GPS Insight Blog » Reporting

Feb 02 2010

HUGE safety addition to GPS Insight — the Speed Summary Report

Category: Driver Accountability, Identifying and eliminating speeding, New Features, Reporting, Reports, Safety — rdonat @ 6:24 pm

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.

Thanks,
Rob.

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Jan 09 2010

I lost my keys — and got to use our improved Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping as a result

Category: Driver Accountability, Driver Assignment to Vehicles, Driver to Vehicle Mapping, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Reporting, Reports, Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 6:43 pm

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...]

Rob.

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Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Fleet Tracking, Fuel Savings, GPS Insight Employees, GPSI-4000, Google Earth, Landmarks, Safety, Trimble, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 2:50 pm

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.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, landmark reporting, unauthorized usage, using vehicles to buy crack, Vehicle Tracking

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Nov 29 2009

Counting & Reconciling Tolls using GPS Insight fleet tracking

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, Driver Accountability, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Landmarks, New Features, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 2:47 pm

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.

Tags: bay bridge, GPS Tracking, landmark report, san francisco, toll collection

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Nov 15 2009

How much time in the NASCAR pits? (we use GPS tracking devices to find out)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Landmarks, People Tracking, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 10:14 pm

We were lucky enough to get a couple passes for this weekend’s NASCAR event, to include pit passes to the garage & pits.

We had a couple of EZ-1000’s with us, and I want to show how easy it is to quantify how much time we actually spent in the pits (vs. the stands/box):

I first create a landmark called “PIR Pits” around the pits:

tracking activity in the NASCAR pits

Then cut & paste the PIR Pits landmark into GPS Insight:

Paste a geofence into GPS Insight

Paste here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Confirm here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Run a report here:

GPS Track of Pit activity at NASCAR using GPS Insight EZ-1000's

1.9 hours in the pits

Except that missed the part where we went really close to the “inside the building” chatter from the GPS device, so I had to carefully re-draw the polygon to get a more accurate picture of the true time spent down there.

So even though we may pick up a little bit of false “in the pit” activity since it’s so close to the box/grandstand (with drift due to the device being enclosed), this adjustment to the “pits” will give a better representation of how much time was there:

Extend the boundary of the pits geofence to get all activity

While we get a couple of random “1 minute” visits which are inaccurate due to the EZ-1000’s “inside” drift, the 2.8 hours is much more accurate than the original 1.8 — both Brent and I spent half an hour in that remote area of the pits and it makes a big difference to the total amount of time in the report by accurately creating the polygon:

2.8 hours in the pits

A fun (and loud) time was had by all:

NASCAR in Phoenix

And a favorite of mine, the RedBull 83 car:

RedBull NASCAR

I like this car so much I bought the $60 model for my bookshelf. Brian Vickers may have come in 38th today, but we drink a lot of RedBull and don’t have much use for Lowe’s in our office.

Rob.

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Oct 05 2009

GPS Insight Hierarchy Capabilities now available in Beta

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Hierarchy, New Features, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 9:46 pm

If you would like to use the Hierarchy capabilities while they are in Beta, please contact support@gpsinsight.com or your salesperson.

The Hierarchy Editor is available now (upon request), as well as reporting using individual Hierarchy nodes or multiple ones in combination (”Custom”)

Here are the basic steps — create your hierarchies, and drag/drop members (vehicles, drivers, landmarks & users) into the various levels of the hierarchy using both groups and “wildcards” to make it fast and easy:

Drag and Drop into the GPS Insight Hierarchy\

Then create a custom report (any report can use a single hierarchy node or a “Custom Hierarchy Selection”):

Create a Report using a Custom Hierarchy Selection

When using a custom hierarchy selection, you can drag and drop hierarchy levels from different hierarchies into the editor. This allows you to “add” hierarchy members together, “intersect” them (e.g. all SouthWest vehicles which are parts vehicles), and “subtract” or restrict them (e.g. but exclude all managers and foreign vehicles, etc.).

Here we are adding Canada to East vehicles:

Drag Hierarchy Members from different Hierarchies

Here we are choosing all Management vehicles in Canada and the East

Create an "intersection" between hierarchies

And last, subtract or exclude/restrict all Foreign vehicles:

Restrict by "subtracting" one or more hierarchy members

Then click on “Run Report” and the Report is run for just that group of vehicles. Only those 9 vehicles are included.

Create a Custom GPS Tracking Report using GPS Insight Hierarchies

Soon you will be able to save your custom hierarchy selections and use them in both alerts and scheduled reoprts.

The Hierarchy Capabilities are still in Beta, and we are constantly adding capabilities.

They are immediately useful and powerful, so please start getting familiar with them by asking support to give you beta access as well as a demo.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Ad Hoc GPS reporting, GPS Insight Hierarchy, GPS Tracking, New GPS Insight Capabilities

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Sep 05 2009

GPS Insight keeps 3 years of your GPS Tracking data

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES, New Features, Reporting, competition — rdonat @ 1:03 pm

Most of our competitors give you 3 months of history availability, maybe 6.

Starting in June of 2007, GPS Insight has kept every bit of our customers’ data indefinitely (unless they specifically ask otherwise).

Here is an illustration of going back 2 years for a customer of ours and comparing their 1/2008 mileage vs. their 8/2009 mileage (they have added trucks since then):

Here is January of 2008’s summary:

Compared to last month (where they did over twice as many miles in spite of the economy I’m glad to see!):

Note their max speed is 89 again, almost 2 years later. Their vehicles are probably throttled and it will be trivial to find those speeding events for both months:

Here is the full report, if you want to see what the 1/2008 report looks like:

Both reports took less than a second to run, even though we’re talking about almost a million miles worth of data to crunch through.

If you need more than 3 years worth, just ask — we’ll be able to accommodate that, and if you need access to something over 3 years ago, we can always get it for you from an archive — for free (vs. the thousands of dollars we’ve heard it may cost you to get from other GPS tracking companies)…

Also, we have several “big picture” reports & graphs coming to allow you to see large scale trends across months or years within your fleet. We wouldn’t be able to provide these to customers without at least a couple years’ worth of data, which is why we keep it for your benefit.

Rob.

Tags: GPS Insight, GPS tracking data

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May 16 2009

New Switch Capabilities in GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, Fleet Tracking, GPSI-4000, Google Earth, Mapping, New Features, Reporting, Switches — rdonat @ 12:35 pm

GPS Insight now offer switches to its customers using the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 models of tracking device.

These are useful if you want to count and quantity where certain activity takes place, such as:

solid waste collection (tipping a can into the garbage truck)
pump activity (pumping a well, concrete, etc.)
street sweeper on vs. off activity

There are countless uses for switches, and we will go through them in future articles.

Here are some pictures of the new capability within GPS Insight for a residential solid waste operation which recently put GPS Insight on its vehicles. These are the “sideloaders” for the day (which pick up curbside cans):

We have a new “All Inputs” option for what to show in 3D Mapping — the path of each vehicle is shown in a different color, but the actual pickups are shown as green or blue dots with stars (depending on speed):

To isolate JUST the pickup activity or JUST the driving activity, put a polygon in place to show the dots like a cornrow, or turn off the time slider to show just the path:

But if all you want to do is count “tips” just run a summary report — here is the how:

Zooming in:

All in .28 seconds. Lots of information, and quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive to obtain. We have other reports available which we will go into with future articles (e.g. idling when PTO is NOT engaged, etc.).

Now when Mrs. Smith at 123 N. Main Street says you didn’t pick up her garbage on time, you’ll know what happened.

Rob.

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May 16 2009

Identifying mis-wired GPS tracking devices with a stop graph

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Alerts, GPSI-4000, Miscellaneous, Reporting, reduced idling — rdonat @ 12:01 pm

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.

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Mar 07 2009

Use GPS to measure your company’s LEADING indicators!

Category: Company Efficiency, Driver Accountability, Fuel Savings, Reporting, Reports, Vehicle Tracking, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 5:57 pm

A key concept in effectively executing a corporate plan is MEASURING the LEADING indicators (vs. the LAGGING indicator).

For instance, considering sales, revenue is the LAGGING indicator, and customer visits may be the LEADING indicator.

The problem is, once you measure revenue, it’s too late! There is nothing you can influence or manage it at that point, once you’ve measured it.

HOWEVER, on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, the LEADING indicators can be measured and adjusted. This is like measuring RPM to predict change in Speed. Or taking the derivative, in Calculus terms.

GPS Insight can help tremendously to gain perspective on where your company is trending.

In this economy, that’s HUGE. For $1-2 a day, we can automate reports which help you to drive your goals to completion, rather than “hope” your company (and your employees…) are headed in the right direction.

So, what is it that we can help drive, depending on your company’s goals? This table summarizes some typical ways customers can use GPS Insight to reach their goals:

Goal	Lagging indicator (goal measurement)	Leading indicator (can be routinely influenced)	How GPS Insight helps measure the Leading Indicator
Increased Sales	Revenue	Customer Visits Miles Driven Longer Hours spent by techs/salespeople	Customer Landmark Reports to count and total visits & time spent at customers Drive Time Summary to summarize weekly/monthly usage for the fleet or sub-fleets Begin/End of day Report shows hours worked by drivers during the day
Reduced Fuel Cost	Fuel Bill	Reduced Idling Reduced Unauthorized Usage Reduced Speeding Reduced Fuel Fraud	Idling Report shows idle time and percentage for all vehicles Odd-Hours/Weekend driving report identifies wasteful unauthorized driving by drivers who take vehicles home Speeding Report shows all speeding activity as well as maps of where that speeding occurs Fuel Consumption Report (3500 series) shows how much fuel was used for comparison to actual bills
Reduced Fleet Risk	Number of Accidents	Reduced Speeding Reduced unauthorized usage	Speeding Report shows all speeding activity as well as maps of where that speeding occurs Odd-Hours/Weekend driving report identifies wasteful unauthorized driving by drivers who take vehicles home
	Number of Vehicles Stolen	Vehicles leaving parking place at wrong times Daily inventory of vehicle whereabouts	Odd-Hours/Geofence Alerts and Reports alert to odd-hours activity outside of known areas and report on such activity daily/weekly/monthly Current Status Map, Dashboard, and Landmark Reports help determine where all vehicles are at all times, and at the beginning/end of the day
Efficient Dispatch	Total Miles Driven Average Trip Distance/Time	Daily/Weekly Miles Driven Daily/Weekly Trip Distance	Drive Time Summary shows mileage and windshield time for any duration of time Stop Detail Report will show average trip distance and times Map Book Lookup Tool gives drivers an address plus that address map book page & grid coordinate, saving time looking for the road
Cut Overtime Hours	Total number of Hours worked	Daily Work Hours	Report on with Begin/End of Day report and Drive Time Summary Influence with efficient dispatch using real time vehicle/order status on a map and closest to functionality Identify purposely or accidentally inefficient driving with the Driver Efficiency Report

Please give us a call at 877-GPS-4321 and ask how we can help you to manage these indicators using GPS tracking technology. You will have meaningful measurements with which to manage your fleet and ensure you meet your goals.

Rob.

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