Aug 23 2010
How true, again from our favorite geek comic strip, XKCD.
GPS Navigation Humor
Original here:
Rob.
Aug 21 2010
One of our employees who drives our GPS Insight Scion in a car pool took it Saturday morning to a remote area of the desert to go for a run.
He parked off the road, on a pull-out which was nowhere near where cars drive.
He came back to this $90 parking ticket (with my name on it since it’s my car officially…):
$90 ridiculous parking ticket
So here’s how you prove that Maricopa County Sheriff’s are scrounging around for money for our broke County, using GPS Insight:
Quickly run a 3D vehicle history for the Scion for that day
Open the “Time Slider” to the first trip of the day & show just the dots (green) on the map corresponding to the drive to the first stop and 45 minute stop (yellow):
History shows the drive to go to an early AM run
Then Zoom down & see the vehicle was parked off the road itself:
Parking off the road yields a $90 ticket
Then go to Street View mode & see that it’s a paved pull-off. Why wouldn’t it be ok to park there to go for a run/ride/hike?
Did they pave it just to lure people in to give them $90 parking tickets? Thanks Deputy Thompson.
Street View shows this is nowhere near the road
I’ve paid it since it’s got my name on it, but I will definitely send a copy of the blog article to the Judge & see if we can get it refunded.
How ridiculous, though.
Even though politics and a County with financial issues trumps GPS evidence sometimes, at least you can clear the suspicion that your driver did the wrong thing.
Also, using our DriverID, you know which driver was in the vehicle at the time of the ticket so you know who to talk with, if the original got “lost.”
Rob.
Aug 14 2010
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:
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.
Jul 29 2010
We have recently added a really good new Idle Detail Report & Map.
Scrutinizing idle times and improving driver behavior as a result saves our customers a lot of money. Knowing this we added this functionality to allow individual vehicles’ idle times to be examined more closely. Improvements have also been made to the Idle Time Report (to include the ability to “drill down” from the summary to the detail for a particular vehicle/driver).
New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report
The Idle Detail Report can be run on an individual vehicle or a group of vehicles. It will display individual idle events for each selected vehicle, along with the driver, address, and greenhouse gas emissions information for that event. (The odometer values are also shown in the exportable spreadsheet version.) Most of the columns are sortable – note the blue column headers shown below.
The Idle Time Report now allows more columns to be sorted too, including the % Idle column. Clicking on individual vehicle labels will open an Idle Detail Report for the vehicle, with the same parameters that were previously selected. Here is a sample detail report (note that one vehicle idled over 9 HOURS!):
New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report
After pressing the button for “Google Earth” all idle stops in the report are shown on a map (this one is 30 minutes or more):
New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map
Zooming down on another mapped idle stop shows the vehicle in a school parking lot:
New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map
This new report and associated mapping functionality will really help you understand who is idling your vehicles and costing you fuel and wear and tear, and let you instantly drill down to see where & in what context the vehicles are being left on when they’re not moving.
It is available for all customers & can be run for a month at a time.
It is extremely fast — running it for a full month for a customer with 279 vehicles only takes 2 seconds to finish.
Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
Jul 15 2010
A customer needed an alert to let them know whenever a vehicle took to long getting from A to B.
We put the new “Late Arrival Alert” into the product as a result:
New "Late Arrival" Alert
Here’s what it does:
You can enter an origination and destination landmark or group of landmarks. Maybe it’s all your customers & all your vendors. Or just your headquarters & the first stops on each of your drivers’ routes. Or in my case, my home, & the office.
Then you enter how many minutes MAXIMUM it should take to get from the originating point to the destination point.
Here is one I created on myself, for my 7 minute (typical) commute from home to the office:
From Home to Work should take 7 minutes
Now, whenever it takes me more than 7 minutes to get from home to work, I get an alert about it. You can optionally send the driver an alert to their cell phone/email (blackberry, etc.) as well.
I purposely took a long way to work today to trip the alert & here is the email I received:
New GPS Insight "Late Arrival Alert" via Email
New "Late Arrival Alert" via SMS
Since I have 2 devices on my vehicle, and the “Robgroup” includes them both, it “consolidated” both alerts into a single email for me.
This will be good for companies which want to know their drivers aren’t taking their time between vendors and customers, and even highly custom applications such as golf management. If a player’s cart which is being tracked takes more than 30 minutes to get from the 1st tee to the 4th green (or fairway, etc.), you can alert the ranger to go work on speeding up the pace of play. There are hundreds of applications for this alert, particularly if you group all your landmarks intelligently & generically apply this logic to them.
Call us to see how we can help you and your business to detect and fix inefficient driving patterns using this alert and others we offer.
Thanks,
Rob.
May 25 2010
Here is a really good article about how GPS works, and the new satellites going up to replace the aging ones out there now:
GPS has become critical to EVERYTHING (to include GPS Insight...)
It’s really worth reading if you are interested in this world-changing technology.
Rob.
May 18 2010
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:
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.
May 01 2010
Now if you have Garmin integrated into your GPS Insight implementation, you can optimize a list of addresses or landmarks, then send that entire route via wireless to your driver’s Garmin on his or her dashboard. It’s this easy:
Route a Set of Addresses to a Garmin as well as Add Landmarks to a Route
A route made from a list of addresses, and some landmarks, can be sent to a Garmin. Using the Route Dashlet, addresses can be pasted to create a list of destinations that are not yet landmarked:
Additional destinations for the route can be added from the list of landmarks on the account:
An optimized route is then created by clicking Get Route:
The Route is sent to the specified Garmin by selecting the vehicle with an attached Garmin and clicking Send:
If you would like to look at the route, you can click on “Map This” to show it on a map and adjust/email it if necessary:
Once you “Send” the route to a Garmin, the NUMBERED stops show up with the Route Name for you to easily determine where to go and in what order. You may call them “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc. in order to help distinguish. Note that they should not be a very long name since Garmin screens aren’t always wide enough to show the full name (as in the case with my small, inexpensive Nuvi 205).
Here are screen shots of the Garmin when it receives the route:
The “Stop” icon shows up and the Garmin “dings” to let you know you have a new stop (or multiple stops). Click on it to show your stops in numbered order:
Then, you can click on the one you want to go to (ideally in the order specified, or based on whichever one is closest to your existing location (which is shown in the right column) [note I had to edit the image since my nuvi didn't have enough space for the full number -- why you should buy a W model (which stands for widescreen)]:
After clicking on it with your finger, you get more details, and can choose to “Go” there at this point:
At that point, the Garmin will take you there with turn by turn audible and visible instructions. If you have a Traffic enabled Garmin, it will optimize for existing traffic.
Note that addresses, latitude/longitude, and Landmarks may be combined within the GPS Insight route dashlet.
This is a real time-saver and using GPS Insight to get the route order optimized will absolutely save you miles — 5-10% is reasonable, and more if your dispatcher really doesn’t have a way to visualize the order on a map.
Down the road, we will start allowing customers to save routes & compare the route SENT to the actual route DRIVEN.
Bear in mind that the GPS Insight GPSI-4000 and newly introduced GPSI-3900 are our 2 Garmin capable devices.
Click for more information on our Garmin Integration.
Rob.
Apr 20 2010
Obviously I am pretty dependent on GPS for just about everything when it comes to getting around [also for money...].
I have 3 GPS Navigation devices with me when I drive my car (factory installed, Garmin, & my iPhone) so I never print directions any more.
So, on the way out to Long Beach a couple weeks ago, my family and I took our 3 month old car with Ford’s/Microsoft’s “Sync” system (with GPS Navigation). No directions, just our factory installed GPS navigation unit.
Just outside of town it crashed on us. I figured out how to do a factory reset and get it back up & running.
Here’s the point: AFTER RESETTING IT, I FORGOT TO TELL IT “FASTEST” & NOT “SHORTEST” when optimizing our route. DOH!
We took the 10 out to LA area, but then it took me through some really sketchy, slow-moving areas.
On the way home, I thought about it, & realized I needed to change my GPS setting to FASTEST from SHORTEST.
I was curious how much longer it took me time-wise to get there than to get back, so I ran a 3D history report & saw very quickly that it was twice as long (60 vs. 30 minutes):
Run a week long history for our trip to/from Long Beach
Slow, direct route vs. Fast, indirect route
All I had to do is look at the 2 points where the route deviates then converges again, and compare times and distances:
Where I took a GPS dictated "dumb turn"
The times/mileages are:
Going there: 17:47 & 4571.6 miles to 18:53 & 4602.5 miles
Coming back: 10:26 4618.8 miles & 10:58 & 4656.3 miles
Doing the quick math, it took 31 miles & 66 minutes there the “short” way, & 37.5 miles & 32 minutes (half as long) the “long way.”
So to save 6.5 miles, I wasted 34 minutes of my life, praying we didn’t get car-jacked. At least if we did, I would know where the car went…
Anyway, I thought of this the other day & was curious just how much extra time it took us because of that one GPS setting on my (Factory Installed — not GPS Insight…) navigation device.
Because I track that vehicle, it took me about a minute to figure it out using GPS Insight.
Oddly enough, while I was writing this, my new Microsoft Windows 7 box crashed Google Earth as well. It knew I was badmouthing Microsoft. Sooner or later, all things Microsoft eventually crash.
I’m really glad we don’t run our systems on Microsoft products.
I just checked and our two “primary” servers which our customers rely upon (with lots of auxiliary and backup servers, of course) have been up for two years to two years & 3 months:
GPS Insight servers run for years without incident
I’m glad most of our competitors run Microsoft though…
Rob.
Apr 14 2010
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.
