Mar 07 2009

Use GPS to measure your company’s LEADING indicators!

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.


Feb 22 2009

New Idling Graphs for GPS Insight

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.

Running a GPS Insight Idle Research Report

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

GPS Insight idle graph

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.

Huge savings using 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.


Aug 30 2008

Better Business Bureau and GPS Tracking companies

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"]

GPS Insight Better Business Bureau accredidation information

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.

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Aug 10 2008

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

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:

Instant reduction in idle time

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.

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Apr 20 2008

Google Earth 4.3 gives GPS Insight street views

Google just released a new version of Google Earth at earth.google.com. It’s slightly different from a navigation standpoint, but one of the nicest new features is the “Street View” which helps our customers to put their vehicles’ activity in context.

Here is a picture of many thousands of our vehicles which we track, most of which are red (it’s Sunday & everyone’s been parked > 1 hour). What’s new are these little camera icons in major metro areas, which appear when you turn on “Street View” under Layers on the left.

Google Earth Street View

These cameras indicate that street views are available for that area.

Now when you want to know where someone is (or was) stopped you can see more than just an overhead image:

Here is one of our resellers named John and he’s parked at a large warehouse with many pools set up. I happen to know it’s Paddock Pools in Phoenix since that’s where we got our pool.

Google Earth Street View with GPS Insight Vehicle Tracking

But John is there right now, & if I wanted to see this “as if you were there” you just click on that camera on the road to “zoom into” a real picture:

Google Earth Street View with GPS Insight Vehicle Tracking

Clicking on “Show Full Screen” brings you into a 3-D picture where you can look around by dragging the world whichever direction you need:

Viewing street level information within GPS Insight

If you want to go down the road a bit you can just click on a new camera icon which represents another photo.

Click from camera to camera to go down the road

Now you can look at the same building but from a completely different angle:

Same Paddock Pools Sign, but from down the street

And when you click on “exit photo” you can then show where the various photos are along the road to pick the best one for your investigative needs…:

Google Earth Steet Photos

All very cool and powerful capabilities, I’m sure this will shed some light on where drivers are taking their lunches for some of our customers…

lunch hour just got less fun for drivers…

lunch hour just got less fun for drivers…

In addition, you can always turn on “Bars/Clubs” under “Places of Interests” under “Layers” for a comprehensive listing along-side the cameras (they show up as martini glasses) to get a feel for what restaurants/bars are located near driver activity:

Bars and Clubs within Google Earth/GPS Insight

There are almost an unlimited number of street photos, and it’s getting more comprehensive, so start making use of this information within your organization.

Rob

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Apr 07 2008

Police chase & “Horrific Crash” — How GPS Insight helped an ambulance company react

Today a customer of ours in Southern California near our Orange office let us know that they used our product to both help 7 of their ambulances get to the scene of a California police chase that ended in a “horrific crash.” They also let us know they were able to use GPS Insight in order to assess their responsiveness to this large scale emergency.

Here is a video of the news story, where a drunk woman in a stolen SUV tried to escape police and crashed into 5 vehicles going the wrong way down the street in Tustin, California:

http://www.cbs2.com/video/?id=63039@kcbs.dayport.com

Ambulance tracked by GPS Insight arrives at the scene of a horrific crash

Using GPS Insight, their dispatch personnel can view their vehicle locations in real time (1 minute map updates and 2 minute vehicle updates). That screen allows them to also visualize their custom-built color-coded zones, click for a zoomed in detail of a vehicle or speed/stopped time type details. This particular screen shot is from a different company since the ambulance company’s regions and vehicles require understandable privacy. However it gives a good example of what a mid-sized fleet looks like in the GPS Insight dispatch map view.

GPS Insight fleet view

When the call comes in for the emergency, they probably only had the cross streets, Warner Avenue and Red Hill Ave, in Tustin (technically close to Tustin in Santa Ana). By typing that into the GPS Insight “Find Address” box and zooming/marking it, the location can be instantly found:

Instantly find an address and route a vehicle using GPS Insight’s Find Address Box

This brings up the following map view, from which turn-by-turn directions to (or from) that location to any vehicle or other location/landmark can be brought up just by clicking on the “directions” links:

Get quick directions to and from a location

Now using the mouse scroll wheel, the zoom level allows you to see the two closest ambulances, 76 and 79, as well as their recent history as a “trail.” They are yellow which indicates they’re turned off but haven’t been stopped more than an hour (then they would be red, and this is all configurable by the customer with GPS Insight). By clicking on them we see more information. Ambulance#76 has been stopped for 27 minutes.

Find the closest vehicles to the crash

Not that this company needs directions — they know exactly where they are going to get to the calls in the most efficient way possible, but for many of our customers, turn-by-turn directions are necessary. All that needs to be done is to simply click on “Directions From Here” and exact directions are shown from that vehicle to the crash site. Note that you can turn on real time traffic and adjust the route simply by dragging the purple route line from one road to another.

Get directions with traffic from your vehicle to an address

Now the dispatcher has all the information necessary to send that emergency vehicle to the scene of the accident.

As for what it looks like in the GPS Insight 3D history at that time, we can run an all vehicles 3D history for that date like this with just a couple clicks:

GPS Insight 3D History

Now we can “dial in” the time of the accident by gradually opening up the time slider until the first vehicle “arrives” on the scene at 3:22 PM (shown as a green vehicle “78 3/24 15:22″) — since this is a historical map history, we show the date as well.

Then we can open up more “time” to see which other vehicles arrived. The differently colored lines correspond to the paths of different vehicles.

other vehicles arrive at the scene of the accident

While there may be too many “dots” to easily see which vehicles arrived when, and how long they stayed, quickly clicking on the blue ones will show length of visit information (blue = idling):

how long an ambulance stayed at the site

Then if we want an exact report, just draw an exact polygon landmark around the crash site (we name it CrashSite here), and run a report as such:

Run a GPS Insight Geofence Report for GPS Tracking

Here is the report which takes less than a second to run, and which tells you exactly which vehicles arrived, and at what exact time (to the second), along with how long they were there.

Crash report

This data can be exported to Excel for further analysis, and of course the times and speeds of the ambulances from their prior locations when they were dispatched can be investigated as well in great detail using GPS Insight.

We’re glad we helped this company out, and hope the victims recover quickly. Thanks to the ambulance company for helping the victims (and even the suspect) so quickly.

Rob.

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Nov 03 2007

Route Reporting in GPS Insight

In an earlier article I mentioned I would do a blog article about the GPS Insight route report. Here I will create a simple route (from my house to work) and run the report to see which of our vehicles ran that route. It should only be (and is) both my vehicle as well as my wife’s, since she sometimes comes by the office, or I sometimes take her car to work (I did the other day).

We construct the route by creating, then selecting a begin & end landmark, in this case “Rob House” and “GPS2″ :

Create a GPS Insight route

Then we run a report for a range of dates, a group of vehicles, and a particular route:

Run GPS Insight route report

Which yields this report, which shows that the only two vehicles making this trip between Rob House and GPS2 (our office) are mine (Rob) and my wife’s (Navigator). I have put red boxes around strange entries, where I either leave my car at the office for days (e.g. someone drops me off at the airport), or it takes me a long time to drive the 6.6 miles I live from work (e.g. I go to a customer meeting before heading to work), or it takes me a while to get home from work (e.g. I go out to dinner with a customer or my family).

Route report

At the very bottom I put a red box around the only time I’ve used the Navigator to go to work, this being because my wife took my car to the airport for a trip and left hers so I can take the kids to school/soccer/etc.

Perhaps I want a “median” time it takes me to get to work, and how long I usually stay at work. In this case, I would pull the data easily into Excel like this and run whichever custom calculations I need to:

Using Excel for custom calculations/adjustments

Now I know it takes me 19 minutes median for me to get to work (the middle of all the samples, sometimes better than an average), and 10 minutes median to get home.

This is because I typically drop my sons off at school on my way to work, which takes around 10 minutes, but I come straight home.

This is a simple example of how you can use GPS Insight to calculate route statistics and use them to gain valuable insight into your fleet and your drivers.

Thanks for your interest, & call us at 866-GPS-4321 to talk about how we can help your company to do similar analysis with its GPS tracking project.

Rob.

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Sep 07 2007

Detecting unauthorized usage trends with GPS

This article details an interesting view of “Macroeconomic” level understanding of fleets using GPS data which we get here at GPS Insight. On a typical day for one set of our servers, the number of GPS data points from vehicles under management reaches around 700. This is indicative of the number of moving vehicles, and with two minute updates for these vehicles, it roughly means 1500 vehicles are moving (and we are tracking) at that time for those servers.

Here is a graph of the activity throughout a typical work week day, with a yellow “15 minute moving average.” The Pink lines indicate our users’ activity on the system, and the blue/yellow lines ultimately indicate their vehicle movement and/or idling time:

dc_weekday1.png

On a WEEKEND, however, the trend is much less smooth, and some interesting “spikes” occur which could show why you probably want GPS tracking for your vehicles if your drivers take them home on the weekend (we also see that the level our customers use GPS Insight is down considerably on the weekends):

dc_saturday1.png

You may want to click on the image above to show a larger version. The day appears to spike at only 600 or so vehicles moving (vs. 1500) at once, and while the day begins about the same time as a typical weekday, there are a couple late-day spikes.

I imagine these spikes illustrate just how many people use their company vehicles to drive to restaurants/bars, particularly the late night return spike which we never see during the week but which is prevalent on the weekends.

Running a quick back-end report, I identified some likely culprits and drilled down on one (there were 150 vehicles driving during that time frame). This driver, a salesperson by the vehicle’s label, went on a 11:45 diaper run from what it looks like, thankfully less than a mile from home, stopping 7 minutes, then heading back. We see that this is a “Fry’s Food Stores” by turning on the shopping overlay/layer which gives useful information about an area within the 3-D mapping we utilize for GPS Insight.

This type of company vehicle utilization may be completely fine with the customer, but it could also be something more dangerous (late night drinking and driving). To see if this vehicle engages in late-night usage we can run a simply “odd-hours” report:

And luckily, we see that in the last 30 days, the only activity this vehicle has had between 10PM and 2AM is this event to the store and a 1 minute movement, most likely moving the vehicle in or out of the garage.

This is a simple example on the first vehicle (of 150) I checked, and for customer privacy we won’t give out much information about others, but the spikes and the trends are compelling evidence that your drivers may be taking your vehicles out at night for fun on weekends, and with GPS Insight, you can easily detect and deter this type of behavior. After all, it’s your company on the line from a risk standpoint if an accident occurs, and minimally, the fuel and maintenance for off-hours/weekend usage is something our customers wish to avoid.

For more information about these types of reports and maps, visit GPS Insight or our Wiki with more examples and documentation about the GPS Insight Vehicle tracking product.

Rob Donat.

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Sep 07 2007

Benefits to fleet-based companies from using GPS Tracking

At GPS Insight, we see a wide variety of customers from just about every industry. Our typical customers are from the service and trucking industries, and here is a list of industries I’ve been compiling recently in order to detail the specific advantages GPS Tracking (aka Vehicle Tracking) will afford each of them. They are in absolutely no order than what order I started typing them, which is somewhat based on how typical they are of our customer base at GPS Insight.

  • HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning)
  • Plumbing
  • Garage door repair
  • Auto Glass
  • Roofing
  • Telecommunications (Cable, Phone and Internet providers)
  • Street Sweeping
  • Landscape Design and Construction
  • Landscape Maintenance
  • General Engineering
  • Energy/Fuel/Gas Companies
  • Construction (General)
  • Construction Supply
  • Excavation
  • Automotive (parts delivery, demo & courtesy vehicles, dealer vehicles)
  • Construction trades (drywall, flooring, painting, bricklaying, tile, electrical, lighting, etc.)
  • Trucking, Long Haul (OTR)
  • Trucking, Local Delivery
  • Security firms (patrol, dispatch)
  • Courier and package delivery
  • Beverage distribution & coffee service
  • Fuel & Oil delivery
  • Military
  • Federal and State, Municipal Government
  • Retail delivery (furniture, appliance, office supplies, medical supply, floral)
  • Installation firms (satellite, broadband, home audio/video, water treatment, basement systems)
  • Limousine, Taxi
  • Concrete Placement/Pumping
  • Agricultural (farming and produce delivery)
  • Boat rental
  • Sales (business equipment, pharmaceutical, company representatives)
  • Police
  • Concrete
  • Vending firms
  • General Services (Pool maintenence, Janitorial, Pest control, Carpet cleaning)
  • Solid Waste (Commercial, Residential, Subcontractors)
  • Personal usage
  • Marketing vehicles
  • Mobile advertising
  • Education (campus plant operations, etc.)
  • Towing
  • Tire delivery/service
  • Mobile Car Wash
  • Mobile Shredding / Document Management
  • Rental companies
  • Catering, food delivery
  • Medical transport
  • Moving

The primary benefits of GPS Tracking to most service industries are:

  • Dispatch: Know where your vehicles are at all time using real time mapping
  • Fuel: Save a lot on your fuel bill by curbing off-hours usage, excessive idling, speeding, and fuel-card fraud
  • Labor: Your drivers will stop reporting time worked that they didn’t actually work. This typically provides instant return on investment (ROI) well past the ~$1.50/day the typical GPS Tracking product costs when the hardware is leased or built into the monthly cost
  • Billing: Prove to your customers your hours at their facility, which helps avoid “goodwill” credits where they’re not deserved — likewise, it helps you to get on top of problem drivers who are claming to work longer than they did — this cost you more than hours paid to your workers. It will cost you your customers as well!
  • Risk: When you implement and enforce a speeding policy, your drivers will stop speeding within a week. We have seen it so many times, and it is simply impossible for your drivers to avoid speeding detection with GPS Tracking. Additionally, you can establish and enforce an off-hours driving policy for your vehicles which will lessen the likelihood of an accident in a company vehicle, particularly a drunk-driving accident after hours when used to drive to the local bar.
  • Maintenence: Our GPS Tracking product talks to the engine’s diagnostics port, which means we know when your engine light is on and why. You get instant email alerts that there are “critical” problems with your vehicle such as transmission & brake issues, low oil pressure, and other major engine issues. Less critical problems come in a nightly email as well as on demand via the web interface. Very few GPS Tracking providers give this information and it is a key differentiator for GPS Insight typically.
  • Routing: By utilizing intelligent and optimized routes, your fleet’s efficiency will be significantly increased. Fewer miles driving to customers in the wrong order, less fuel, less labor, less maintenence, happier customers — they all add up to a significant advantage for your company after installing GPS Tracking devices.
  • Reports: Most GPS Tracking companies provide detailed activity, summary, stop, idling, speeding, off-hours, and landmark/geofence reports. Some companies provide more custom (or completely custom) reports such as State Mileage reporting (for fuel tax reporting), route compliance/deviation, etc.

As more and more benefits warrant detailing here, we will do so — there are many other lesser reasons for using GPS Insight — call several companies and ask their salespeople for more information (us included…). Some of the lesser reasons: Idling, maintenence logs, mileage reports, etc.

Rob

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