GPS Insight Blog » Landmarks

Jan 28 2013

New landmark alert feature lets you notify your customers a delivery is coming

Category: Alerts,Landmarks,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 8:35 pm

We have a potential customer who wanted to set up landmark alerts in advance for certain days to notify certain customers their delivery was almost there.

The problem was they had several different customers who all use the same corridor which served as the landmark for the alert.

The only way to solve this problem was to allow for landmark alerts to be scheduled for ONLY certain days in advance.

Here’s what the screen looks like for setting up a landmark alert, with an option to choose a starting and ending date range:

New Date Range functionality for Landmark Alerts

Now they can create one landmark alert per customer and activate it for just the day scheduled shipments are on their way.

And their customers are notified in advance so they can be ready to receive the shipment, without needing anyone to monitor the truck’s whereabouts, or expect the driver to know who to call in advance.

Rob.

Tags: customer requests, date range, delivery alert, delivery notification, GPS Tracking, landmark alert, landmark alerts

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Aug 29 2012

New Landmark filter in Odd Hours Report

Category: Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 6:47 pm

A customer asked us to allow for landmark restrictions on the Odd Hours Report, so we added it.

Now you can:

Report Odd-Hours activity ONLY WITHIN certain landmarks
Report Odd-Hours activity ONLY OUTSIDE OF certain landmarks

You can specify either (or neither, e.g. how it used to work) as well as which group of landmarks you wish to include:

Choose only activity NOT IN certain landmarks

This is what the report looks like:

Choose only activity INSIDE a certain landmark

We hope this helps you to tune your reports to avoid legitimate activity (such as night driving within the yard) and also find troublesome activity (take home vehicles going to the yard at night, maybe to pick up materials for side jobs).

Enjoy!

Rob.

Tags: landmarks in odd-hours report, new reports

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May 17 2012

How Custom GPS Tracking Reports are made

Category: Custom Reports,Fleet Tracking System,GPS Fleet Tracking,GPS Tracking,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 8:48 pm

We received a request today from a Government customer which I think is both a great idea, as well as something worth documenting in the blog.

At first glance, it’s a “simple” request:

“We want to report on driver take-home miles since that benefit is taxable to the driver.”

Here is a diagram of how “complicated” that request really is:

Personal Usage Report Complexity

Here’s why it gets so complicated quickly:

Need to define work sites
Need to define homes
Need to assign homes to each vehicle
Need to specify what hours are “allowable” for work
Need to specify how long a vehicle must be at a work landmark for it to be part of the “workday”
Need to allow for automated or manual “personal or business” status for each trip
Need to Schedule on a semi-monthly basis to correspond to payroll for tax withholding to be made

Thankfully, we have all of these capabilities built already — just not 100% integrated for the purposes of this report.

Taking seemingly unrelated aspects of a GPS Tracking product and combining them is the way to succeed — both for our customers as well as for us against other products — and a core aspect of how we approach our product and custom requests.

Taking these separately:

Need to define work sites
Need to define homes

You can both import spreadsheets as well as organize landmarks into meaningful groups and hierarchical structures in GPS Insight:

Grouping and Import of Landmarks in GPS Insight

Need to assign homes to each vehicle
Need to allow for automated or manual “personal or business” status for each trip

We recently launched user-specified, highly customizable attributes and categories. All we need to do is add support for two things — a landmark to be assigned to a vehicle or driver, etc. to specify their “home” (and to keep it highly flexible, we will generically support any GPS Insight object of any sort, such as vehicle, group, hierarchy node, etc.), as well the ability to categorize trips and stops (currently announced, just not yet officially supported).

Need to specify what hours are “allowable” for work
Need to specify how long a vehicle must be at a work landmark for it to be part of the “workday”

These parts of this new report already exist in other standard report parameters, shown here in our Drive Time Summary Report and Begin/End of Day Reports, which already partially solve the problem this customer has:

Time Restriction on vehicle activity

Exclude first and last trip from payroll report based on stop time

Need to Schedule on a semi-monthly basis to correspond to payroll for tax withholding to be made

Our Schedule creation tool for Scheduled Reports allows you to be highly custom in the dates for which a custom report is run. Plus you can always combine two separate schedules (e.g. the first Monday of every week plus every 15th and last date of the month) when scheduling a report:

Defining a custom report schedule within GPS Insight

So, the pieces are all there! There is a little bit of new development necessary, and then a fair amount of integration in order to complete this report for production usage. It is really helpful to be able to draw on prior capabilities in order to create highly custom reports which help not only this one customer’s needs, but many current and future customers’ needs.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this GPS tracking report, and aspects we develop for it will then become pieces of future development efforts.

Rob.

Tags: custom reports, enterprise fleet, enterprise fleet management, enterprise gps fleet, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking reports, gps vehicle tracking, personal use, Reports, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking system

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May 06 2012

Have it your way! — Add data you want to GPS Insight now!

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Custom Categories and Attributes,Ease of use,Extreme Return on Investment,Google Earth,GPS Fleet Tracking,GPS Tracking,Landmarks,Mapping,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 2:43 pm

We just released our newest feature — CUSTOMER SPECIFIC CUSTOM CATEGORIES AND ATTRIBUTES.

This is a big deal.

Here’s how it works (silly example — but you’ll get the concept & can adapt to your needs):

Say your company is an ice cream delivery company and you need to know what type of ice cream each truck carries.

Launch Custom Categories and Attributes here:

Open Category/Attribute creation screen

Then click on “Create new Attribute” (you can choose to treat it like a category, which is a set of pre-populated values, in the next screen):

Create a new Attribute (or category)

Then make some changes in the highlighted fields and create your category (this is for Ice Cream Type).

Create a Custom Category

Do the same to create your Attribute (Freezer Capacity in Gallons):

Create a custom Attribute within GPS Insight

Then click on one of the available green “checkmarks” to assign values to your vehicles. Note that Custom Categories and Attributes can be assigned to Users, Vehicles, Drivers, Landmarks, and Hierarchy Nodes:

Click on a category "checkbox" to assign values

Click on a category "checkmark" to assign values

Now you can assign your pre-determined Category values by clicking on each vehicles’ list of options and choosing one. Soon, you will be able to use a new interface to choose multiple options, and we will allow for spreadsheet import assignment of custom values to vehicles & other GPS Insight Object types.

Assign Ice Cream Types to your trucks

Then assign your freezer capacity values:

Assign freezer capacity values

And now, you can click on the “Custom” tab within GPS Insight’s 2D mapping to see the custom categories/attributes and the vehicle’s values. This is helpful when referencing business specific information on a particular truck, and can be customized to keep track of ANYTHING you want.

Custom Category and Attributes displayed in GPS Insight maps

We also show this data in free-form format within 3D mapping when choosing a vehicle:

GPS Insight 3D Mapping with custom category and attribute information

And you can re-use that category in order to assign it to landmarks (or anything) — let’s say our distribution centers need to ALSO be labeled with a particular Ice Cream type:

Edit a Category to assign it to another object category

Check the “Landmark” checkbox:

Add Landmarks to a custom Category

And now you can click on the NEW green checkmark to start editing the values for your landmarks:

Edit Landmark Category Values with one click

Just click, enter, and OK each landmark (this will use our new rapid edit screen soon for even quicker entry):

Edit values for a landmark's Ice Cream Type

And now when looking at that landmark, it will show you that information informationally:

Show custom information about a Landmark within GPS Insight using Categories and Attributes

And when it’s time to “clean up” (as I need to do after using a customer for this example…) you just click on the trash can to delete the Category/Attribute and all associated data (we ask you to confirm first):

Delete a Category/Attribute after you're done with it

And coming soon, you’ll be able to use Categories and Attributes when filtering vehicles on a map, vehicles to appear in a report, and as parameters and filters in alerts (e.g. you’ll be able to set a “max number of minutes idling before alert” on different vehicles and alert whenever that threshold is exceeded).

Here is a sample screen (proof of concept):

Filter vehicles using Category and Attribute values

This is REALLY POWERFUL STUFF and will help us to do even more custom work for our customers easily. Between the Hierarchy capabilities and the Custom Categories and Attributes, the sky is the limit as to how granular we can get in your mapping, reporting, and alerting capabilities.

Please let us know if you need some training on this powerful new capability.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: attributes, categories, custom categories and attributes, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking solution, fleet tracking system, fleet tracking systems, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, gps vehicle tracking, highly customizable, Vehicle Tracking

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Mar 26 2012

Getting to my kids’ Flag Football Game using GPS Insight

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,cell phone capabilities,Company Efficiency,Ease of use,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,Landmarks,New Garmin Features,Reports — rdonat @ 8:47 pm

I knew my boys had flag football practice this evening and that my wife was bringing them, but didn’t know where, and didn’t want to have to ask her for directions.

A few text messages (while parked) later and I was on my way to meet them.

Here’s what I did using GPS Insight to get going within a minute (less than asking my wife for detailed directions or an address): [note that 477-477 is "GPS-GPS" and our 6 digit short code]

Using GPS Insight SMS text messaging

Texted “gps nav2″ to get my wife’s location (she was just pulling in when I talked to her)
Texted “gps nav2 landmark flagfootball” to create a landmark named “flagfootball” within GPS Insight, corresponding to her location
Texted “gps rubi dis flagfootball” which told GPS Insight to dispatch my Garmin in my vehicle (Rubi is short for Rubicon) to the “flagfootball” location

At that point my Garmin showed a “flag” in the top right corner indicating I had a dispatch item:

Garmin Dispatch Item to my kids' flag football field

Clicking it I see the item at the bottom of my dispatch items (many show a green check indicating they are complete):

Dispatch items in GPS Insight's Garmin integration

Clicking that item (which shows I need to go 7.2 miles SouthEast to get there), I am given a choice to “Edit Stop” or “Go.”

Choosing to "Go" to "flagfootball"

Note that GPS Insight receives exact timestamps for when we send the dispatch, when the Garmin receives it, when the driver views it, then chooses to go there, when they arrive, and when they mark the stop as “complete.” I’ll show that later.

Choosing Go, I’m now given visual and turn-by-turn directions on how to get to the destination:

Garmin takes me to "flagfootball"

So as I’m driving there, I was stuck at a light and decided to take a picture to show what it looked like on the way there:

Almost there

And as I arrived at the site where I “landmarked” my wife’s Navigator (nav2) the Garmin shows my location, even though it’s technically in a parking lot:

Arriving at flagfootball

So when I ultimately got home, and put this blog article together, I logged in and was able to show my path and 3D map history (with pins for just this trip, but a progressively darker/thicker blue line indicating my vehicle’s entire day’s route):

My route from Best Buy to Flag Football

And clicking on the detail area of the Garmin Dispatch & Messaging Dashlet on our main interface shows the times I received/arrived/cleared the “stop” :

Timestamps for Garmin Dispatch Statuses

The stop report shows what time I left and what time I arrived (as well as the fact that I dropped my car off in the AM to get it washed and left it there all day so they needed to move it a few times):

GPS Insight stop report with details on trip to flagfootball

And since the default landmark definition is simply a 750′ radius circle, I decided to go in and modify it quickly (under Mapping->Landmarks -> Manage Landmarks)

Manage (Edit) GPS Insight landmarks

Loading the “flagfootball” landmark, I can change the type from Circle to Polygon, change the “address pin” to the actual entrance address, and re-draw it more precisely to match the parking lot:

Change a circular landmark

And here’s the end-result: [note that the address changes to reflect the new pin location -- this allows for more accurate dispatch directions]

Accurate Polygon "flagfootball" landmark

So now the next time I need to get to that park I can just dispatch myself with a simple SMS text message to “GPS GPS” (477-477) of “gps rubi dis flagf” (note that since rubi and flagf are “unique enough” for rubicon and flagfootball I can shorten the SMS string).

It took me 1 minute to dispatch myself, 23 minutes to get there, and probably 30 minutes or so to put this article together. It’s really intended to show you how just a minute’s worth of “interaction” with GPS Insight can make your drivers’ (and my) life easier, and how much information you can get derive from their driving, automatically, should you need to go back and get more in-depth information about it.

As for my boys’ flag football team, well, I think they need to practice more… They have practice twice a week, and in a month I’ll run a landmark report to show you how frequently I attended.

Rob.

Tags: find truck, find vehicle, garmin dispatch, garmin integration, geofences, GPS Insight walkthrough, landmarks, truck directions, vehicle directions

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Mar 11 2012

New “Cycle Time” Detail and Summary Reports

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Company Efficiency,Driver Accountability,Graphs,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Truck Tracking — rdonat @ 8:00 pm

GPS Insight has completed two new reports for our customers who have vehicles going “back and forth” between two landmarks frequently, and where those “cycles” should be either above or below a “standard” drive and work time. This is a huge requirement for aggregate, trash, fuel, or other materials haulers who do the same thing day in and day out, and where hitting the standard turn and drive times is key to making a profit.

These reports are the “Cycle Time” Detail and Summary report.

This report runs a “Cycle Summary” for all our vehicles running between “RobHouse” (my house) and “GPS Insight Headquarters” (work):

GPS Insight's new Cycle Summary

Here is the output summarizing all of our trips from my house, to work, then back to my house:

GPS Insight Cycle Summary

This quickly displays a full month’s for all vehicles completing that pattern at least once during the month. Bear in mind that the data doesn’t make much sense since we don’t work driving back & forth between my house and work, but this will be more useful to companies which have this business model.

Running the Cycle Detail report for ONLY my 2 vehicles like this:

GPS Insight Cycle Detail Report

We get the following output (shrunk to fit, but you get the idea):

GPS Insight Cycle Detail Report

These reports still have some work to be done, but we wanted to get them out there for customers who require this functionality.

They are NOT going to help all customers in all situations, and while we are happy to listen to suggestions, these are two fairly specialized reports which may or may not see further development based on customer feedback/requests.

That said, we will most likely add functionality for an “upper limit” for drive and/or turn times before they are ignored (so that when I go to the airport for 4 days, then back to my home, that doesn’t count as a “cycle” for instance) and also, we will allow a “half cycle” to count toward the totals (where someone only completes half the cycle that day then completes the day without completing the cycle).

You will not see these reports show up in the Landmark menu by default, but if you want them turned on, please let us know and we will be happy to make them available.

Enjoy and Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: aggregate hauling, cycle time report, new GPS Insight reports

Comments (1)

Jan 17 2012

It took less than 3 minutes to make my wife happy using GPS Tracking

Category: Alerts,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Driver Accountability,Landmarks — rdonat @ 4:28 pm

I was getting some work done today when my wife sent me this email at 3:35 PM:

Request from my wife to fix an alert

I bought a new car, so my old car (Rob 4000) doesn’t alert her like it used to when I set it up to text her automatically whenever I leave the office (blog article about that here).

I have a new car and new device (Rob 3900) and sometimes drive another car (Rubicon) now so instead of a single car notifying her, I thought I would do the following:

Make a group called “Robs Cars”
Change the Landmark Alert from a single vehicle (Rob 4000) to a Group of vehicles (RobCars) containing these 2 vehicles (devices)

So here’s how I did all that in less than 3 minutes (1 minute of it was just opening a window and signing in):

3:36:15 PM: I opened up Vehicle Administration to add a new vehicle group: [the screen capture program I use timestamped the files so that's how I can get the timeline easily]

Open Vehicle Administration in GPS Insight

Open Vehicle Administration in GPS Tracking Dashboard

3:36:27: I clicked on “Create New Vehicle Group”:

Create new vehicle group

3:37:02: Add the vehicles to the new RobCars Group

Add 2 devices (vehicles) to new RobCars group

3:37:24: Open the Alerts Manager:

Open the GPS Insight Alerts Manager

3:37:43: Open up the “Coming Home Alert” for edit:

Edit an alert in GPS Insight

3:37:56: Change the single vehicle “Rob 4000″ to the Group of vehicles “RobsCars”:

Change vehicle to a group

All done in less than 3 minutes:

3 minutes to make a change in GPS Insight

Now I don’t need to call my wife when heading home to see if she needs anything — she’ll get an email and text message every time now (again).

And because it takes just a couple minutes to make substantial changes within GPS Insight, I did it right away — just like our customers can make changes to ensure their alerts, reports, groups, etc. are always up to date. And if the GPS tracking system is easy to administer, it actually gets used properly and to the full extent.

If it only took me less than 30 minutes to fix up the images and write the blog article about it…

Rob.

Tags: ease of use, family, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, gps vehicle tracking, powerful alerts, vehicle tracking alerts

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Dec 05 2011

Landmark import now 40x faster in GPS Insight

Category: Landmarks — rdonat @ 2:21 pm

GPS Insight has always emphasized landmarks as a core capability of our GPS Tracking solution.

Landmarks are helpful because they make reports and real time location much more intuitive.

It’s easier for users to understand “Home Depot SW Phoenix” than it is “12525 W. Glendale Ave., Phoenix, AZ.”

But getting all your landmarks into the system used to take a lot of time (well, 5-10 minutes or so for a few thousand landmarks).

We spent some time optimizing this process so that large customers (or small customers with lots of landmarks) don’t need to wait so long.

We have made landmark spreadsheet import roughly 40x faster.

Now instead of 4 landmarks per second, you can expect over 175 per second (peaking to 200+).

Here are the results from today vs. 5 days ago (from our activity log):

Landmark Import in GPS Insight

If you need information on how to upload spreadsheets of landmarks, always feel free to call our support, or try it yourself here (it’s very intuitive):

Import landmark spreadsheet into GPS Insight

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: faster landmark uploads, Fleet Tracking, geofencing, google 3d earth landmarks, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps tracking solution, gps vehicle tracking system, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 29 2011

New Timestamps in Garmin Dispatch/Messaging Module

Category: Driver Accountability,Ease of use,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,New Garmin Features — rdonat @ 11:44 am

With our new timestamp functionality you can now check the time a Garmin Message or Dispatch Item (stop) was:

Sent by Dispatch or GPS Insight automatically or via text
Delivered to the Garmin
Viewed by the Driver
Accepted by the Driver
Marked as complete by the driver

Here’s how:

The other day I Dispatched myself by texting “gps rob dis robhouse” which is short for “gps [rob 4000] [dispatch] [landmark named robhouse].”

Here are the timestamps of each of the status changes (available under the “Custom->Garmin” menu):

View Garmin Dispatch Status Change Timestamps in GPS Insight

Note all I need to do is “hover over” the “Done” status at the end of the Message field, and the date-stamped statuses are visible.

After dispatching myself at 4:09, it instantly appeared as a stop on my Garmin.

I saw it, but then drove a bit so it would have a different timestamp when it became “active”, at 4:10, as I was about to turn North onto Scottsdale Road. Note the change to “Active” at 4:10. Here is where everything happened, after running a 3D history like this:

Run a 3D Map History for a day for my vehicle

Leaving Work, accepting a stop to go home

It took me until 16:18, and 5.8 miles to get home, where I was prompted by the Garmin to mark that stop as “complete” (we shorten it to “Done”):

Getting home and marking the stop as "complete"

Even if I didn’t mark the stop as complete, we still have the timestamp of when I reach that landmark available in the landmark report, and will eventually incorporate all of this information into a single “dispatch report” which allows our customers to get a single-stop summary of all their Garmin dispatch activity.

Here’s how to run that landmark report:

Running a GPS Insight Landmark Report

Note that our “1 day” landmark report extends backward and forward automatically to show you how long the vehicle was there prior to LEAVING (if it started the day in that landmark) and how long it stayed there through the end of the stop, if it was parked there at the end of the day. These are the kind of “nice to have” features our customers (and we) insist on, so we provide it.

You can easily tell I left (late for the day, really…), then forgot something, came back, then left, and eventually came back, precisely at the same 4:18 PM time I marked the stop complete via the Garmin interface:

Times in and out of my house, matching the Garmin "Done" timestamp

At least I left early the next day to make up for it — 6:22 AM.

This new capability is very helpful for proving service to a customer, determining how quickly your drivers react to dispatch items, and other investigations about your drivers’ daily activity.

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, garmin dispatch, Garmin Timestamps, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, Vehicle Tracking

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Apr 16 2011

New Landmark Stop Dashlet

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

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

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

GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet

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

GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet

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

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

Click through to Sky Harbor Airport for a report

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

GPS Insight Landmark Report

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

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

Thanks,

Rob.

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

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