GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog

Nov 26 2010

GPS Insight introduces new remote panic switch capability

Category: Alerts,New Features,New Features,Safety,Switches — rdonat @ 12:04 pm

We had a customer who needed to allow their drivers to remotely trigger a panic alarm which would go to their dispatch/safety personnel instantly.

We found a good hardware vendor for the wireless keyfob component, and programmed the necessary parts to make this work with our existing panic alerts.

Here is the hardware:

GPS Insight introduces wireless panic switches

This is a $50 one time hardware option which includes the wireless keyfobs (2), receiver, and a bright LED to let anyone in the vehicle know that the panic switch has been turned “on.”

It can be canceled by pressing the “off” button on the keyfob.

This new option is available immediately, and the service is a free upgrade.

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, automated vehicle tracking, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking trucks, gps vehicle tracking, remote panic switch, Vehicle Tracking

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Sep 21 2010

Idling can cost you $2k in New York City!

Category: Alerts,Fuel Savings,GPS Insight Employees,New York City,reduced idling,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 9:01 pm

I took a trip recently with my 2 boys to the greatest city on the planet (that I’ve been to yet, that is, & I probably haven’t been to your city yet so don’t get mad at me for saying that).

The Big Apple — New York City.

Everything is idiotically expensive in NYC, especially the fees for idling! $2,000!

$2k if you get caught idling in New York City

With most GPS fleet tracking solutions, a quick idling alert sent to you or weekly idling report will easily and quickly help you avoid such fines. As well as the $4 or so per hour in fuel/wear & tear idling costs your company. Times hundreds of hours per year per vehicle, those savings really add up.

So then you will be able to afford paintings like the one here with my boys (can you tell where we went the night before…?)

Afford a Van Gogh with the money you're not spending on idling and fines!

Or at least enough to take a trip to NYC with your kids & see it for yourself at the MOMA.

Rob.

CEO & highly active founder of GPS Insight

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking idling, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking companies, GPS Tracking, real time gps tracking, Vehicle Tracking

Comments (1)

Aug 14 2010

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

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

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.” You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so! They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight. We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

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

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Jul 18 2010

Always making things better

Category: Alerts,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Mapping — rdonat @ 3:10 pm

After our new “Late Arrival Alert” was launched last week, we got some feedback & changed it a bit to make it easier to read. The time it SHOULD HAVE TAKEN is now shown (e.g. “…taken less than 6 min.” in this alert).

new alert additions

Additionally, a map is now shown for the start/end points which generated the alert, so you can easily see the context of the alert. We embed maps in all location-based alerts (e.g. odd-hours, speeding, etc.).

This alert was generated because I took 18 minutes getting from my house to the office today, since I took “the long way” to stop by and pick up something at a convenience store.

This caused me to take 18 minutes vs. 6 to make it the 4.5 miles to the office from my home, and trip this alert.

Here’s a map of the “out of the way” route I took to get to work today (just to get a few things done before I head out of town for the week):

extra stop at a convenience store

You can see the way the red line starts “thin and light” and gets “thick and dark” with the direction of travel, which makes it easy to see the activity at a glance. I clicked on the yellow “pin” which shows all stops less than 60 minutes. It shows I stopped for 1 minute.

The red pin down at the bottom is my car stopped for > 1 hour.

It’s Sunday & I’m heading home now to hop in the pool & get ready for my trip, but wanted to show off this new alert functionality first.

By the way, here are the 2 alerts I got which now are “obsoleted” by this alert — I had one for every time I enter/exit either home or work — now I can see ONLY when I get to work when it’s too long of a trip. (not that I really need to track myself — it just makes for good examples when showing our functionality to customers):

RobHouse & GPS Insight Headquarters arrival alerts

Rob.

Tags: dashboard dashlets, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (1)

Jul 15 2010

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

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

A customer needed an alert to let them know whenever a vehicle took to long getting from A to B.

We put the new “Late Arrival Alert” into the product as a result:

New "Late Arrival" Alert

Here’s what it does:

You can enter an origination and destination landmark or group of landmarks. Maybe it’s all your customers & all your vendors. Or just your headquarters & the first stops on each of your drivers’ routes. Or in my case, my home, & the office.

Then you enter how many minutes MAXIMUM it should take to get from the originating point to the destination point.

Here is one I created on myself, for my 7 minute (typical) commute from home to the office:

From Home to Work should take 7 minutes

Now, whenever it takes me more than 7 minutes to get from home to work, I get an alert about it. You can optionally send the driver an alert to their cell phone/email (blackberry, etc.) as well.

I purposely took a long way to work today to trip the alert & here is the email I received:

New GPS Insight "Late Arrival Alert" via Email

New "Late Arrival Alert" via SMS

Since I have 2 devices on my vehicle, and the “Robgroup” includes them both, it “consolidated” both alerts into a single email for me.

This will be good for companies which want to know their drivers aren’t taking their time between vendors and customers, and even highly custom applications such as golf management. If a player’s cart which is being tracked takes more than 30 minutes to get from the 1st tee to the 4th green (or fairway, etc.), you can alert the ranger to go work on speeding up the pace of play. There are hundreds of applications for this alert, particularly if you group all your landmarks intelligently & generically apply this logic to them.

Call us to see how we can help you and your business to detect and fix inefficient driving patterns using this alert and others we offer.

Thanks,

Rob.

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

Comments (1)

May 24 2010

New “Recent Alerts” dashlet in GPS Insight

Category: Alerts,dashboard dashlets,Ease of use,New Features — rdonat @ 11:04 pm

A couple weeks ago, a customer with ambulances asked if we could give them a dashlet which showed a list of recent landmark visits.

Presumably they wanted to know when their medical personnel arrived/left certain hospitals.

That was too “specific” to just their one particular request, so we opened the requirement up to fit more than just that one need.

I had our developers work on an “alert ticker” (we call it “Recent Alerts” on the Dashboard).

It looks like this:

GPS Insight Alerts ticker

Like all dashlets, you drag and drop it onto the dashboard where you want it to go.

Then you configure the settings (which vehicle group, which alert (or all alerts), how far back you want to see, and how many lines you want to see at once):

New GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashlet

You will notice that for our account, we have multiple redundant alerts, and many of our devices are temporary so they go “out of range” since they aren’t installed into our vehicles permanently since we’re constantly testing on our own vehicles (e.g. they lose power when we shut the vehicle off). This is why there are some duplicate alerts and we have a few “Out of Range” alerts, battery voltage alerts, etc.

The point though is to show you that when alerts are triggered, you can see them on the dashboard as well as receive them on your cell phone/email.

In fact, we made it so that you no longer need to send alerts to an email/SMS phone # — you can leave that blank, & they’ll only be viewable on this dashlet.

Since our “fleet” of employees tends not to idle or drive off-hours (at least not right now for me to show you), I pulled up another customer & they had a few recent problems with their drivers. Notice that I “hid” the Alert Type column, since it’s only there until you figure out what the various colors represent, and can be “unchecked” along with “Alert Name” in the edit properties area (click on the pencil to get there):

Odd Hours & idling alerts on the GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashboard Dashlet

If you want, you can create a dashboard full of these for all of your various alerts, and segment them into different areas:

This one I created quickly for our account:

GPS Insight Multiple Alert History Dashboard

And always remember to save your dashboard!

Save your Dashboard after creating it!

So now next time you log in you can recall it!

This is a pretty useful capability. And it took us only 5 days to create based on this requirement — make sure to ask us in case you ever have a need you would like help with. Usually it’s in the product, where you might not know we do what you require, and if it isn’t, we’ll typically put it on the list of new capabilities and sometimes get to it as quickly as within the week. We’re really that quick!

To learn more about GPS Fleet Tracking Alerts visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, dashboard interface, dashlet, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, gps vehicle tracking system

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May 18 2010

Sneak peek at our new Trip Efficiency Report!

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

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

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

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

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

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

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

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

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

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

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

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

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

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

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

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

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

Thanks,

Rob.

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

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Apr 15 2010

GPS Insight Saved a Customer $10k a Month by Cutting Idling 75%

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Alerts,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,reduced idling,Reports — bbarker @ 1:37 pm

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 thousands of 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.

Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Rob.

Tags: cut costs gps tracking, Fleet Tracking, gps idling tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking save fuel, gps tracking saves money, Vehicle Tracking

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Mar 28 2010

We use GPS Insight all the time OURSELVES!

Category: Alerts,cell phone capabilities,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,GPS Insight Employees,Stolen Vehicle Recovery — rdonat @ 1:31 pm

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.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, odd-hours, tracking alerts

Comments (1)

Feb 23 2010

GPS Insight checks our BILLIONTH alert !

Category: Alerts — rdonat @ 7:05 am

Sometime yesterday GPS Insight checked our ONE BILLIONTH alert for our customers.

Every night I get a small report showing how many checks and how many actual alerts have been processed/sent.

GPS Insight checks our one billionth GPS Tracking alert

Last night it showed that we have passed ONE BILLION alert checks, and just over one MILLION alerts (1,036,790 to be exact).

Again, just about one in one thousand times GPS Insight checks your vehicles’ status, we send you an alert email or Text Message about it.

That’s the beauty of managing the exceptions — GPS Insight does everything for you, and you just find out once every thousand times we check — once a minute per vehicle.

FYI, the popularity of alerts is in this order:

idling alerts, speeding alerts, odd hour alerts, geofence alerts, long stop alerts, panic alerts, and powercycle alerts.

Click for more information on our alerts.

Rob.

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

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