GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog

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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Jul 17 2011

GPS Insight saves my wife & daughter from 3 hours stranded in traffic

Category: Arizona,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Safety — rdonat @ 6:21 pm

As my wife was driving back home after dropping my boys off for a week at sleep-away camp, she hit the worst traffic you can hit. Cars were stopped dead on a divided mountain road, and people were getting out of their cars since no one was going anywhere.

She called me up to check traffic online through GPS Insight (since she has a device on her car (named “nav2″).

I got “directions” from our directions dashlet, then turned on Traffic :

Directions from my wife's car to mine

I was able to instantly pull up the fact that there was an accident 3 miles ahead of her which had the road completely closed, and it was estimated to be closed another 3 hours.

Pulling up crash data from Google Traffic within GPS Insight's directions functionality

Then I pulled up her location and recent 30 minutes of history within our 3D mapping (Google Earth):

Pull up Nav2's current status and recent history

She said people were turning around and driving on the shoulder of the road BACKWARDS to get to the nearest off-ramp. I told her it was .5 miles.

My wife, .5 miles from the nearest offramp

She called me back and told me everyone was going the wrong way down the on-ramp to get over to the other side of the highway.

Within 3 minutes she had escaped a really bad traffic-jam, before it got jammed up too much behind her.

Then she needed alternate directions which I was able to get her instantly, as well as watch her progress on a route only about 20 miles out of the way.

Which sure beats waiting in traffic for 3 hours.

And a quick right-click “directions from/directions to” in Google Earth tells me she’ll be home in 39 minutes.

Directions/ETA and recent history

So I can fire up the grill and have dinner ready when they get home. As I was typing this, she texted me the same thing:

Better go make dinner

Now I really better make dinner.

Rob.

Tags: accidents, GPS Tracking, gps tracking device, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, re-route employees, traffic, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking device

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Jun 30 2011

You can attach pictures to stops now in GPS Insight

Category: cell phone capabilities,Ease of use,GPS Insight Employees,Mapping,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 8:09 am

Using your smart phone, you can now attach a picture from the field to any stop’s detail.

Here’s how it works:

Take a picture that you want associated with your stop (or someone else’s stop, if you’re a supervisor in the field) — this can even be a screen shot from a dispatch system, etc.

Send that picture to our GPS Insight notes email address [you generate this in the system here under User Management:]

Add an inbound email address for GPS Insight queries/notes

You want to use our “gps [vehicle] note here is my note detail” format to annotate the note and minimally let us know which vehicle the picture should be associated with.

send a picture to GPS Insight to attach to a vehicle's activity

Once we receive the photo and note, it becomes available on our mapping and on the stop notes report:

Picture under the "notes" tab of the vehicle detail in mapping

When you “hover over” the note, the picture pops up to give you more information — this could be a picture proving service, showing a problem which justifies further time/billing, or just a reference photo to remind you later on about your customer.

Field pictures show up in Stop Notes Report

Adding pictures from the field into our mapping and reports will help better document (and verify) working conditions as well as pick-ups/drop-offs from stop to stop.

Close up of added Photo

Give us a call if you have any questions regarding this functionality. There is a “wizard” which is launched when you choose the option at the top from the Admin->User tab. It asks you to choose a user and a vehicle group, then provides you the email to use (and store in your phone for easy access in the future). For your convenience, you can click on that email to send to it, cc’ing yourself or your drivers so that they can just save it as a contact for future use.

Then all they need to do is email photos to that address in order to have them associated with their GPS tracking records for the day, available in both mapping and reports.

This is included in basic GPS Insight functionality, and available for all users at this time.

Enjoy!

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps truck tracking, gps vehicle tracking, photos, stop notes, truck tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Jun 18 2011

The ROI of tracking road signs

Category: Alerts,Extreme Return on Investment,Mapping,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Stolen Vehicle Recovery — rdonat @ 11:20 am

Some ROI models are harder to define than others. In the case of a road-sign customer, you really need to dig before tracking your assets saves you more than it costs (which is typically only $15/month).

Here’s what drives ROI in that world (and many like it):

Daily inventory, as well as any time the asset is moved, once it stops
Changing sign batteries JUST BEFORE they die (due to solar panels not keeping up in cloudy weather)
Catching thieves in the act of stealing rechargeable batteries
Low power and data consumption to keep batteries from being used unnecessarily and to keep costs low
Backup Battery within the device to report in case of battery theft
Weatherproof device

First, we set each device to report its location and voltage ONLY once a day in the AM.

Then we detect if the road sign is being moved using a motion detector switch, and once it stops for 15 minutes, we report the NEW location and voltage.

We added several voltage capabilities recently which allow us to meet these requirements.

To help customers visualize their assets’ voltage, we added a new “location and voltage” dashlet which color-codes each vehicle based on its voltage (green/yellow = good, orange/red = bad, grey = really bad). The assets show these colors along with the actual voltage on the map as well, shown below:

Tracking Road Signs

Then we modified our device performance report to add voltage, which is sortable. This report is then scheduled to arrive daily to let the customer know which devices need to be visited with fresh batteries to ensure they don’t stop working — here is that report:

Voltage tracking report

Last, we added a voltage alert which is initiated by the device itself (to save on transmission costs). Any time the voltage drops below 11.7 V (the magic number where the sign has only a few more hours left) the device initiates a transmission, and our alert notifies the right person to go out and change out the batteries. Additionally, if the voltage is ZERO, you know that the asset’s batteries have been disconnected, and if that isn’t due to a worker changing them, it’s a theft in progress (apparently a big problem in this industry as the batteries are very expensive).

Here is that alert within GPS Insight:

Low/No Voltage alert for road sign tracking

This particular customer worked with state troopers to immediately identify a theft in progress, and 4 official-looking individuals in hard hats and road-crew vests were arrested for stealing their competitor’s road sign batteries.

All these things combined really help to drive ROI.

Fewer road sign outages due to dead batteries (improved customer satisfaction)
Less time spent changing out batteries proactively before it is necessary (fewer miles/less gas/fewer labor hours)
Theft prevention and deterrent to future thieves due to immediate arrests
Automated inventory of highly mobile assets

These voltage capabilities have many other applications in GPS and asset tracking, and are ready for our customers at this point.

Rob.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in seeing a more in-depth demonstration of our GPS fleet tracking solution.

Tags: asset tracking, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, road sign tracking, Vehicle Tracking, voltage

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Jan 09 2011

Now you can click through graphs to reports (then maps) in GPS Insight

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,dashboard dashlets,Ease of use,Google Earth,Graphs,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 3:09 pm

Our new dashboard maps now allow you to click on individual items in order to instantly run a supporting report:

Click through on a graph item for supporting information

The report is then shown in a new Browser window or tab:

GPS Insight Idling Report from a graph click-through

Then you can continue to click through and choose to view the data in a Google Earth (or standard map) window:

Google Earth view of Idling Report data for a vehicle

Zooming down to an individual idling incident to investigate

Having the ability to quickly zoom down from a high level graph to detailed, satellite-view specifics truly enables our customers (you) to find out what is going on with your fleet in minutes. Just look for outliers on the graphs, and drill down to see the supporting activity.

Note that you can run the report for the entire group (vs. a single vehicle) by clicking elsewhere in most graphs:

Clicking on the legend usually runs the full summary report or a particular summary utilizing certain thresholds, such as all speeding incidents > 21 MPH over the posted speed limit, as shown below:

Click through for the report on all > 21 MPH over speeding incidents

We are constantly providing new capabilities for our customers — be sure to ask us for whatever you can think may help you and your organization to get more Return On Investment from your GPS Insight GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Thanks,
Rob.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in seeing a more in-depth demonstration of our GPS fleet tracking solution.

Tags: click-through graphs, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, gps tracking software, graph dashlets, track my trucks, Vehicle Tracking

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Nov 15 2010

$3 million legal verdict for not having GPS tracking

Category: detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Fleet Tracking,Google Earth,Mapping,Reports,Safety — rdonat @ 2:01 pm

Well, to be accurate, if St. Louis had installed GPS in its vehicles, might not have lost a recent $3 million verdict in court.

Here’s the story:

A jury ordered St. Louis $3 MILLION to a woman who claims a municipal truck cut her off and led to a single vehicle crash.

She did not have any evidence about the vehicle, department, or employee other than the fact that “a municipal truck caused her to swerve and avoid a collision.”

The crash time and location were certainly determinable.

If St. Louis had GPS on its vehicles, it would be trivial to determine if (and/or who) was the truck in question.

You could run a landmark report for a 2 mile area around the crash location at the exact time (20 minutes between 14:50 and 15:10 near the landmark called “Mesa Riverview” in this example):

Check to see if any vehicles were near the accident at that time

We quickly see there was no activity:

No activity near the crash at that time

Then you can pull the entire day to see if ANY vehicles went nearby that landmark, and when:

Pull the full day's history into a map

Zooming in on our “pretend crash” landmark, we see that that there was NO ACTIVITY for that day, & the closest to that landmark was the “Scion” at 10:03 driving by on the freeway, and “Adam 4000″ at 12:20 several roads away from the incident.

Conclusive proof no city vehicle caused the accident

Now it’s entirely possible that the vehicle DID in fact cause the accident — however, right now it is the word of an unfortunate accident victim against the City — and apparently that word is worth $3,000,000.

That $3,000,000 would buy a city of 1,500 vehicles GPS Tracking for every vehicle for 5 years based on my calculations.

Plus they would have the benefits of GPS Tracking instead of just a way to avoid a jury verdict. And maybe if the drivers knew they were being tracked, the accident wouldn’t have occurred in the first place if it was in fact caused by a city worker.

Rob.

Tags: $3M jury verdict, avl tracking, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, tracking hardware, vehicle accountability, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking device

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Oct 23 2010

6 different GPS devices tracking my car at once — A new record for me…

Category: HARDWARE TYPES,mobile mapping,New Features — rdonat @ 6:51 pm

I usually have 2 or 3 devices tracking my car at once (to test new ones, etc.).

Yesterday I managed to get 6 at once.

We have >> FOUR << new devices coming to GPS Insight soon and I had 3 of them in my car along with 3 others.

Here’s what it looked like on my iPhone when I tracked my vehicle at my boys’ school “Fall Festival” where I had parked on the street:

Tracking my car using 6 different devices

The new devices are:

Battery powered Freight Tracker (which can be hidden inside of shipments and still track even though it is inside of a trailer)
Battery Powered Satellite Trailer Tracker (Next Generation TT-3000 in our Trailer Tracking series)
Personal Safety tracker with worldwide satellite coverage (used for remote workers with a panic button to alert others and summon help)
Dual-mode device (both Cellular and Satellite coverage when in remote areas)

Here is a picture of the 15 minute reporting while I was there of the device buried next to my spare tire in my trunk. It doesn’t need GPS to know where it’s at, and lasts for months on a single charge (depending on reporting frequency & battery size):

GPS Insight FT-1000 freight tracker accuracy in my trunk

So I spent 4 hours with the kids at the fall festival, and GPS Insight sponsored the best ride, according to my son Ryan (pictured on it below):

My son on the Orbitron, sponsored by GPS Insight

We had a fun time, and I could test out some upcoming products at the same time. We look forward to bringing you these devices for purchase this month.

Rob.

Tags: automated vehicle tracking, dual mode, Fleet Tracking, freight tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, new GPS Insight hardware, People Tracking, satellite units, trailer tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 11 2010

More New Graphs (and many to come)

Category: dashboard dashlets,Dashboard Maps,Graphs,New Features — rdonat @ 2:37 pm

Recently (a week ago), we promised a lot of graphs coming, & here are 3 more:

New Speeding Graph and vehicle-centric graphs

The top graph is a histogram of speeding events relative to the speed limit with different colors representing the severity of the speeding.

The bottom graphs show 3 different per-vehicle metrics:

MPG
Miles Driven
Idle Hours

Each different graph dashlet is configurable as to how many lines to show, which graph to show, how many days to show, etc:

Modify each graph dashlet

Each “per-vehicle” graph is also configurable as to which graphs & how long to show, and the vehicle shown is the one most recently clicked upon in the “vehicle picker.”

Here is a screenshot of just how much you can easily depict within your dashboard, and save/call up whenever you want an overview of your groups of vehicles:

Lots of graphs and maps available within GPS Insight's new graphs dashlets

And the new “dashlet group” functionality makes it very quick to set up dashboards like this instantly.

Enjoy!

Rob.

Tags: dashboard, dashboard dashlets, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking software, gps graphs, GPS Tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 02 2010

How to use Cell-Based GPS Insight capabilities

Category: cell phone capabilities,dashboard dashlets,mobile mapping,New Features — rdonat @ 1:16 pm

GPS Insight’s cell-based capabilities are now a part of our baseline offering for customers.

There are 3 capabilities:

Cell Phone Maps (Mobile Mapping)
SMS Messaging (to and from Dispatch)
SMS Queries (using a text message to do things with your fleet)

Here are VERY basic overviews, followed by 3 more detailed instructional links.

These are very powerful capabilities within GPS Insight, and we want to ensure all of our customers know to use them.

Cell Phone Maps:

Set up a link which you can input (once) into your Smart Phone (e.g. iPhone, Android, etc.) and you can see your vehicles or just a group of them on the phone map (you may need to load Google Mobile Maps first):

Mobile Mapping in GPS Insight

For detailed instructions, click here.

SMS Text Messaging (free access limited to 50 messages per vehicle per month, aggregated — for more, speak to your salesperson)

You can set up associations between your vehicles/drivers and their cell phone numbers.

Then you can text your drivers and receive their response from within GPS Insight’s interface:

Use GPS Insight to send and receive messages between drivers and dispatch

For detailed information, click here: Bear in mind there is also a messaging page under “Custom/Messaging.” There is also a training topic at http://training.gpsinsight.com.

SMS Queries [free access limited to 50 messages per vehicle per month, aggregated]:

Last, you can send text messages from your phone to find out a vehicle’s location, see which vehicles are closest to others, set movement alerts, create landmarks, and much more:

Use SMS text to find manage your fleet

For basic and detailed capabilities and instructions, click here and here.

Please start using these capabilities, as they are now included with the basic GPS Insight offering.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: cell phone maps, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, mobile mapping, SMS Queries, SMS text messaging, Vehicle Tracking

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Sep 23 2010

New improved iPhone App coming soon

Category: cell phone capabilities,Garmin Integration,Garmin Messaging,mobile mapping,New Features — rdonat @ 10:45 pm

We’re putting the final touches on our new iPhone App which will be available free to all GPS Insight users.

Here are some highlights of improvements to the first version:

First choose a group (in this case we’ve chosen ALL VEHICLES) and then choose a vehicle [we'll choose "Ray" who is at a landmark named "BowlingAlley" -- landmark names can be turned off as a setting and addresses will show up instead]

Color coded list of vehicles (color indicates recent activity)

Once we choose “Ray” we see the following status on a map:

Close up of Ray in hybrid map mode

The icons on the bottom let you change map mode, zoom in/out, create a landmark, or zoom to your own location using the iPhone GPS.

Clicking on the pin’s blue “>” we get more information about Ray:

Information about the "Ray" vehicle to include setting alerts

From here we can “bookmark” Ray, call Ray (using his cell phone information within GPS Insight), or open his location in Google Mobile Maps on the iPhone itself [to get directions to, check street view, etc.]

Here we click the phone icon and can either SMS text message or call Ray directly:

Call or text your drivers from within the GPS Insight iPhone App

You can easily click (“press”) here to open the vehicle’s location within Google Mobile Maps:

Open a vehicle's location within Google Maps in GPS Insight's Vehicle Tracking iPhone App

And really cool, if the vehicle has a Garmin, you can send a message to that Garmin instantly using the GPS Insight iPhone App:

Send a message to any vehicle's attached Garmin with the GPS Insight App

We will get the final version of the app onto the Apple App Store sometime in early October.

It’s free, and you will be able to search for it in the “App Store” or go here for information: (click below to go there)

Where to go in GPS Insight to find information on the iPhone App

We plan to continue improving this application for all of our customers’ use — enjoy!

Rob

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking systems, GPS Insight iPhone App, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, iPhone App, mobile, mobile mapping, Vehicle Tracking

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