GPS Insight Blog » Company Efficiency

Apr 16 2011

New Landmark Stop Dashlet

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Company Efficiency,dashboard dashlets,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 4:37 pm

This new Landmark Stop Dashlet helps you see how many visits your vehicles are making to landmarks and how long they stay along with averages.

This might help you to see your vehicles’ average visit times to loading zones/transfer stations/warehouses/customers/etc.

GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet

You can modify which vehicle group, which landmark group, how many days you want to go back (1, 2, or 3), what you want to sort by, how many lines to display, and whether you want totals or averages to be displayed.

GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet

This coming week will let you modify how frequently it auto-refreshes.

What is most convenient about this dashlet is you can click through to ANY landmark to run the corresponding landmark report instantly.

Click through to Sky Harbor Airport for a report

And instantly (.2451 seconds…) you get your listing of 3 vehicles which have passed through Sky Harbor Airport with detailed information — even what direction they were traveling (in the Distance column):

GPS Insight Landmark Report

As with many of our dashlets, this may not be necessary for many customers, but for some customers, it’s going to be a huge help in determining which landmarks are experiencing backups for the day and taking action.

If you like it, it’s under “Dispatch” and if you don’t, you can leave it in the Dashlet Dock.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, landmark report, Landmark Stop Dashlet, Vehicle Tracking

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Feb 05 2011

New Garmin Canned Messages interface

Category: Company Efficiency,Garmin Integration,Garmin Messaging,GPS Navigation,New Features,New Garmin Features,Safety — rdonat @ 4:38 pm

We have recently given customers the ability to store “canned messages” on their drivers’ Garmin in the vehicle.

This allows them to choose from a list of commonly sent messages, rather than have to type each one out on the mini-keyboard on each Garmin.

Here’s how you do it:

Open the Garmin page:

Open the Garmin interface

Choose the Canned Messages tab and then create new messages, assign them to message groups, and assign those message groups to vehicles:

GPS Insight Garmin Canned Messages Interface

Create a message:

Create a Canned Message

Assign it to a group of messages:

Assign Garmin canned messages to groups

Then assign them to vehicles:

Assign message groups to vehicles

Then press “Sync Now” and your messages will be “pushed” to the appropriate vehicle’s Garmin.

To send one from your Garmin to dispatch, follow these steps:

Push Dispatch

Push Messages

Push "Quick Message"

Then up comes a list of “your” quick (canned) messages. Scroll through to select the one you want:

Choose a Canned Message

The Garmin will then prompt you if you want to send OR EDIT the canned message, so you can make small changes, such as add an amount, change a time, etc.

This definitely beats using the small on-screen keyboard to send free-form/ad-hoc messages:

Edit a canned message

Keyboard interface for editing a canned message

And here’s the message, in “red” to indicate it’s new and un-read. Once you click on it, it turns back to white:

Canned Message in the Garmin dashlet

This will help our customers enable their drivers to communicate more effectively, and help avoid the potential for distracted texting on their Garmin.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet management software, gps fleet tracking, gps garmin integration, gps insight garmin tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps vehicle tracking

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Nov 04 2010

GPS Tracking is also cheap insurance! (which even pays off if you let it lapse)

Category: Company Efficiency,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Stolen Vehicle Recovery — rdonat @ 10:46 am

Last month we had 2 customers benefit from their GPS devices, even though they had canceled service to save money.

One customer’s vehicle was stolen, and within an hour of us reactivating the device and giving them access, the police found it and it was recovered.

The other customer needed proof of their having performed service from the year prior when they were tracking their vehicle. It was needed to be paid out of a bankruptcy distribution, and we were able to run the report for them that day.

Obviously we prefer that customers don’t cancel with us, but even when they do, GPS tracking can still benefit them.

The moral of this story is that companies and fleet administrators need to ALSO think of GPS tracking as an insurance policy as well as an operational tool.

Knowing where your vehicles are currently is ESSENTIAL, as well as knowing where they have been historically (we store 5 years of history).

Unfortunate “insurable” events include:

Vehicle theft/recovery
Proof of delivery/service when there is a billing dispute
Proof of delivery/service when there is a LAWSUIT
Proof of speed and time whenever an accident takes place with a company vehicle
Proof of driver actions during termination
Investigation into illegal/competitive actions such as side jobs or selling of company materials
Finding a driver who has been stranded/wrecked in a remote area

Many of these types of situations aren’t considered when GPS tracking ROI is estimated or computed. But they have a tangible “lottery” effect on ROI when they occur. Quickly recovering a vehicle, proving service to end legal action or get paid, saving a life, or having data to refute a lawsuit are MASSIVE wins for a company. Simply tracking vehicles BEFORE these things happen makes the difference between a major financial or legal problem and a quick and hopefully painless resolution.

Think of GPS tracking as a mobile surveillance system for your fleet — you wouldn’t dream of doing without security cameras in your warehouse/sensitive areas for theft prevention and safety/security. Why do without the equivalent for your mobile assets and drivers? A GPS tracking system is very inexpensive insurance against many unthinkable possibilities — take out a policy as soon as possible.

Every vehicle, every 2 minutes of every day — you’ve got complete proof of where they were at and how they got there.

Week History for a fleet of vehicles

Rob

Tags: Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking discount, gps vehicle tracking, insurance, insurance discount, travelers insurance, vehicle recovery

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Jul 15 2010

New alert tells you when vehicles take too long to get where they’re going

Category: Alerts,Company Efficiency,New Features — rdonat @ 9:57 am

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.

Tags: Alerts, efficiency, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, late arrival alert

Comments (1)

May 18 2010

Sneak peek at our new Trip Efficiency Report!

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

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Jan 14 2010

New Graphs showing speeding relative to speed limit

Category: Company Efficiency,Identifying and eliminating speeding,New Features — rdonat @ 4:31 pm

Next week we will release this new capability which will be part of the Activity Detail Report. Next month you will be able to run it for all the vehicles in your fleet and sort in a way that you can identify your Lead-Foots, your Slow-Pokes, and your efficient, safe drivers:

Identify which drivers are going too fast or too slow relative to the speed limit

This is a really useful report, and is just the beginning of many new graph-oriented capabilities we plan to release in 2010.

Here is a close-up of just the graph area which shows the driver efficiency — within 10 MPH of the limit 44% of the time:

Efficient Driving Graph in GPS Insight

To see more intuitive reports that we offer, please view our Sample Reports.

Rob.

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

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Mar 07 2009

Use GPS to measure your company’s LEADING indicators!

Category: Company Efficiency,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Fuel Savings,Reporting,Reports,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 5:57 pm

A key concept in effectively executing a corporate plan is MEASURING the LEADING indicators (vs. the LAGGING indicator).

For instance, considering sales, revenue is the LAGGING indicator, and customer visits may be the LEADING indicator.

The problem is, once you measure revenue, it’s too late! There is nothing you can influence or manage it at that point, once you’ve measured it.

HOWEVER, on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, the LEADING indicators can be measured and adjusted. This is like measuring RPM to predict change in Speed. Or taking the derivative, in Calculus terms.

GPS Insight can help tremendously to gain perspective on where your company is trending.

In this economy, that’s HUGE. For $1-2 a day, we can automate reports which help you to drive your goals to completion, rather than “hope” your company (and your employees…) are headed in the right direction.

So, what is it that we can help drive, depending on your company’s goals? This table summarizes some typical ways customers can use GPS Insight to reach their goals:

Goal	Lagging indicator (goal measurement)	Leading indicator (can be routinely influenced)	How GPS Insight helps measure the Leading Indicator
Increased Sales	Revenue	Customer Visits Miles Driven Longer Hours spent by techs/salespeople	Customer Landmark Reports to count and total visits & time spent at customers Drive Time Summary to summarize weekly/monthly usage for the fleet or sub-fleets Begin/End of day Report shows hours worked by drivers during the day
Reduced Fuel Cost	Fuel Bill	Reduced Idling Reduced Unauthorized Usage Reduced Speeding Reduced Fuel Fraud	Idling Report shows idle time and percentage for all vehicles Odd-Hours/Weekend driving report identifies wasteful unauthorized driving by drivers who take vehicles home Speeding Report shows all speeding activity as well as maps of where that speeding occurs Fuel Consumption Report (3500 series) shows how much fuel was used for comparison to actual bills
Reduced Fleet Risk	Number of Accidents	Reduced Speeding Reduced unauthorized usage	Speeding Report shows all speeding activity as well as maps of where that speeding occurs Odd-Hours/Weekend driving report identifies wasteful unauthorized driving by drivers who take vehicles home
	Number of Vehicles Stolen	Vehicles leaving parking place at wrong times Daily inventory of vehicle whereabouts	Odd-Hours/Geofence Alerts and Reports alert to odd-hours activity outside of known areas and report on such activity daily/weekly/monthly Current Status Map, Dashboard, and Landmark Reports help determine where all vehicles are at all times, and at the beginning/end of the day
Efficient Dispatch	Total Miles Driven Average Trip Distance/Time	Daily/Weekly Miles Driven Daily/Weekly Trip Distance	Drive Time Summary shows mileage and windshield time for any duration of time Stop Detail Report will show average trip distance and times Map Book Lookup Tool gives drivers an address plus that address map book page & grid coordinate, saving time looking for the road
Cut Overtime Hours	Total number of Hours worked	Daily Work Hours	Report on with Begin/End of Day report and Drive Time Summary Influence with efficient dispatch using real time vehicle/order status on a map and closest to functionality Identify purposely or accidentally inefficient driving with the Driver Efficiency Report

Please give us a call at 877-GPS-4321 and ask how we can help you to manage these indicators using GPS tracking technology. You will have meaningful measurements with which to manage your fleet and ensure you meet your goals.

Rob.

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Feb 22 2009

New Idling Graphs for GPS Insight

Category: Company Efficiency,Fuel Savings,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 11:46 am

We have begun work on some new graph-based reports to help our customers quantify their return on investment. Since April of last year, we have been crunching and saving every customer’s data to help provide long term trend reports such as this.

This is a large, almost 1000 truck customer, and this graph completes in 1/4 second:

This particular customer doesn’t have much of an idling problem. They started around 13%, dropped to 4% average, and have risen back up slightly most likely due to both weather & the fact that management may have stopped looking so much at their numbers.

However, this customer has been rolling out vehicles for 3 or 4 months now, and we realized that certain divisions might see a decrease in idling due to usage, but brand new vehicles with poor idling habits would offset that.

So the next iteration of this graph will be to show the data based on how many weeks/months each unit has had GPS installed.

e.g. this will answer the question “How much were we able to decrease idling from week 1 to week 12?” — this is a big savings and helps our customers to justify moving forward after a small trial. Additionally, we will have similar reports for fuel consumption, speeding, off-hours/weekend usage, and total miles driven, moving forward.

Better yet, since we have customer data from over a thousand customers and over 12,000 vehicles, we can establish industry-specific averages and help our customers compare themselves to that average to see how they perform. We can do the same by state or region.

In a nutshell, we can help companies to determne not only how well they have been able to curb wasteful behavior in the first several months using GPS Insight, but also how they compare to the averages in various industries, regions, or overall.

Here is a nice success story:

In a previous blog article, we showed a large customer’s cost savings after emailing their drivers any time they idled longer than 7 minutes.

Here is that data, and in the first 2 months, with diesel at $5 per gallon, they saved 18,000 & 22,000 gallons, for a $200,000 2 month savings by properly utilizing GPS Insight.

Conservatively, their organization has achieved a 500% return on their GPS tracking investment with GPS Insight when considering fuel savings, wear and tear, improved dispatch and delivery efficiency, identification of unauthorized usage and theft, and recovery of stolen vehicles (and some arrests too). Now we have the graphs to help prove some of that.

Rob.

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Aug 30 2008

Better Business Bureau and GPS Tracking companies

Category: Better Business Bureau ratings,Company Efficiency,Fleet Tracking,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,GPS Tracking Industry,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 5:08 pm

GPS Insight is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. We applied and were granted this designation in May of 2007, 2 years after we were formally incorporated, on 4/14/2005. GPS Insight technically began as a consulting project, and my first billable work on it was 8/24/2004, over 4 years ago. This was work done by GPS Insight’s holding company, Sedonatech, Inc., an Illinois S Corporation in business since 4/1/2000.

Here is our information from the BBB: [you can check these yourself at bbb.org, under "USA Site/Check out a business"]

Today, I got my BBB newsletter in the mail, and was curious which of the other GPS vendors we come across were also accredited by the BBB.

I started searching, and thought I would share and maintain this list, periodically checking for changes, so our customers and employees can also know what the Better Business Bureau thinks of them.

These are the BBB rating links to some are the companies we typically hear our customers are (or were) looking at, in no particular order:

@Road:B, but not BBB Accredited

Fleetmatics: Unsatisfactory and not BBB Accredited

Teletrac: Unsatisfactory and A-, East and West offices

Sage Quest: A & BBB Accredited

Discrete Wireless: A-, but not BBB Accredited
Networkcar: No listing

Navtrak: A, but not BBB Accredited

Rocky Mountain Tracking: A- and Accredited

Fleetilla: No listing

Why do I list our competitors here? I feel that prospective customers should know about the market, and know who’s who, and does what. There are some other good GPS vendors out there, and this may help you to determine that as well. But we are happy to help you with a risk free trial against any of them, to prove that we not only have the best GPS Fleet Tracking product on the market, but that we’re also the best value, and have the best support available. Plus we can get you up and running same day in any of our 4 local markets, or next-day/second-day depending on how quickly you want to start tracking your vehicles.

One thing you’ll notice about our competitors’ websites (you’ll have to look them up yourself, I’m not that charitable to them…):

None of them will let you see a live action demo of their maps, their reports, or their overall product.

We have live demos, video demos, and tons of screenshots of our reports, etc. online at www.gpsinsight.com — please take a look. Our product is something that we are proud to show on the website, without forcing you to enter your information, email address, etc. first. An educated customer is the best type — please educate yourself on our website, check out our competitors, have us do a same-day WebEx demo for you, then do a side-by-side, risk free, 30 day money back guarantee trial. You’ll see the difference, or we wouldn’t put our product out there for everyone to see, including our competition!

I usually sign about 1 refund check a quarter and none yet in Q3 of 2008… [or Q4 of 2008 or Q1 of 2009 either]

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Better Business Bureau ratings, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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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

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