GPS Insight Blog » Fleet Tracking

Apr 15 2011

Do your drivers learn from their mistakes? Or keep making them?

Category: Fleet Tracking,Safety — rdonat @ 6:22 pm

I don’t drive a truck or service vehicle for a living, but I’m guessing my human nature isn’t much better or worse than most others… To include your drivers, who have ample opportunity during the day to get distracted, try to do too much at once, and get into near-misses… Only to do the same thing shortly thereafter.

So what does this picture of me with way too much to carry (taken by my uncomprehending son when I asked him to take it with my phone) have to do with your drivers?

Me trying to carry too much at once

I was walking from my kitchen to my outdoor grill yesterday. I had a can of ‘Pam’ under my arm, 2 pieces of fish in one hand, spice and a glass bottle of sea salt in my other hand.

I had to open the kid-proof pool door somehow rather than be smart and put something down.

What did I do?

Drop the glass full of sea salt onto the tile floor.

Almost a disaster, yes!

SOMEHOW, in a quarter second, I managed to kick it on its way down onto the carpet 2 feet away.

I averted disaster, or I would be sweeping up sea salt and glass for an hour (or in the case of your drivers doing too much at once, recovering from a crash).

What did I IMMEDIATELY DO AFTERWARD?

I picked the salt back up, put it in my hand with everything else, and stupidly opened the kid-proof door.

As I was doing it, I realized how ridiculously dumb that was, & how lucky I was 10 seconds prior not to have a nightmare on my hands.

Are your drivers learning their lessons after near-misses?

Do they get distracted, talk on the phone, speed, tailgate, slam on the brakes, and generally do other avoidable things which cause them near-misses with people or vehicles periodically? And do they learn their lessons from those experiences?

Can you COUNT on the fact that they do?

There so many technologies out there currently to MEASURE your drivers’ performance, and whether or not they learn from their mistakes. USE THEM! These proven technologies are grounded in logic and business-rules, not human nature and the unfortunate human inability to learn from one’s mistakes!

If you are running a big fleet, you should be looking into ALL AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGIES to help ensure you know when your drivers make mistakes, and that they correct their behavior when it is brought to their attention.

Here are a few examples of technologies which can help:

GPS Vehicle Tracking (speeding/acceleration/braking/odd-hours/posted-speed violations/geofence violations, excessive idling)
Cell Phone Usage Monitoring/ (texting or talking when driving)
In-Cab Camera Monitoring (impact detection/recording & acceleration/braking)
Driver Behavior Monitoring (seat belt usage, rapid acceleration/harsh braking)
Electronic Driver Logs (to ensure DOT compliance)

All of these technologies are readily available. They help you, the fleet manager/supervisor ensure that you know what is going on with your drivers, and whether or not they can be trusted to learn from their mistakes.

The downside of a catastrophic crash for your organization is clearly significant.

The amount of effort to implement technology to identify continually reckless drivers and reduce the risk of that crash is minimal, and all of these technologies have proven ROI and widespread adoption in all fleet industries.

Let technology help you coach your drivers and ensure they’re learning from their mistakes.

You’ll be safe, not sorry.

Rob.

Tags: drivers learning from their mistakes, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, safety, 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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Jun 24 2010

New “Hide Vehicle Label” on Dashlet Maps

Category: dashboard dashlets,Dashboard Maps,Fleet Tracking,GPS Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — bbarker @ 9:50 am

We now offer a new option to “hide” Vehicle Labels on all Dashlet Maps. Simply open the Dashlet edit settings by clicking on the pencil icon, find “Vehicle Labels” and then choose “None” from the drop-down menu. By utilizing this new option, you can avoid extra clutter on the map, especially when viewing a large number of vehicles.

Select "None" from the Vehicle Labels drop-down menu

Below are examples of the same mapping Dashlets with and without labels:

Following Vehicle Dashlet

Mapping Dashlet displaying large number of Vehicles

Mapping Dashlet displaying specific Vehicle Group

We also allow the vehicle icons to be clicked, which will then open up an information box. To remove the box, just click on it.

Click on Vehicle icon for information box

Vehicle information box

This new feature went from “customer request” to “in production” in just seven days! Always feel free to give us a call if you have a suggestion for a new feature by calling 866-477-4321.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: dashlet, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, Mapping, vehicle label

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Apr 15 2010

Happy 5th Birthday GPS Insight

Category: Fleet Tracking,GPS Insight Employees,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 11:42 am

Today, 4/15/2010, is the “legal” 5th birthday of GPS Insight (as a product we celebrated back in August). I “spun off” GPS Insight from my consulting company as its own legal entity 4/15/2005.

In that time, we have grown from one customer & 286 trucks to having sold over 1,000 customers & over 20,000 tracking devices.

We have gone from 3 employees to over 30, and now have 8 digit revenues and are sustainably profitable (much better than 5 digit revenues and 6 digit losses back 5 years ago…)

My wife was nice enough to remember the “birthday” and send this bouquet of cookies to the office:

GPS Insight 5th birthday

Many Heartfelt Thanks to everyone who has helped us make it to this important milestone. It has been challenging for everyone through the past few years with the economy like it is, and we are proud to have helped our customers save money, identify problems, and keep their drivers and businesses safe with GPS Insight’s GPS fleet tracking product.

Here’s to the next 5 years!

Rob

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

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Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Fleet Tracking,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,Safety,Trimble — 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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Sep 14 2009

Dashlet Mapping is more configurable now!

Category: dashboard dashlets,Fleet Tracking,Mapping,New Features — rdonat @ 9:43 am

GPS Insight has made it easier to get your Dashlet maps exactly how you need them by introducing “Map Groups” to the map-aware dashlets.

You can assign each map and each dashlet a letter A, B, C, or D.

Then whenever you click on a vehicle name, the appropriate map will display that vehicle’s location.

When you set it up, it looks like this:

GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

The way to “assign” a map to a dashlet is to choose the Map Group Letter for both the map and the dashlet, like shown below:

GPS Insight Map Groups

Now you can “tie” your dashlets to certain maps, and choose your groups accordingly.

In the graphic above, we have 4 different groups chosen, and they are each tied to a map nearby, so you are able to view your various vehicle groups separately but at the same time.

Every map-enabled dashlet has this capability now — here is a screenshot of the “Closest To” dashlet & where to make that configuration change.

REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR DASHBOARD AFTER MAKING THESE CHANGES OR YOU WILL LOSE THEM!!! (I just did that — oops)

Save your GPS Insight Dashboard changes

Rob.

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May 16 2009

New Switch Capabilities in GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Fleet Tracking,Google Earth,GPSI-4000,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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Nov 25 2008

Work hours of trackee’s vs. trackor’s…

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Fleet Tracking,Miscellaneous,Reporting — rdonat @ 10:32 am

We have quite a few daily reports we see on overall usage patterns, and one shows an interesting fact, over our 12,000 units and 2300 users:

Drivers start their day 2 1/2 hours earlier than office workers (and way earlier than me…). The yellow/blue line depicts driver activity (e.g. they’re driving), and the pink line is user activity (e.g. people are viewing them on maps, running reports, etc.):

This is in Arizona time, and we’re 2 hours off of New York this time of year, but you get the overall idea. In AZ time, the typical driver starts his or her day around 2:30 AM, and the typical USER of our system (e.g. dispatch) starts around 5:00 AM — 2 1/2 hours later.

That’s way too early for me (either way), but shows how hard both our customers’ drivers, and their office staff work, and how the service industry performs their jobs overall.

I’m a late night worker (after the family goes to sleep), so this is a little more when you’ll see me using the system on the tails of this bell curve, when, to be fair, the drivers tend to be done for the day, and the office staff is still working with the system:

Also interesting is the fact that even though we have well over 10,000 vehicles tracking, the TOP number of vehicles MOVING at any given point during the day (yesterday, and this is a holiday week so it’s somewhat lighter than usual) is 1590 * 2 (2 minute updates) = 3180, or roughly 25%, at 12:17 PM MST:

With so many different vertical markets, time zones, and types of company which are our customer, it’s interesting to see them all take on a very consistent bell-curve like daily activity graph, so I thought I would share this with you.

Thanks,

Rob.

Update: 11/28/08 — maybe Thanksgiving is the exception to this early morning rule (which is probably just because dispatchers leave their computers running all week, tracking when they’re not viewing it):

It looks like the most driving of tracked vehicles is done around dinner time. Authorized or unauthorized usage..?

One other interesting thing — note that the peak is around 650 (1300 vehicles moving) for Friday following Thanksgiving, vs. 1400 (2800 vehicles moving) — less than half the number of people worked the day after Thanksgiving as the day prior. Shopping or working? Based on the similar pattern to the prior workday, I think it was working, but only about half as much — I’m glad at least half of our customers give their employees the day off after Thanksgiving.

Rob.

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

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Sep 06 2008

Tracking the GypsyMobile (our new wrapped GPS Insight Scion)

Category: Driver Accountability,Fleet Tracking,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 3:22 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And started to zoom down on the activity in question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks,

Rob.

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

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Aug 30 2008

Better Business Bureau and GPS Tracking companies

Category: Better Business Bureau ratings,Company Efficiency,Fleet Tracking,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,GPS Tracking Industry,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 5:08 pm

GPS Insight is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. We applied and were granted this designation in May of 2007, 2 years after we were formally incorporated, on 4/14/2005. GPS Insight technically began as a consulting project, and my first billable work on it was 8/24/2004, over 4 years ago. This was work done by GPS Insight’s holding company, Sedonatech, Inc., an Illinois S Corporation in business since 4/1/2000.

Here is our information from the BBB: [you can check these yourself at bbb.org, under "USA Site/Check out a business"]

Today, I got my BBB newsletter in the mail, and was curious which of the other GPS vendors we come across were also accredited by the BBB.

I started searching, and thought I would share and maintain this list, periodically checking for changes, so our customers and employees can also know what the Better Business Bureau thinks of them.

These are the BBB rating links to some are the companies we typically hear our customers are (or were) looking at, in no particular order:

@Road:B, but not BBB Accredited

Fleetmatics: Unsatisfactory and not BBB Accredited

Teletrac: Unsatisfactory and A-, East and West offices

Sage Quest: A & BBB Accredited

Discrete Wireless: A-, but not BBB Accredited
Networkcar: No listing

Navtrak: A, but not BBB Accredited

Rocky Mountain Tracking: A- and Accredited

Fleetilla: No listing

Why do I list our competitors here? I feel that prospective customers should know about the market, and know who’s who, and does what. There are some other good GPS vendors out there, and this may help you to determine that as well. But we are happy to help you with a risk free trial against any of them, to prove that we not only have the best GPS Fleet Tracking product on the market, but that we’re also the best value, and have the best support available. Plus we can get you up and running same day in any of our 4 local markets, or next-day/second-day depending on how quickly you want to start tracking your vehicles.

One thing you’ll notice about our competitors’ websites (you’ll have to look them up yourself, I’m not that charitable to them…):

None of them will let you see a live action demo of their maps, their reports, or their overall product.

We have live demos, video demos, and tons of screenshots of our reports, etc. online at www.gpsinsight.com — please take a look. Our product is something that we are proud to show on the website, without forcing you to enter your information, email address, etc. first. An educated customer is the best type — please educate yourself on our website, check out our competitors, have us do a same-day WebEx demo for you, then do a side-by-side, risk free, 30 day money back guarantee trial. You’ll see the difference, or we wouldn’t put our product out there for everyone to see, including our competition!

I usually sign about 1 refund check a quarter and none yet in Q3 of 2008… [or Q4 of 2008 or Q1 of 2009 either]

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Better Business Bureau ratings, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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