So I head out tomorrow morning to Las Vegas for the  AFLA Conference (American Fleet Leasing Association), and probably won’t have much time for documenting GPS Insight in the blog.

So I have to pick up 2 GPS Insight employees tomorrow, & don’t know where they live (I won’t name names — what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas).

Easy enough — I just enter their addresses into the GPS Insight Route Dashlet on the dashboard, choosing a Start/End of my house & Sky Harbor Airport (both pre-defined landmarks in GPS Insight’s account):

How to route myself via Garmin to 2 employee homes & the Airport

Press “Get Route” and voila!

Create and send an optimized route to my vehicle's Garmin to pick up employees and head to the airport

Now I am able to send the route named “Vegas” to my Garmin, which will have 4 sequentially numbered stops, and will take me in that order.

Also, I can always map it by pressing “Map This” and it will show the overall route, to include the time (1 hour & 10 minutes) and turn-by-directions (not that I’ll need them — that’s what the Garmin is for!):

Mapped route with a start & 3 sequential stops

Now I need to pack & get some sleep for a very busy conference full of learning and such…

Rob.

I was working yesterday (and today) and my wife sent me an email to pick some stuff up from the grocery store.

Email asking me to get things from the store

I knew I would forget & get home, & have to drive back, so here’s what I did:

Send myself a reminder to go to the store via Garmin Message to my car

Here’s what I sent only 2 minutes after getting the email:

Modern day GPS Insight "ribbon tied on my finger"

This means when I get in my car, the Garmin will be beeping at me, with this message, and I won’t get home and forget.

Here’s what the Garmin screens looked like:

I have a message waiting for me

Click on it for the full message

Full message to remind me to go to the store

And did I remember?

Yep, and I can pull up a stop report to show it:

Run a stop report for "Rob" vehicle for yesterday

Note the 24 minute stop near the grocery store:

24 minute stop at the store to get groceries

Why did it take me 24 minutes to get 7 things?

Because I need GPS in a supermarket — I made 5 trips from aisle 1 to aisle 20 — I have no idea where anything is & am worthless in a grocery store.

That would be a very useful product for guys like me.

Rob.

How true, again from our favorite geek comic strip, XKCD.

GPS Navigation Humor

Original here:

http://xkcd.com/783/

This happens to me all the time, & it drives me crazy.  Except then inevitably they live on some crazy brand new street and I wind up calling them for directions anyway…

Rob.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of our salespeople, Alissa, just sent me this.  Nice to know we are getting use out of our own product.  She was waiting for her car to be towed & didn’t want it stolen over night (the radiator died).

using an alert to ensure a vehicle isn't stolen

We get hooked on all the various uses of GPS Insight ourselves as well! Learn more about our tracking alerts or the rest of our GPS vehicle tracking solution by visiting our website.

Rob.

I took my  boys (7 & 9) skiing (snowboarding they correct me every time…) up to Flagstaff AZ this weekend.

I brought my Garmin Edge 705 (a Garmin for bikes, basically) & put it in my coat pocket to get a really good feel for where we went during the weekend.  It logs every 10 seconds for eventual upload (vs. once a minute in real time for the EZ-1000 I brought along as well).

Garmin EDGE 705

They are really nice, and we don’t sell them — I bought mine at the bike shop.  [We do sell Garmin's for vehicles and can integrate them with our GPSI-4000 GPS tracking solution though...]

The Garmin is an optimist, and thinks I ran up all those hills & burned 5248 calories in the process (had I brought the wireless heart monitor it would have known better):

Garmin's interpretation of my Skiing with my kids

This is a great image of GPS Insight vs. Garmin (bear in mind we are an “ACTIVE” tracking system whereas the Garmin is “PASSIVE” and needs you to upload the data eventually):

GPS Insight vs. Garmin for ski tracking

The “pins” are EZ-1000 points [every minute while in cell coverage, which is spotty on the mountain].  The yellow circles are Garmin points (a LOT more of them).

Here is the Garmin unit track of where we went (and where I remembered to turn the unit on…):

Skiing at Snowbowl in Flagstaff AZ

It’s nice to have that for sports usage.  But if you want to track your vehicles in real time, that’s not an option — you need an active tracking solution like GPS Insight. Both are great products — just for entirely different needs.

And here are my cold kids.  Lots of snow this weekend, and way colder than they’re used to living in the desert.

Rob's kids in their cold-weather snowboarding attire

Rob.

This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Click for information on the other reports we offer.

Thanks,
Rob.

We have been busy this month and released several new features to the dashboard (as well as posted speed limit reports/graphs which I will talk about separately).

First, there are new dashboard layouts, and they are more intuitively labeled:

Intuitive dashboard styles

Choosing “2 wide L” will give you a wider column on the left and a thinner column on the right.  Choosing “4 wide” will give you 4 columns.  These various layouts are useful depending on what type of style you like for your dashboard setup.

As always, after making changes, make sure to save your dashboard settings!

Next, we have added the ability to send routes to Garmins from the Route Dashlet.

After optimizing a route with the route dashlet (and optional feature), just choose a Garmin-integrated vehicle and click on send — the optimized route is sent instantly to that Garmin:

Send a full optimized route to a Garmin

Last, we made our “closest to” dashlet more useful by adding both drive distance and drive time, in addition to the “crow flies” distance which is all we previously supported.  You can sort by any of the columns, choose your vehicle, and click on the “dispatch” button if you are using Garmin integration:

Closest To Dashlet includes drive distance/time now

And for users of the dashboard map book tool which turns an address into a map book page/grid coordinate, you can now “sanity check” the location by clicking on “Map Address” — it will pull up a convenient map for you to make sure you typed it correctly & have a reasonable address:

Sanity check your mapbook addresses now in the dashlet

And another recent dashlet worth mentioning again — the legend.  Now you can have a convenient reference to what the various colors and vehicle icon shapes mean:

GPS Insight map legend

Thanks for using these new capabilities and we appreciate your feedback which has led to their creation.

Click for more information on our GPS Vehicle Tracking Functionality.

Rob.

I pretty much have a never-ending supply of EZ-1000’s so I brought one skiing with my 2 boys on a recent trip.

Jack, my older son, is old enough to go skiing (boarding, he would correct me) without me. Actually, he has officially passed me by — he does black runs I refuse to do (small on a board is way better than big on skis when it comes to moguls).

I wanted to know where he was at one point so I ran a quick mobile map on my iPhone & put it in “compass mode” so I could see what direction he was from me.

Here it is (I’m the blue dot, Jack is the red pin):

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

Here he really was (my eyes are better than the 3 megapixel camera on the iPhone…) — note that he’s between the lift & the ski patrol “house” just like the map shows it:

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

I ran a 3D history of that device for the 2 days I remembered to bring it and put it in Jack’s pocket & it puts him exactly where my iPhone shows him at 1:44 (note the time in the first screen shot). Waiting 4 minutes at the bottom of the hill for his 2 friends:

Showing skiing activity using an EZ-1000 from GPS Insight

Also interesting is the straight lines which depict the lifts very clearly. The main lifts are in the “clutter” of dots on the left side, but the lifts we went on once each are really easy to spot toward the top right.

It’s easy to see which runs got the most use by turning off the “time slider” and looking at just the blue path:

GPS Tracking my son on the ski (board) slopes

Here are my two boarders:

Jack & Ryan on a snowboarding trip

And by looking at the GPS track as well as how well he was jumping and grinding, I can tell Jack went through the terrain park most of all:

Jack grinding/jumping off a box in the terrain park

I’ll try embedding a Facebook video I have of him going through the terrain park here:

Rob.

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.

I lost my keys the other day which is awesome. I think they’re in a toy chest somewhere courtesy of my daughter.

So today after we rolled out a new improved Driver-to-Vehicle mapping product, I grabbed a new DriverID at work and put it on my (new) keychain.

I forgot to “log in” — we do however support mandatory login using a really obnoxious buzzer which goes off after 30 seconds until you press the driver ID button to the reader.

So after dinner, I decided to test everything for myself. Since I’m not the only person who will lose a DriverID or their keys, we made sure to make it easy to give out & assign new driverID’s.

After my drive, I logged in and launched the right administrative screen where we see 3 unassigned driverID buttons — one has been used in my car (Rob 4000) and has today’s date and a recent time.

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So I choose my previously defined Driver record with the drop-down:

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So then we run an activity detail report for my vehicle for today to see the driverID switch. My “wife’s” driverID had been recently assigned to my car, so the change was very apparent. (I quote “wife” not because she’s not real, but she doesn’t really use a driverID — she might be more colorful than some of our customers’ drivers about telling me where to put my driverID if I asked her to use one…)

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

So here’s the switch — exactly when I took the car for a quick spin around the neighborhood:

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

And here is my path with my name now in the Driver field within the information bubble:

New DriverID assigned to my vehicle after losing my keys

After working diligently lately, we’ve streamlined this process as much as possible for as many use case/problem cases (e.g. drivers losing their keys…) as possible, and it’s trivial to reassign a new driverID to a driver now.

I wish we tracked keys though…

[Side note, I found them today, 1/24/10, finally, outside by the hose, rusted after a couple weeks of sitting out in the rain, but the car door openers still work...]

For more GPS Insight features, please see our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features page.

Rob.

This feature really helps to make sure you are saving miles/hours/dollars by streamlining your drivers’ daily route!

Before I talk about this, please realize that the routing dashlet is not a standard feature, and is included with our routing package, which is an enhancement to the base GPS Insight product. You may not have access to it currently. Call your salesperson for information.

Here is a new ability we added to the Route dashlet:

You can enter multiple addresses as always, as well as a start/stop landmark.

GPS Insight routing dashlet

Click on Optimize to get the proper order (which you can cut and paste into an email to the driver, etc.):

Click on GPS Insight's "Map This" button for optimized directions

Here is the result:

Map and directions for optimized set of destinations

You can click on print, send (email), or link (to cut/paste a direct link) at the top right for your convenience.

We will add more functionality to this dashlet over time (e.g. more landmark/landmark group inclusion, optimization options, Garmin integration, etc.).

If you would like to try it out and you are not an existing routing customer, please call us for a 14 day trial.

To learn more visit our Fleet Tracking Routing.

Thanks,

Rob.

Rob.

Well, the holidays are over, and we’re getting back to business at GPS Insight.

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

1. We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
2. We will release an iPhone App toward the end of January (although Apple may take longer to approve for the App Store than that)

The Posted Speed Limit Report will let you know where your drivers are driving fast relative to the actual speed limit. It will come with other graphing enhancements to our regular speed alerts which will let you graph the 30 minutes before & after the speeding event in order to better understand what your drivers are doing. Additionally, if you use GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping with Google Earth, you will be able to click on the graph for an instant download of that vehicle for those 60 minutes.

Here are some screenshots:

Running a Posted Speed Limits Report on the “Robgroup” (my vehicles, and “Rob” has several devices installed):

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Disclaimer!!!*** — I was not really doing 28 MPH over the speed limit — I’ll explain this after the report:

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Clicking on the “Google Earth” button shows this:

GPS Insight 3D Posted Speed Violations View

That street is actually a 40 MPH zone (although I was definitely speeding — I live in the middle of the desert and it was 50 MPH when I moved there so I’m grandfathered in — is that a good excuse? How about I only needed some sample data for this article? My scofflaw COO borrowed the car? How about I have big brakes? Either way, I was speeding and this report picked it up.)

What is important to know is that the standard speeding report wouldn’t have really called attention to it so much. I was only doing 63 [65 max]. It’s 65 MPH standard on the highways out here. What’s important is the difference between ACTUAL and POSTED speed limits. 28 (really 23) in this case.

So how do you check to see what the real speed limit is? Just quickly go into street view in that area & find a speed limit sign:

Finding Stop Signs in GPS Insight's Google Earth Mode

Soon we will allow our customers to “override” certain street speed limits in order to accurately report on violations. Not every speed limit in our system is 100% up to date. It’s the ease of using it which makes this a quick and powerful tool. We plan to begin a “sanity check” service on our customers’ behalf where the most flagrant speeding will result in our double-checking the actual speed limits in that area.

Even if they are off by 5-15 MPH, this report is REALLY good at finding your opportunistic speeders.

Note the “inline” graph in the 3D “bubble” will also show up in the report for an instant check of recent/subsequent activity. Clicking on it gives a 30 minutes before/after map in Google Earth.

Speed Graphs in GPS Insight

[we're still working on the best way to graph it, so this will change soon]

Here is the 60 minute “quick map” you get when clicking on the graph:

60 minute "quick map" around a speeding violation

This is useful in order to get some context for what the driver was doing.

So this report will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to companies, and comes with a lengthy disclaimer that you need to put some time into investigating the speed limits initially before going off and firing drivers. It will also come with a follow-on report which “ranks” your drivers with graphs which show their typical speeding patterns. Since speed limits differ from our data equally across drivers, you will quickly get a feel for which of your drivers are speeders, which are ideal, and which intentionally go slower than they should in order to pad hours.

Moving on, we have an iPhone app coming in January. It will do a nicer job of mobile fleet management than the current GPS Insight Mobile Mapping option. Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight iPhone App coming soon!

You launch it from the iPhone like a normal app.

You are then given a set of options to choose from in terms of moving/stopped vehicles, various vehicle groups, etc.:

List of vehicles within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Choosing one will give you various information, to include a map of just that one vehicle (or choose “Map” to see them all):

Vehicle location within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Quick View lets you choose just a few vehicles at a time

And you will be able to set certain settings (right now they’re pretty limited):

Settings tab in the GPS Insight iPhone App

So that about covers the 2 new exciting features coming soon in January 2010. Based on licensing restrictions, both capabilities MAY have an additional cost, either now or in the future. If they do, it won’t be much, and chances are they’ll both be free to customers or cost the same as the existing mobile mapping capabilities.

Happy New Year everyone!

Rob.

Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Detroit city employee’s vehicle which had been used to BUY crack cocaine.

Now in Key West, FL, an employee was just arrested for selling cocaine, near a school or church, even!

We are seeing quite a few municipalities show interest and purchasing GPS tracking systems.

With problems like this, I can see why! We hear a lot of stories, but these two in the last couple weeks are pretty shocking.

Use GPS Insight! Know where your drivers are at all times! And let them know they’re being tracked. Then they won’t do this type of thing most likely…

Rob

I used to use this as a far-fetched example when talking about the benefits of retroactive landmark reports:

“Let’s say you catch one of your drivers buying crack at a crack house — don’t you want to know which others may have visited there in the past year or more?”

Well, in Detroit, they actually found a city employee’s vehicle at an actual crack house.

It’s detailed in this Automotive Fleet article.

So, now that there is a real life example of this, how would you use GPS Insight to easily determine the other vehicles which have visited that same crack house?

Here’s how:

First, find the exact location by looking at that vehicle/date/time and create a landmark with the convenient link from that point (we’ll pretend my house is a crack house).

First, run a 3D history map for that day (pretend yesterday):

Use GPS Tracking to find out who's buying crack with your vehicles

I’ll pick the “crack stop” at my house (really me coming home from taking the kids to Buffalo Wild Wings, a different kind of crack) and blur the street names in case anyone wants to come see for themselves — then I click on “Landmark: Create from Point”:

Pick a stop & create a landmark around it

Now I choose a Polygon landmark, change the color to green (why not?), and outline the areas a vehicle might PARK IN (not my house, which is a common mistake — you want landmarks to be where people park, not where the actual landmark is!).

I call it “Crack House.”

Now when I refresh my menu to pick up the new landmark under “Reports: Landmarks” I can run a 1 month at a time landmark report (note clicking the month name selects the entire month):

Run a GPS Tracking landmark report on a crack house in GPS Insight

Other than my wife & I, no other vehicles show up in December, so I go to November and see that a few other vehicles have been tracked in that exact area. Note the “Passing through” option which is checked — this means the visit will show up even if the ignition is not turned off while there (e.g. a drive by drug buy — my guess is crackheads like to idle too).

There was too much activity for my vehicle (with 3-4 devices), my wife’s & the company Scion (3 devices), so I created an “all but robs” group and ran the report against that:

Quickly create a vehicle group in GPS Insight

So Elliot and Ryan were in the crack house zone in November:

Elliot & Ryan at the crack house?

You get the idea. Obviously this is just a simulation — Elliot was dropping off a credit card we had forgotten at a restaurant the night before, and Ryan was dropping my wife off after her car needed service.

But what is important here is GPS Insight allows you to go BACK in time to check for landmark activity.

Several competitors do NOT (including two of the largest/oldest ones in our space). They will only allow you to report on landmark activity in landmarks which you created BEFORE the activity took place.

That means you would need to know all the crack house locations in advance! I hope our customers don’t have that information handy.

Although, I’ve often said you would have to be smoking crack to go with another solution…

Rob.

We have a customer in San Francisco who wanted to be able to reconcile the # of trips they make across the Bay Bridge (since they pay a toll when coming into the city).

Here is a picture of the landmark they defined (along with a nice 3D representation in Google Earth):

GPS Insight Landmark of the San Francisco Bay Bridge

We added a “Passing Through” option to our standard landmark report to help with this requirement. Before this, the landmark visit would have required the vehicle to either stop or idle for a minute to register. If you click the “Passing Through” checkbox, it will count any activity through that “zone.”

GPS Insight landmark report adds "passing through" option

Now when running the report (which took less than 3 seconds), you get each time a vehicle went through that area (I’ve blurred out the vehicle names for customer privacy).

GPS Insight vehicle tracking landmark report

This makes it easy to see that 7 vehicles went a total of 23 times across the Bay Bridge.

But how many tolls is that?

You only get charged on the way INTO the city. Exporting that report to Excel gives us some additional information such as heading (what direction the trip took through the landmark). So only Southwest trips should incur a toll. That shows 8 of them according to this Excel Screenshot:

How many tolls should we be charged across the Bay Bridge?

We added Heading as well to the exported version of the report. Since space isn’t at a premium in Excel, we usually put all columns into the exported versions of the reports there.

This helps our customer, & I thought it would be worth detailing here in case other customers can think of a good use for this.

Thanks,
Rob.

Funny, we saw this truck on its way home from Disneyland. I think I’ll have a salesperson call to see how they keep tabs on unauthorized usage on Monday:

Unauthorized usage of Company Vehicles

GPS Insight prevents this! Not only will you prevent your drivers abusing/using their take home vehicles on weekends and at night, but you won’t have to worry about your drivers causing accidents when couches fall off of YOUR vehicles. Plus you won’t have to pay for the fuel to move their apartment.

Rob.

We added 10 second panic capabilities to our EZ-1000 devices yesterday. They have a “panic button” which can be pressed to send a message.

My boys have EZ-1000’s here in Disneyland so I thought I would configure an alert straight to my cell phone if they ever pressed the button (not that they ever were somewhere without us).

Within 20-30 seconds on average, it would “page” me that either “Mickey” or “Chip” (the 2 devices) had pressed the panic button.

This is NOT something we sell to people for their kids — but security firms do use them for their foot and bike/Segway mounted security guards.

Here is the alert:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

And here was the SMS text message I got when “Chip” pressed the panic button:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

Then a map shows you their location and using the iPhone, I can walk to them using the “blue” dot which is me (well, if you look at the time, I had actually done this earlier to figure out where they were at beforehand…):

GPS Tracking my kids on Tom Sawyer's Island

This is what might happen to a kid at Disneyland if they get lost on Tom Sawyer’s Island without a Panic Alarm capable EZ-1000:

Jack in Tom Sawyer's jail at Disneyland

Rob.

We recently introduced driver-to-vehicle mapping. Now we support driverID buttons and readers to quickly allow drivers to identify the fact they are driving a vehicle. A really obnoxious alarm goes off in 30 seconds after ignition on if they forget this (optional — I left it off my vehicle…)

Here’s how it works:

You touch your driver ID button to the reader before or after turning the vehicle on. In dispatch, a list of all the “unassigned” driver IDs is shown (on the bottom). Note that my driver ID (Robert Donat) is assigned only to “Rob” at this time. The Driver ID reader is on “Rob 4000″ and I used that button earlier today:

GPS Insight shows "unknown" driver ID buttons

After clicking “Assign Driver Button” you can now choose from a list of drivers — I choose myself:

Assign a driver to our gps tracking and driver tracking system

Notice I am now listed on BOTH vehicles (really 2 different devices in the same vehicle, which is not typical, but there for our testing purposes):

Then that “unknown” button is no longer in the list of buttons to assign:

No longer unassigned in the driver button box

Now whenever I use a different vehicle, I can use my button on that vehicle and I will automatically be “assigned” to it for reporting/mapping/alert purposes.

We recently completed an API to achieve this as well.

This makes things much easier and more automated when assigning drivers to vehicles. That allows you to tell which PEOPLE are speeding, idling, using the vehicles off hours, getting parking tickets, etc. — not which VEHICLES.

Rob.

We have had a few customers require alert for both panic buttons which they wire to our GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 devices, as well as “power cycle” alerts (due to tampering, battery changes, etc.).

They are now there, and here is how to use them:

First, open the Alerts Manager:

GPS Insight Switch Alerts

Then choose the “Switch-Based Alert” option:

GPS Insight Switch Alerts

Here is where you can then choose either a panic switch based alert, or a power-cycle-based alert:

Panic vs. Power Cycle Alert

The next time a Panic Switch is detected (or a Power Cycle of the GPS Insight device), you will receive an email and/or an SMS text message letting you know.

This capability will be very helpful for customers with high-risk environments (cab drivers, etc.), as well as to help detect if/when drivers are intentionally disconnecting the GPS Insight device in order to escape being tracked.

As always, call for details at 866-GPS-4321, #2,1 for Tech Support.

Thanks,
Rob.

This is a quick camera video I took to show just how fast messages make it to the GPS Insight Navigation solution using Garmin.

I simulate a dispatch event using an SMS text message from my iPhone, which sends both a “dispatched stop” (to GPS Insight Headquarters) in the form “gps rob dis headq” (which is short for “dispatch GPS Insight Headquarters”). Then I send a text message using “gps rob gm hi there”and “gm” is short for “Garmin Message.” You can see it takes literally less than a second to receive the message, and about 2-3 seconds to receive the dispatch (the “lag” is due to the text messaging infrastructure but 2-3 seconds is pretty good regardless).

Here is the video, and below it, I will show how a customer would “typically” send a message or next stop to a driver.

Here is the message I sent back using the Garmin in the demo (visible here in the Garmin message history):

There is another Garmin demonstration here for a more thorough look at how the Garmin Integration with GPS Insight works. This video is to really show the solution “in action” to illustrate how quick and powerful it is for dispatch oriented organizations.

Thanks,

Rob.

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.

I decided to hike Camelback Mountain today — I’ll try to make this short (shorter than the 1 1/2 hour hike up & down the toughest mountain I’ve done in the Valley).

I couldn’t remember where to go so I looked it up on the internet & then dispatched myself via my Garmin from my PC:

Then I created a landmark as well, while I was at it (note I put the “route me here” address where it should go, but then I outlined the whole mountain) :

Then I routed myself there with my Garmin by wirelessly dispatching my vehicle’s Garmin to that location:

Turns out it was the wrong entrance — I go to the other one typically, so I drove around aimlessly finding that, plus the REI sports place where I bought a new water backpack (called a Camelbak, coincidentally…) .

Running an efficiency report, I ran 58% more time and 20% more miles (since the miles I went extra were on surface streets, not highways, this makes sense):

Here is my driving around aimlessly, wasting time & fuel (green dots, vs. blue “optimal path”):

Then I get to Camelback, and send a couple SMS notes when I start, get to the top, then get back to the bottom:

Here is my track of the 1 1/2 hour climb to the top and back (using an EZ-1000 at 10 second updates):

Here is an iPhone picture of me at the top, mapping both my iPhone GPS location (blue) and the EZ-1000 location (red pin):

But here is the good part:

Toward the bottom:

And at the top:

I’m a little sore after the 1 1/2 hour long trek up & back down, but the view is worth it.

And I even wore a GPS Insight hat…

Rob.

So yesterday I took my 9 year old son, a friend and his son to the Diamondbacks game (they lost…). Thanks to Mike Greco at bluemedia for the tickets…

On the way home, after dealing with the 101 being closed (Arizona doesn’t know how to work on roads without closing them entirely), yours truly got pulled over 2 miles from home after punching it to make a stale yellow light. In my defense, there was no one around (except the police officer apparently, who I never saw).

Anyway, I got pulled over shortly thereafter and was informed I did 67 through the light in a 50. Oops.

I haven’t had a ticket for 15 years, so there goes that streak.

I got home shortly thereafter & guess what, he was right.

My GPSI-4000, which takes speed samples once a second, got me doing 68.

Here’s a picture which pretty much tells it all:

Here is my idle stop while receiving the ticket:

I pulled over near a community’s entrance to get over from traffic:

I brought an EZ-1000 with me for my son to hold on to at the game in case I lost him, & it was set for 10 second updates.

It got me at 67 MPH going through the light too (and shows I immediately slowed down):

So, the moral of the story is: I was speeding. It was literally for just a few seconds to catch a yellow light rather than slam on the brakes and wake the kids up (that’s my story), but both the police AND my GPSI-4000/EZ-1000 caught me. FYI, the GO-3000 is equally accurate, and our 3500 lineup checks speed every 20 seconds, so it catches speeding, just not the rapid up & down speeding like I exhibited yesterday — it got me at 62 MPH. To put it in perspective, many of our competeitors check speed once every 5 minutes and don’t report max speed — just instantaneous. We report max, instantaneous, and average, and this is detailed in several “speeding” related blog articles.

On a less depressing note, we had a nice time at the ballgame, and stopped at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown before which we tracked on the EZ-1000. I landmarked it while I was there by sending a text message of: ‘gps rob 1000k landmark cooperstown’ so now it shows up here like this:

A quick landmark report shows we were there for 41 minutes:

41 much more worthwhile minutes than sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ticket 2 miles away from home.

I’ll let you know how traffic school works out.

Now that I think about it, had I been using my new Garmin routing capability I would have been directed to take the shorter path home after getting detoured, and would have avoided this ticket altogether… Grr…

Never mind all those other light green speeding dots where thankfully there weren’t any police or speed cameras.

Rob.

I didn’t really forget it there (yet).  But since a few months ago I put an alert out there when I leave my car at the car wash for 4 hours or more, I just got this email alert along with a cell phone SMS text message alert:

I don’t want to forget, then have to find the manager at the gas station to get my keys from wherever they lock them up at night.

So I’m heading there now, thanks to my alert.  Here is the article where I set this alert up last time.

Rob.

We stopped sending Email Alert maps a little while ago in order to revamp them [we wanted to send one map with all that alert's activity, not multiple maps with each email].

Now whenever you receive an email alert for speeding, idling, or odd-hours activity, it comes with a map to show you where that activity is occurring.

Here is an email I just received about Tony speeding through the desert on his way home from the Memorial Day Weekend:

Note the attached .png map:

Sorry to pick on you Tony. I’m sure it’s 75 MPH there & you’re only 9 over so hopefully they don’t go after you for this…

Here, I’ll pick on myself driving home from the previous article’s trip [does the 5th amendment protect me against a ticket if DPS reads this article? At least I only averaged 58 the whole time.]:

Notice how the alerts are 20 minutes apart? That’s because I don’t want to be alerted continually, just occasionally.

I open up the alerts page, then look at the alert by hovering over the “i” for information:

It’s been checked 370,151 times, and I’ve been alerted 600 since I created that alert.

Opening the properties, we see where it’s set to only send every 20 minutes if the alert condition continues:

Before these changes, there would be one .png attachment for every red dot in the map. With more customers choosing to use 1 minute updates and 20+ minute alert frequencies, you can see why we changed this…

Since many customers have blackberry’s and/or iPhones, smartphones, etc., now if you get the alert email to your phone, you can see the inline image to get a feel for where the alert is occurring as well.

Maybe you can go meet the driver yourself to discuss it…

Come to our main website at www.gpsinsight.com for more information about our alerts and maps.

Rob.

GPS is very accurate, but still not 100%, especially for civilian/commercial purposes.

Typically, when a vehicle is moving, we get it within 5 feet of accuracy.

When a vehicle sits still for some time, tracking devices (all of them) typically experience “GPS Drift” of up to 25 feet or so.

However, GPS Insight fixes and insulates our customers from this inaccuracy and I will show you how in this article:

This is what GPS Drift it looks like using a version of our mapping which only our support staff has access to — this particular map shows how long each individual point takes to make it into our database, and also shows every single reported point, and I use it make this “GPS drift” evident:

These are roughly 24 points which bounce around up to 25 feet from the center (they are 30 second updates for 12 minutes while my wife & family waited for me to get a few things from the office on our way home tonight):

All of these points were in our database within 4 seconds of them being registered by the GPS device (in this case, a GPSI-4000 at 30 second updates).

However, we “consolidate” them into a single, highly accurate 12 minute idle stop, which shows precisely where we parked the vehicle and let it run for 12 minutes — the parking lot is practically empty and we parked in the 2nd space:

To show what our customers see, I run a typical 3D history map to compare:

And we only see one “pin” where my vehicle truly parked for 12 minutes:

Note the “lighter/thinner” red line from earlier in the day (where I drove through the ATM at the bank to our North earlier). We show activity in this way to help easily determine direction and time of travel with the “path” which exists below the individual location “pins” which we show.

Here I have zoomed out a bit, and we see this 2 minute idle stop (at the ATM drive through), 5 1/2 hours prior to coming back to that area (it’s a long drive to Tortilla Flat):

The light/thin to dark/thick lines are another way we help customers gain easy insight into their fleet activity.

Here is my vehicle (Rob 4000) and Brent’s — it is immediately apparent by looking at the line thickness/color what direction of travel I took to the office, then back home (by way of the post office) today. It is trivial to see that Brent drove in the direction of travel from light/thin to darker/thicker.

These are the types of things which you might not immediately notice with GPS Insight. Things just “work” the way they should. But behind the scenes, we are processing and filtering and consolidating and sanity checking millions of points per day for our customers to make sure they see sensible data and can use that to bring efficiency and insight to their businesses. We take advice on usability from customers all the time, and encourage them to provide feedback to help better the product.

I just happened to run a map tonight for a different reason (we were testing a different unit) and I noticed this idling activity. I thought it would be a good time to detail how we do these two (of many) convenient map enhancements for our customers.

By the way, here is an iPhone pic of where we were at with the kids (’Tortilla Flat’ — an old mining town/tourist trap in Apache Junction):

It is a beautiful area near the Superstition Mountains — we thought the drive would be nice on this Memorial Day weekend. I’ve had better food before though…

Note the hitching post where people tie their horses up when they can eat at the Saloon.

We don’t have GPS or diagnostics for horses, and note they left different types of “emissions.”

Rob.

When we subcontract out installations, we want to make sure they were done right electrically. 6 of our devices are either “Plug and Play” or “Lick and Stick” (they just glue to the top of the trailer) but some require actual installation into the vehicle’s electrical system. We can help with easy “wire taps” so you don’t need to do much work, but often times the customer will ask us to do the install or we subcontract it out.

So, after a joint installation of 65 or so devices recently, we ran a quick report to make sure every unit was reporting properly.

A minute to run the report & we could see 2 things immediately:

One unit did not have its “switched power” lead properly wired in the vehicle, since it shows as idling (blue) throughout the night vs. red or white (which indicate stops between 1-8 hours and 8+ hours):

The top circled item shows this mis-wired vehicle. We will just need to have our installer make a quick adjustment & we will be 100% on these 65 units.

Toward the bottom, we see an actual overnight idle stop — amazingly, some times, drivers leave the vehicle running, then go home for the night, and the next morning find the truck has wasted 15 gallons of fuel, caused 15 hours of pollution, etc.

A GPS Insight Idle Alert to both the supervisor and the driver will stop that, as well as this report or one of our other idle-detecting/quantifying alerts.

Rob.

At NAFA 2009 (National Association of Fleet Administrators), we unveiled several new hardware and software offerings. Notably:

• Garmin Integration
• Driver Log/DOT Hours of Service application coming in 2009
• EZ-1000 & PNP-1500 hardware
• Switches & Sensors capabilities

This year’s conference was in New Orleans. Here are some pics of our booth and

The 5 of us who attended (Ryan, Jolene, Rob, Alissa, & Elliot) (wearing our Bourbon Street beads…)

:

Then Elliot donned a Mardi Gras outfit & joined in the parade…

We had a good time & the show went well.

Here is a video interview of me which Automotive Digest published after the show.

Rob.

I got an odd-hours alert for our GPS Insight Scion (the wrapped vehicle we use to do advertising, occasional installs, etc.).

One of our employees took it home tonight, which is fine — miles & miles of cheap advertising since he lives far away from the office.

Except they’re speeding so I looked online to see what’s going on. (I also got a speeding alert…)

The Scion has 3 units installed — a 3500, a 4000, and a 3000. The “Scion” vehicle is the 3500, at 2 minute updates, and the others are at 1 minute updates.

This was a pretty interesting distribution of whereabouts on the 60 heading West, all speeding, but nicely spaced out between location reports:

I just thought I would share, it looked interesting.

FYI, the “out of range” “Pedestrian” units are our EZ-1000’s — when you turn them off, to save on battery, they rightfully go “out of range” – since we only have a few for testing on our account, they are all turned off at night, since we’re not out patrolling the mall, etc…

A few minutes later, the 3 units in the Scion are still equally spread out — this time Alena is in chase. I’m guessing she’s trying to catch up to her husband, who is driving home from wherever they met for dinner together…

And here we go, the culprit is…. Grant, stopped finally at Grant House.

[The night after I wrote this article, 3 of our installers are driving the Scion to coordinate a large install in California together, and one has an EZ-1000 with him (don’t ask me why he named it ‘Ghost Rider’ — I have no idea). Now there are 4 different types of tracking device in the Scion, all together, again all speeding… That’s California though, they’re probably getting passed left & right.

Here’s a picture of the 4 units, off by just a bit time/reporting-wise, all in an alert mode. Bear in mind the speeds are slightly different due to them having different 1-2 minute sample timeframes:

Rob.

I forgot to turn off an EZ-1000 I had brought on a trip. It was in my overhead luggage (oops).

It still tracked me on the runway (a max speed of 214 until it lost signal), then all the way home while in my trunk.

Run a quick 3D map for Friday:

We took off on time (3:35 flight pushed back at exactly 3:35 & left the runway at 3:40):

Then the unit last reported before losing cell coverage at 214 MPH after turning over the ocean:

I was out of cell range for roughly an hour, and covered 330 miles between Orange County, CA and Phoenix, AZ which means we averaged about 330 MPH:

All of our units except for this one (the EZ-1000) would store that history, but the EZ-1000 is more about where a person is right now (e.g. security guards, police officers) so it does not store data if it loses cell coverage — since we rarely lose cell coverage (except in planes at 33,000 feet…) it’s a non-issue, as you’ll see next.

After landing, it picks right up again, then tracks my vehicle all the way home, even though I had the unit in my suitcase, in my closed metal trunk:

And on the freeway, it is exactly accurate (but at 2 minute updates) relative to my GPSI-4000 at 10 second updates in the same vehicle (red line=10 second with the GPSI-4000, blue line = 2 minutes with the EZ-1000):

Here on the highway there are 2 points 4 seconds apart, with the same exact speed (67 MPH):

The points are 56 feet apart, which seems reasonable for 4 seconds at 67 MPH (technically it should be 393′ but the 1000 takes a couple seconds to transmit vs. the 4000 which is pretty much instant — but close enough– we’re not launching missiles here):

The moral of the story here is that this unit can be used to economically supplement your tracking of freight, high value packages, etc. Just Thursday a customer I visited in El Monte asked if he could use them to track shipments — Given the fact that my trunk is probably thicker metal than the typical trailer, I can say that it should work reasonably well.

Remember these units work for up to 10-15 days in “ping only” mode, and 3 1/2 days at 2 minute updates. Inexpensive external USB-connected batteries work well to extend the life up to a month or two.

This device is very reliable, and easy to use for many security, freight tracking, and occasional tracking needs. Just don’t ask us to sell it to you to track your spouse or kids — we strictly sell for B2B (Business to Business).

Here’s one more picture of the 2 minute EZ-1000 tracking (blue with green movement/speeding dots) vs. “reality” at 10 second updates (red) — it caught me speeding… I wanted to get home in a hurry obviously:

Thanks,

Rob.

So we went on a short vacation to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico for our kids’ Spring Break last week.

I took an EZ-1000 with a Mexico-compatible SIM in it, and tested out the coverage AND the water-proof-ness (if that’s a word).

Here are my 2 boys on the banana boat (a towed inflatable boat which we bought rides on for $5 each).

Note the boat states “not to be towed at more than 15 MPH” — we can show where the ride took us and that they exceeded that speed, not that there are any Federales out there enforcing the banana boat speed limits.

So the first “lap” I was holding on to Sarah (my 3 1/2 year old) and so I couldn’t get a picture of us all at once.

I pull up the 3D history of our banana boat trip, referencing the picture’s date & time, like so (choosing “Beach Patrol” — what I named the unit, and 3/20):

Then I click on each point and see the speed at that particular 15 second update — they’re all between 8 and 11 MPH since I had my young daughter & I asked them the boat “Captain” to drive slow for one lap until I dropped her off with my wife Kristi on the shore:

Once we got back to shore after lap 1, a wave knocked both Sarah and me off into the Ocean. She & I got soaking wet but made it into shore. The EZ-1000 is fairly water resistant so it kept on reporting and didn’t get damaged even though it was completely underwater for some time in the waves (It won’t make it on a dive trip though…) I also looked at the time stamp on the picture & noticed that Kristi took the picture after the first lap (14:49:52).

So we go on laps 2 & 3, which are about 2/3 of a mile from one end to another based on the “ruler” I use in Google Earth (note the white line I drew between the farthest points — I could also trace a “path” and see how many miles it was in total).

By checking some of the points, I see the speeds go from a peak of 11 MPH up to 25 MPH — definitely more than the 15 MPH safety limit on the side of the boat, not that anyone minded:

Here is a picture taken by Kristi as the boys & I were getting off the boat after the last 2 “laps”:

Note the time is 2:59:00 (not sure it’s 100% accurate on my camera, but it’s close).

Look at the “picture” from GPS Insight with Google Earth:

I was able to “dial in” exact time the picture was taken with the new Google Earth 5 “time Slider” by entering the exact time into the control (press the “wrench” to bring up this dialog box):

A couple days later we took another longer banana boat ride with just the boys from town. I had used the GPS Insight interface to put the EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode vs. the 15 second mode for the first trip. You can see how much more accurate the path is with that refresh interval here (in red, vs. pink):

Incidentally, we get 16 hours on a battery charge at 8 second updates (I tested on the way back from Mexico, that’s another story for another blog article).

And that’s about all I have to say about Banana Boat Racing with the kids — here’s a good picture to leave off with:

Now we’re home — back to school and back to work.

Rob.

We have been processing user defined alerts for over a year, and prior to that would set them up as custom alerts for customers.

I was curious how many have been processed so far, and we are less than 2 days or so from processing our 100 millionth alert:

Yet they are still relatively un-used by our customers.

Here is how you access your alerts, which are an integral part of managing by proactive exception using GPS Insight:

This opens up our account’s alerts (we have a HUGE number of them since we test using our own vehicles all the time — I get 100 emails/SMS text messages a day about our employees speeding, getting to the office, leaving the office, idling (rare, we’re office workers, not service technicians…), etc.

Even if I leave my car at the car wash & forget about it… (documented here).

Here are the alerts, and if you “hover over” the “info” (i) you can see information about how many times it’s been checked (generally once per minute) and how many times you’ve been alerted (in this case 538 times when one of our employees went > 90 MPH — we do a lot of driving back & forth through the desert to/from Southern California — hopefully the 5th amendment prevents us from getting in trouble over this…). Also, bear in mind that we sometimes test this alert by artificially dropping it down to 55 MPH, plus many of our vehicles report at 10 second updates — this over-inflates that number of alerts (but that many emails/SMS text messages were sent on this alert being “tripped.”).

You can see that we have 7 types of alerts currently. Bear in mind that a Geofence is the same thing as a “Landmark” or “Site” in GPS Insight.

Geofence Alert: Any time a vehicle enters/exits a defined Geofence (or group of Geofences)

Geofence Stop Alert: A stop for longer than a defined period of time inside or outside a given Geofence (or group of Geofences)

Idle Time Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle’s engine is left running for greater than a configurable number of minutes without moving

Odd-Hours Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle is driven during a specified period of time

Odd-Hours in Landmark: Alerts when a vehicle is driven but only inside or outside of a Landmark (or group of Landmarks/Geofences)

Speeding Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle’s max or average speed (you choose) exceeds a specific threshold (you choose)

Speeding Alert in Landmark: Same as a Speeding Alert but within a specific landmark — this is good for construction zones or “trouble areas” you define

We have several new alerts coming online soon, and will be able to allow you schedule what time/days you want alerts to come within the week.

These do not include Maintenance Alerts which are separate and maintained under “Scheduled Maintenance” within GPS Insight.

As always, if there is an alert you would like to see, please let us know — there’s a good chance we’re already working on it or will add it to our list of alerts to add, and usually they come within a week or two, not “sure, we’ll get that for you…”

Rob.

I don’t come across much GPS humor, but this was in The Onion today (The Onion is a great satirical newspaper originally from University of Wisconsin – Madison). In case you don’t remember, Kenny Loggins sang “The Danger Zone” as the theme song to Top Gun back in the ’80s sometime:

http://www.theonion.com/conttent/radio_news/50596

In late April, 2009, we introduced support for Garmin integration with GPS Insight, which allows dispatch to now send drivers’ Garmins their next stop(s) as well as send and receive messages to and from a Garmin connected to a GPS Insight GPSI-4000 tracking device.

Here is a demo of that. It is a huge advancement for the GPS Insight product and is invaluable to companies who need to send orders/pickups to their drivers throughout the day. We also support sending and receiving text messages and driver/job statuses using a Garmin as well.
Rob.

Cast:

Lost Driver: Rob’s beautiful wife Kristi

Dispatch: Rob at his desk on a beautiful Saturday afternoon

Important Delivery: birthday present

Happy Customer: Birthday boy

Pretend this is a business scenario — this happens hundreds of times a day with our product for our customers.

My 6 year old is heading to a birthday party with my wife driving. The address is new and doesn’t show up on her navigation built into the car.

I’m at work & she called and asked me for directions.

Since I’m sitting at my desk, and we usually have our account pulled up, it took me about 15 seconds to tell her how to get there.

Just type in the address in Google Earth (this works on our browser map as well, I just happen to like Google Earth more).

Right click it and choose “Get Directions To.” Then either click or right click her car and choose “Get Directions From.”:

So then the directions come up:

And I explain to her how to wind over to the new street address (clearly a new subdivision since the aerial photo shows it as dirt)

Then I watch as she takes a wrong turn anyway… (It’s not like I follow directions well either). I’m able to call her & explain she needed to take a left, not a right.

Then she’s back on track, and gets to the address.

But then she stops there for 4 minutes, & moves somewhere else?

Why? I’m guessing the party is at the subdivision clubhouse. Turn on Street Maps, & confirm that’s the case:

Or maybe they’re having it in the park, who knows? I’ll find out later. Meanwhile I am getting caught up at work on a Saturday. It only took 30 seconds to find and get directions to my wife, & another 30 to call her back & help in the maze of this new area. Unfortunately it takes me longer than that to document this good example for the blog, but it’s done now, & I’m only 40 minutes farther away from getting out of the office on this beautiful day in Scottsdale. I wish I had taken Ryan to the party instead!

This should illustrate the real time dispatch assistance you can give using GPS Insight though — call our sales or support for more info at 866-GPS-4321.

Rob.

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:

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.

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.

I decided to test a unit in my car today at 3 second updates (vs. the typical 2 minute, sometimes 1 minute/30 second updates).

It is WAY too much information, but interesting to see.

I was able to look at the map and literally remember what was going on at that second. I can see excruciating detail about:

• Lane changes to get through traffic
• Right turn/U-turn to avoid a long line turning left
• Searching for a space at my son’s over-crowded track meet
• Slow service at the Dairy Queen drive through afterward

First, here are a couple pictures of my vehicle’s activity (and 2 others in “Rob Group”) for reference. My vehicle has 3 different units at 3 different reporting intervals — 2 minute, 1 minute, and 3 second.

I quickly run a “2 click” history map:

I took my 2 boys to a track meet after work and didn’t bother to check directions to the field first. Here is a zoomed in view of a winding road where I realized I didn’t know where I was going, then pulled into a corporate driveway to enter the address into my car’s GPS navigation (which didn’t know the address since I haven’t bought the newest disc from Chrysler…):

The amount of granularity is unbelievable at 3 second updates (if you’re paying attention, I missed a turn here by the way…):

• Lane changes to get through traffic

• Right turn/U-turn to avoid a long line turning left

Interestingly, Jolene our office manager cell phone text messaged me at 5:52 telling me to turn left since she could see where I had gone the wrong way (I had to call the office and ask her for directions since my car didn’t have the latest maps (not GPS Insight’s fault, just mine for not bothering to buy the new maps every year…)).

At 5:51, when she saw I had taken a “wrong turn,” I was exactly where the green pin above shows me moving (courtesy of the “time slider”):

• Searching for a space at my son’s over-crowded track meet

Incidentally, it was pretty close to .75 miles as far as I can measure based on where they ran (thanks to the path measurement tool in Google Earth which our customers use for our 3D mapping):

And it was definitely illegal parking, per Street View (a trick to make sure you are looking the right direction is to”get behind” the right bubble from the correct angle when you turn on Street View as shown below):

[note it even shows that I backed up a bit to get as far out of the street as I could]

Double-clicking on that “photo bubble” shows this exact sign which I parked right in front of:

• Slow service at the Dairy Queen drive through afterward

It should not take 10 minutes to get 3 ice cream cones from the DQ in the middle of our frigid 48 degree winter here in Scottsdale:

And you can tell that:

1. I had to do 2 U-turns to get into DQ and turned back in the right direction home when leaving
2. the building had an overhang since it interfered very slightly with the GPS signal, causing what we call “GPS drift or bounce” — this was only 15 feet of “drift” but I want to explain the spaghetti which occurs with 3 second updates — typically vehicles move a lot more than 15 feet between 2 location updates (1 or 2 minutes apart) — with 3 second updates, there is more drift visible, but it’s a trivial 15 feet — we’re not planting crops here so it’s not the end of the world.

OK, I think you get the idea here — 3 second updates makes for a lot of data, and a long blog article. But a lot of our customers are asking for this type of thing:

• 10 second updates for garbage trucks during operating hours (they take 12 seconds to empty a can, so this ensures we see every pickup event without needing to wire the arms for a switch input)
• 30 second updates when an ambulance’s lights are on vs. 2 minutes when they’re off (triggered using a switch)
• 5 second updates when a truck is inside a port vs. 5 minute updates when it’s outside the port boundary
• 10 second updates when an airport vehicle is on the runway vs. 60 second when it’s not
• 10 second updates when a vehicle is speeding vs. 2 minutes when it is not

This article should hold some good information about many different applications of “high frequency” updates. Unfortunately they cost significantly more, which is why we do what we can to get as much good data out of as infrequent of updates as is reasonable. I’ll be changing my car’s refresh rate back to 1 minute tomorrow… It’s overkill for me:

Rob.

A customer asked us today if we could add greenhouse gas emissions to our idle time report. It is a simple thing for us to add this type of useful information to our reports. We investigated the generally accepted algorithm for computing this, and added it to our idle report.

Within a few hours, we had made this change to our idle time report for this customer:

Here is how you run our idle time report (for a month, which takes less than a second to run for this ~50 truck customer):

And that yields this new report column and an explanation of how it is computed:

The full report:

We listen to customer requests continuously — if you ever have a need or a requirement, please let us know — most of the time we are able to make that enhancement right away, or put it on a list of features to be added in future releases of GPS Insight.

Thanks for your ideas and help in shaping the GPS Insight offering — we have gotten countless good ideas from customers and prospective customers, and really do listen. It’s good, free advice, and we take it as often as we can get it.

Rob.

We got a call today from a golf club that wants to track their carts in order to make sure the pace of play isn’t getting too slow.

Since we have several options available from a hardware standpoint, we can help with this requirement, and will probably put together (I unconsciously typed that as “putt ogether”) a golf-centric offering.

They want to be alerted when more than 2 carts are “bunched up” on a tee box, which indicates a ranger needs to go out to speed one foursome up.

Using GPS Insight, we can easily define the tee boxes, and alert/report on too many carts within a single boundary, and are happy to develop reports to help the golf industry to speed up the pace of play.

GPS Insight has a pretty golf-centric staff, so this is an interesting project we will get involved with. For a typical golf course, it will cost $350 per cart, and $32.95 per month — roughly $1.50 a day on a lease. Since the golf industry works about every day, they’ll get their money’s worth. Also, since this line of “non-diagnostic” hardware can be turned off seasonally, there will be no activation/deactivation fees for them. If this helps squeeze one more foursome in per day, that’s instant ROI, plus greater customer satisfaction from a day at the course which actually moves along at a 4 hour pace.

More on the ROI — out on Scottsdale, $175 a round isn’t uncommon. Let’s assume it’s only $50. Times 4 players, that’s $200. for 75 carts (typical), the cost is $112.50. That’s a 77.5% return on investment, PLUS they know where the carts are at all times, can analyze usage patterns, compare cart usage to actual rounds paid for (sorry all you friends of the cashier who don’t pay for your carts or rounds)… Also, we can put an alert/report in there to identify how long a cart’s run since being recharged or refueled in order to keep customers happy (no more getting stranded on the 15th with a dead cart). You can also find out who is not following the “cart path only” rules when they apply.

There are plenty of courses here in Scottsdale for us to test this new capability:

Plus, our favorite, you can use text messaging to find out how far away the beverage cart is…

Just don’t ask us to track your golf ball.

Rob.

GPS Insight partnered with design powerhouse bluemedia to create our new company vehicle, shown below:

They were great to work with, and did a phenomenal job of designing, producing, and installing this wrap for us in virtually no time.

Here was our final design (took about 3 changes to get right, only 30 minutes of my time):

From their website: “bluemedia is a leading provider of design and printing for use in vehicle, large format and environmental graphic applications for B-to-B and B-to-C organizations. Through its combination of cutting edge technology, nontraditional approach to ideas and design expertise, bluemedia helps companies get noticed and gain market share through highly relevant communications.” They are offering a 15% discount to any of our customers on their first wrap — Call Mike Greco, his phone number is 480-317-1333 and his email is mike.greco@bluemedia.com.

They sent me the top picture, which helped answer a question I had — why did they drive it 6 miles after they wrapped it? They obviously have a nice deserted desert parking lot (pardon the pun) where they take their vehicles to add pictures to their substantial portfolio.

We track this vehicle with 2 different tracking devices (one gives diagnostics data and 2 minute updates, and one is less expensive, and gives 30 second updates), and I noticed they had driven the vehicle after wrapping it. I saw this while I was doing a demonstration of our product that day to a customer. It just seemed odd — they weren’t speeding or anything, and didn’t take it anywhere like a restaurant, etc.

I ran a history for the day they wrapped it like this:

And started to zoom down on the activity in question:

They took a very quick photo at this spot, not even stopping long enough to register a stop (2 minues):

This is the Phoenix Zoo, (which we already had landmarked for some reason), and I wondered why the Scion had gone there earlier today when I looked through our weekly Scion landmark report which I have delivered to my email weekly.

Here’s the landmark report (both by landmark as well as by vehicle (technically 1 vehicle but it counts as 2 since we have 2 different devices in it):

Note it only takes .26 seconds to run that report for a week’s activity. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a blog article unless I threw in some ways you can use GPS Insight to help you gain understanding and accountability of your fleet.

But it’s more fun to drive this car than read the reports on it. Here are a couple more pictures of the car — it’s coming to a trade show near you!…

Thanks again to bluemedia! — Give Mike Greco a call at 480-317-1333/480-452-4114 or email him at mike.greco@bluemedia.com and he’ll be happy to help you with your vehicle’s wrap (and make sure you have us track it while you’re at it…)!

By the way, they also have a great blog at www.bluemedia.com/blueline.

Thanks,

Rob.

This Labor day weekend, we’re still taking calls from new customers who are installing their first units, forgot how to run a particular report, etc. We get our support calls 24×7, no matter what day it is.

I thought I would write a blog article and quantify just how available our service and support is to our customers.

First, I’ll run a Tech Support phone Queue report for all of 2008:

We see our average hold time at 14 seconds (up from 12 seconds last year, but we just hired 2 more tech support representatives to help that!):

We answer 96.8 % of all tech support calls, and of those which we don’t get to in time, the customer’s average hold time is only 31 seconds, a max of 2.1 minutes. When’s the last time you sat on hold for ONLY 31 seconds and thought that was too long?…

But what about our servers and systems availability?

It’s not quite 100%, but pretty close. Here is a report I ran for all of 2008. I have to blur the names of the servers, due to security, but it should help give you an idea for just how much time our systems are available to you. An average of 99.594% availability, but really, the few servers which “bring us down” from 99.97-100.00% for most of our important servers are “expendible” such as the one called “olap-02″ (shown in the picture below with a 96.021% availability rate). These servers are “extras” which we use to speed your experience during peak traffic, for large report requests like state mileage for a full quarter Sometimes we take them offline to make changes, but ensure that your reports are always available to you, or better yet, delivered to your email every day automatically.

The other server you see is “web-01″ which had an availability of 99.989% for the year so far.

That is only 58 minutes of “unavailability” in the entire year (and generally due to unavoidable “other carrier” network problems between our office and the secure facility where we run GPS Insight).

Here you can see that it hasn’t been rebooted for over a year — 343 days, and it’s barely breaking a sweat (it’s Labor Day Sunday, no one is really using the product):

We go to GREAT LENGTHS to make sure our product and our support staff are available to our valued customers 100% of the time. There is tremendous redundancy built in, so we can make sure that no matter what happens to a hard drive or network card, our customers will never see an interruption of service.

Plus, we have the tools and processes in place to help quantify it for our customers. If you’re not a customer, but considering GPS Insight vs. another vendor — ask them for this information and see if they can provide it. Call THEIR tech support to see how long you’re on hold & if they drop you to a voice mail box or offshore? Then call ours & see how quickly we answer — 866-477-4321, press 2 for tech support, & 1 to bypass the recording detailing our online http://support.gpsinsight.com tools.

Thanks,

Rob.

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.

Here is a link to the original cartoon (from my favorite, http://xkcd.com)

http://xkcd.com/461

From our 2D (or 3D) mapping, all you need to do is click “Directions: From Here” and “Directions: To Here” in the vehicle, landmark, or address “bubble” and you are given high quality directions you can email, print, or send to a phone:

Here I clicked on Brent, then on Cardinals Stadium, choosing From/To for each:

You can turn on Traffic and “Drag” the route around bad areas (red):

Then finally, if you want to see what the area looks like with a “street map” you can click on the camera icon (this image shows Cardinal’s Stadium):

Or maybe it will show a spectral wolf.

We just added this support to Firefox and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7, please try it out.

Thanks,

Rob.

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.

A customer needed a large amount of historical fuel consumption data, and thankfully we have this data going back for one year for all of our customers, and will keep it moving forward indefinitely. In a few days, based on this request, we released the new GPS Insight “Fuel Consumption” report which uses real data from the vehicles’ computer to determine actual fuel (gas or diesel) consumption for all compatible vehicles (just about 95% of the vehicles we track are compatible with some old vehicles, and occasional exceptions).

Here is how you run the report:

And within a few seconds (.26 seconds in this case), you have a fuel consumption report for all of 2008 for all vehicles or a particular group of vehicles (26 in this case):

This is good for budgeting, charging back fuel to certain cost centers/drivers, etc.

We’ve made this report available for all customers (free of charge, of course).

We hope it helps, unfortunately with the price of fuel these days, I’m sure it will.

Rob.

On the way home from a client visit in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, both Josh and I were heading back on 294.

Here is how we can pull a speed history (bear in mind since I’m logged in with a Phoenix account, times are in MST — if Josh were logged in it would show his stop at 8:42, not 6:42):

See Josh stop:

See Josh speed:

See Josh pull over for 6 minutes, get a ticket, then start obeying the speed limit again:

See Josh’s Ticket (the officer was nice and dropped it to 75 from 80 to save him $20):

Note the time is slightly off (1:32 PM vs. 1: 35 (11:35 with 2 hours of timezone adjustment)) — our times are from the satellites & definitive — her watch is a little off.

I was just ahead of him in a rental (no tracking…) and am glad I wasn’t doing 80 when I passed her…

Doh!

Sorry Josh, slow down next time!

Rob.

Apparently that’s what is starting to happen with Diesel nearing $6 per gallon.

We got a call from a long-time customer asking for our help sorting out the crazy behavior he was seeing from a brand new employee driving one of his big rig trucks. Since not all of our customers use every feature (notably our 3-D mapping in this case), we occasionally help customers out with these types of investigative requests.

The new driver was driving back and forth in a particular part of town, stopping for a period of time, then doing it again.

It became clear to us what was happening as soon as we pulled up these pictures (plus the police filled us in on the details once he was questioned):

High concentration of activity inside the town the driver should have driven straight through:

Zooming down, we see a semi-truck driving around almost canvassing the local area looking for people to buy diesel from him in order to fund his drug habit:

Here is one apparent set of stops where he is siphoning fuel out of his tanks and selling it on the side of the road.

Here is another where much of the activity seems to have taken place (note how many red, yellow, and blue dots there are — they correspond to stops > 1 hour, stops < 1 hour, and idle stops):

Our customer called the state troopers which were hesitant to do anything about it until he told them the driver was severely incoherent on the cell phone when he called him. Then they were happy to pull the driver over (with GPS Insight’s help pinpointing the location), and arrest him for driving while under the influence. Our customer had to have someone drive to pick up the truck and trailer, but that beats any of the other possible outcomes:

• lost vehicle
• wrecked vehicle with a driver under the influence of drugs
• harm to other drivers/pedestrians by the driver
• stolen/illegally sold goods in the trailer

This is the second “drugged up driver” we’ve helped a customer with in the past two weeks, and we’ve heard MANY stories from thankful customers of how they’re able to detect, and immediately put an end to problems such as this by watching new driver behavior closely, monitoring for off-hours/weekend usage, excessive speeding, etc. — all using the GPS Insight product which costs between $1-2 per day.

If we were curious how much time, how many miles, and and how many stops were made in this town, we could just draw a quick polygon landmark around it and run a report (as I did here):

Then run a quick report (.36 seconds to complete for all vehicles & 7 days history):

This report is available in this format only at GPS Insight:

It clearly shows that truck 402 drove 100 miles in this small area in one day, which itself cost roughly $90 (I ran a MPG report and saw this vehicle gets 6.2 MPG, and guessed that diesel costs $5.50 in that area). The time spent in that small area was 14 1/2 hours.

The next truck to enter and exit took only 2-4 minutes to get through town, and was probably the vehicle used to drop off a driver to retrieve the vehicle after the driver was arrested.

This is obviously a sad situation, but could have been a whole lot more sad if our customer wasn’t scrutinizing his new driver’s activity, and had we not been able to show him very clearly what was going on. By alerting the police and ending it quickly, everyone is a lot happier with the end of the story (maybe even eventually the driver).

Don’t buy this type of GPS Navigation device!:

Here at GPS Insight, we love TomTom navigation devices, and allow our customers to do the following with them:

• import all your landmarks (e.g. customers)
• import your optimized routes
• “send” a driver his or her next stop (using a bluetooth enabled phone with a data plan)

This allows you to use the TomTom to guide you to any of your customers or along your pre-determined route (optimized courtesy of GPS Insight). They’re great devices, & I would personally be lost every time I travel without my TomTom One XL ($249.95). If you’re one of our customers, please call and we’re happy to sell them to you to add to your GPS Insight solution. If you’re not a customer, just pick one up at Best Buy and you will be happy you did (we only sell them to customers so they work with GPS Insight, unless you have 50 or more you want to purchase).

If you don’t buy a TomTom through GPS Insight, you can’t use your PND (Personal Navigation Device) with the GPS Insight solution. There are good alternatives, just avoid the ones that look like the one at the top.

That joke is courtesy of the funny (but geeky) people at xkcd.com.

If you’re into Unix or really geeky humor (or as the people at TomTom would spell it humour — they’re European), that site will get you both laughing and scratching your head in alternating cartoons.

Rob.

I see a lot of commercial vehicles pulling boats here in Scottsdale, and I sometimes use that as an example when talking to customers about how their vehicles are used off-hours and on weekends.

But today I actually saw the first one online as I was showing a friend the way GPS Insight works.

Not too many vehicles are moving on a Sunday morning, but I found one as an example, and it was idling (blue dot).

After zooming in, I saw this:

That’s pretty telling evidence of what’s going on with that company vehicle. It may be perfectly OK for this company, and the names have been blurred out to preserve anonymity, but it’s good to know you can check your vehicles’ history for this type of thing any time you need to using GPS Insight.

I put a quick landmark around that dock so I could run a report to see how frequently that vehicle goes there to drop off and pick up the boat:

Now I can run a simple report which tells me when in the past 30 days that vehicle went within that Geofence:

And we see there have been 3 days in the past 30 (all weekend dates) where that vehicle went to the “Boat” geofence:

Obviously this fuel usage and wear and tear, as well as liability, is not something most companies want happening on the weekends with their trucks.

We also have a new “weekend” option on our “off hours driving” report — this allows you to choose a Friday through Monday, and report any activity after a specified time on Friday, all of Saturday and Sunday, and then only activity prior to a specified time on Monday:

Note that for last weekend, there were 6 hours of usage, and 200 miles spent by this vehicle — probably all on the company dime and not for their benefit:

And if you want to see a map of it, just click on any of the several mapping options — here’s one:

As always, you can zoom right in:

And moving to street view tells you that this employee ate at Macaroni Grill that day:

Again, you may be perfectly OK with your drivers using vehicles for personal usage on the weekend & outside of business hours, but a lot of our customers aren’t, and this is a good example of how to catch, quantify, and prove this behavior using GPS Insight.

We were asked recently to provide a solution for a large mobile advertising company which wanted to be able to:

• More effectively define, document, and sell their routes to customers
• Assure their customers of the time spent driving those routes
• Alert their staff to any infractions of vehicles leaving those routes

GPS Insight now has a “Route Path Tool” which allows you to define a route, document that route, and quantify how much time and mileage was spent on that route.

I will demonstrate on my own vehicle here by running a quick “Rob” 3D Mapping History” for the past “7d” (7 days):

Here is JUST the path (the 2 minute location dots can be easily turned on for more information) :

Using that information, I can select and create a path which is “authorized” which still leaves some activity outside the official route this vehicle should travel:

The orange path (you can choose the color) is simply me clicking the major intersections in order that I want them driven by my driver. Remember we want to drive this path frequently so that our advertising on the side of the truck is seen by as many people, and certain streets (Pinnacle Peak Road, for instance) are driven more frequently in order to backtrack and to allow more people there to see your advertisement.

We save this path into GPS Insight and can display it in many colors, with a “thin to thick” and “light to dark” indicator of direction of travel/order. Additionally, we have numbered icons to tell us which order these intersections should be driven:

I have annotated the blue-lined/numbered path with white arrows to help understand the direction of travel:

Now we can run a report on whether or not my vehicle actually stayed on this path, for how many miles, hours, etc. More importantly, we can find out very easily how much time and how many miles were spent OFF the path. The distance “off path” is configurable depending on the circumstances.

I can show the map of this and circle these two “off route” trips. One was to see my son’s “Heroes” presentation at school (where they talked and sang songs about their favorite heroes), and one was taking the kids to see Iron Man at the theater last night for Ryan’s birthday (good movie, by the way).

Zooming down we can see more information and specific times for both trips to the school (dropping off in the AM and attending the presentation in the evening):

And here were the heroes on stage. They were Christopher Columbus, Sally Ride, Teddy Roosevelt, Orville & Wilbur Wright, & others:

And my hero Ryan, who portrayed Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Heroes Presentation:

You can hardly fault me for driving off-route to go see him in this school presentation, right…?

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.

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.

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:

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:

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

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

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…:

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…

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:

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

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

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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):

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:

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.

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.

About once a month we hear from a customer who has recovered a stolen vehicle using GPS Insight (the other day we heard from a Miracle Method franchisee which led police to a recently stolen vehicle and had it recovered in >> SIX MINUTES <<).

But honestly, that’s not what our customers purchase GPS Insight for — it’s a nice side benefit, but most companies purchase in order to gain efficiencies, save money on fuel by curbing idling, off-hours usage, etc.

Here’s an out of the ordinary story about finding a lost vehicle using GPS Insight which occurred last month:

I paid a visit to a Las Vegas tour company last month because I had 4 days in Vegas for a conference & wanted to visit some of our customers there.

One of this company’s tours takes passengers to an extremely remote rim of the Grand Canyon.

The same day I visited, one of their vehicles got stuck in the mud well outside of cell phone coverage, and used their satellite phone in order to ask for help. They stated they were 35 miles “onto the dirt road” but really didn’t know where they were.

Unfortunately while our GPS tracking works just about everywhere since we use AT&T and partner (T-Mobile) coverage, we had lost coverage of the vehicle right where the cell coverage ran out, so using GPS Insight wouldn’t help in this situation.

Or would it…? I asked the manager when the last time another vehicle took that route was, and he told me back on the 5th of February, a particular vehicle ran the same tour on that same remote, dirt road.

I ran the history for that day for that truck using our interface like this:

The scenic history of that vehicle’s trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is shown below (along with the fact that the tour remained there for 1 hour, 36 minutes):

Then I used the path distance measuring tool in our 3-D mapping platform (Google Earth) to measure exactly 35 miles from where the road turns to dirt. That placed the “in trouble” vehicle exactly at Craig Ranch Road:

They were then able to send the towtruck to that remote intersection and know that they would find the vehicle. It was getting dark and the group of tourists had been stuck in the mud instead of viewing the Grand Canyon. This was the first “breakdown” this well-known tour company has ever had. Thankfully I was able to help them significantly narrow down the search area.

As much as I hoped to hear things would go well, I had a meeting to get to, and left, then found out the next day that they were able to find the truck and everything wound up good.

I was curious how close I was to accurately defining the vehicle’s location (or really, how accurate the driver was when he said they were 35 miles onto the dirt road), so I pulled all history for the day of my visit, and see that we were only 2.3 miles from where the vehicle was actually stuck.

I can also see at a glance what time they got moving again (the green (moving) points in and out of the “stuck” area have the time right before and after the long stuck-in-the-mud experience) — from 12:44 to 18:03 — roughly 6 1/4 hours.

I like to think I helped that tow truck to find the stuck vehicle, but even if we hadn’t, GPS Insight provides a great way to document exactly where and when that vehicle got stuck, and what time it was back on its way home.

Additionally, we are able to show where the AT&T coverage stops and you can see that the coverage extends almost all of the way to the end of their trip. It is very rare to lose AT&T coverage for our customers, but if and when they do, we can very precisely determine where the remote fleet vehicle does or does not have coverage. The height of each “pin” shows how long the vehicle was out of range of cellular coverage. What we call “lag” is how long it takes for the data to get to our database from the time the unit transmits — note typically it’s only 2-5 seconds, sometimes 10, when in good cell coverage, which is 98% of the time for all of our tracked vehicles.

The truck was out of cell coverage for 25 miles as shown by the measurement below.

Bear in mind that where we are in coverage, it’s typically only a few seconds from the time the vehicle reports its position until it’s available to our customer. This vehicle goes to some pretty desolate areas.

Additionally, bear in mind that using satellite communication to transmit vehicle location costs >> SEVENTY TIMES MORE << than cellular costs. A typical 1 Megabyte plan is $10 per month. A typical satellite 100 Kilobyte (1/10th of 1 megabyte) is $70, last time I checked. That’s why this customer doesn’t mind losing track of its vehicles for this short period of time/distance. They know where they’re at since they know when they went out of range, and on what road. Once they get back into coverage, all that data is sent back to the servers, so things like speeding, stop duration, excessive idling, and engine trouble codes are all “stored and forwarded” for analysis/alerts/reports later by management.

Some day I may have time to take one of these tours, I live in AZ and have for almost 5 years, and still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon other than from an airplane (which is about every month as often as I fly over it).

This was a long article, thanks for reading it.

Rob.

With the cost of fuel over $3 per gallon, by far, the easiest way to save money with the GPS Insight product is to curb your fleet’s idling activity.

A GPS Insight salesperson asked our tech support to look into one of his customers’ vehices today, since he used it in a demonstration and it showed as having been idling for more than 23 HOURS. 23 HOURS!

Because we get our idling data off of the engine’s computer using RPM and battery voltage it is always 100% accurate. Other products can’t tell the difference between someone sitting with the key in “ACC” mode so they can listen to the radio and whether or not the engine is really running.

So, once we double-checked to see that the vehicle was truly idling, I decided it was the perfect candidate to compute just how much money 1 hour of idling costs a company.

Since the vehicle started idling at 9:09:39 on Wednesday, and ultimately stopped idling at 10:31 on Thursday, for over a 24 hour period of time, I decided to calculate how much fuel it burned through to determine a fairly accurate “waste” rate.

I determined when it started and stopped idling by running a GPS Insight 3D history map for today and yesterday like this (3 mouse clicks to choose the vehicle, the dates, and run the report).

It takes about a second to pull down that data, and we see that the vehicle finally turns itself off at 10:31:16:

So, now I can check the diagnostics side of the GPS Insight solution to see how many gallons of fuel were consumed during that period:

At close to the time the vehicle STOPPED idling (1/24 at 10:22 AM), the vehicle had a cumulative total idle fuel used of 1945 gallons, per our diagnostics history, which updates roughly every 40 minutes:

Roughly when the vehicle started idling, there were only 1928 gallons of fuel used at that point:

That’s a difference of 1945 – 1928 gallons = 17 gallons of diesel.

17 gallons of diesel for 25.5 hours of idling time.

That’s 2/3rds of a gallon of diesel per hour.

At Diesel at $3.25 a gallon, that’s $55.25 for one day’s worth of tracking, and more than what the cost of GPS Insight is per month.

How much does this truck idle? Let’s pull a report for a few days:

Why could that be? Well, the company is in the horse transport business, and it’s probably to keep their horses warm in the Winter months if they aren’t able to board them immediately.

Let’s pull the weather quickly into the high end, 3D Google Earth-based GPS Insight mapping:

It’s only 45 degrees F where they’re parked, and there may not be enough room where it’s warm to house these horses. They’re probably keeping them warm by running the engine to the truck. Of course I have no idea if that’s the case — just an educated guess. But thanks to this very long idle stop, I now have a good statistic for how much an hour of idling costs a truck owner — 2/3 of $3.25 per gallon = $2.16 an hour.

Rob.

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″ :

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

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).

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:

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.

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:

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):

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.

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