear in mind that this is still unfortunately a small decrease relative to the total fuel bill, but an interesting thing became clear after the drivers started shutting their vehicle down rather than leave them run, especially in the hotter markets:

The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.

Without a nice cool cab to get back into, they took less time doing deliveries, since every minute they took to get the truck back up and rolling, the cab got hotter in the sun, especially on hot days. Our customer’s management commented to GPS Insight that they got more deliveries done on account of this change, as well as saving a considerable amount of money on fuel.We will introduce this capability for all of our customers in August, since the improvement was so significant, and we want everyone to be able to send both their driver and their supervisors proactive alerts/messages when excessive idling, speeding, off-hours usage, and out-of-geofence activity is detected.

Look for news about this new feature in our upcoming newsletter.

Thanks,
Rob.

The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.

Tags: Extreme Return on Investment, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (2)

Mar 29 2008

Still on my health kick, but now with Cell notes in GPS Insight

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Extreme Return on Investment, GPS Insight Employees — rdonat @ 11:30 am

A while back I wrote about my New Year’s Resolution to start working out more. So I went to Lifetime Fitness today, and thought I could show off a few new GPS Insight features while I was at it.

We now have:

cell phone based notes (send a text message to annotate your stop)
landmark reports for up to a month
landmark reports showing ALL landmarks and ALL vehicles at once (previously only one vehicle or one landmark)
cell phone based “which trucks are close?” feature

So, first off, as I was leaving I sent a text message to our 5 digit number “30364″ saying “GPS NOTE 3.5 MILES TREADMILL, 20 MINS. WEIGHTS, 30 MINUTES SAUNA.”

Since I can’t take a screen shot of my cell phone, here is that same activity from our messaging inbox (also showing the next example where I send a text message asking which vehicles are close to me with “GPS ROB CLOSE”:

I get an instant acknowledgment that my note was received (this can be turned off by the customer if not needed.

Now when I either look at that stop on a map or on a “stop notes” report, the text is there for future reference:

yields the following report in .4 seconds:

So I was there for 2.5 hours, I did 3.5 miles on the treadmill, 20 minutes weights, & 30 in the sauna. Additionally I can quickly see that I stopped at the office quickly (to grab my Ipod), and am still here (have been for 37 minutes doing some catch-up weekend work and writing this blog). I started the day by leaving “Rob House” (start location) at 7:28:24 and it’s 6.4 miles to my office, 6.7 to Lifetime, and then another 6.3 back to the office (I took a shorter route).

So what if I wanted to know how many times I’ve been to Lifetime in March?

I can just run a landmark for the month and in 2.2 seconds, I have my answer:

I’ve been there 4 times for the month, totaling 8 hours, 49 minutes:

Running it on all our 26 tracked vehicles shows that apparently I’m the only one who goes to Lifetime (the report is identical, but takes 6.6 seconds…)

If I want to run an ALL VEHICLES / ALL LANDMARKS report? We now let you do that which is a HUGE time saver (previously, we would need to run a landmark (by vehicle) report for each of our 26 vehicles. Now it completes for the entire month of March in only 11.4 seconds. We also have two sections, one for which landmarks were visited by each vehicle, and one for which vehicles visited each landmark. This helps to answer two different questions (where did my employees go vs. who went to a particular customer?):

This report takes a little longer, especially if you have a lot of vehicles, but is enormously insightful for most companies to see what is going on with their fleet.

Then by vehicle:

Of course everything can be easily exported to Excel for further analysis.

This post is getting long, but on my way back, I saw one of our customers’ trucks drive by the other direction. I sent “gps rob close all” via text message to 30364 (only GPS Insight employees can choose “all” accounts — customers are limited to their own account only, of course). I instantly received a list of the 2 trucks within a mile of my vehicle, to include the one I saw. I have blurred out their company names for privacy concerns, but you can see that cell phone query/response in the “inbox” picture at the top of the post.

When I started this article I ran a 30 minute “trail” current status 2D map for that customer, and see that the vehicle’s “trail” goes right by the route I took back. The ramp at Scottsdale to get onto the Westbound 101 is closed so the truck had to drive down Mayo to get there, which is why it was there. Here is are two pictures of the mapping I ran:

Zooming down to where I had been (toward the end of the 30 minute “trail” since it took me some time to get to the office, run the map, etc.) , we see its path being detoured in order to get back on the 101:

Anyway, this is a nice way to detail these 4 new capabilities. As always, we take our customers’ suggestions and get them into the product on a regular (weekly) basis.

Please let us know what we can do to help you as a current customer or prospective one, and make sure to read the new “implementation roadmap” on our main website at www.gpsinsight.com — it will really help you understand the best ways to deploy a GPS vehicle tracking product (ours preferably…) and reap the ROI benefits.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (0)