Sep 10 2007

Sleeping vehicles

Category: GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 11:49 pm

I haven’t had much time to blog about GPS Insight or GPS tracking lately, but I’m working late tonight & took a quick look at a good number of our customers in real time. They are mostly red (stopped for more than an hour). Not surprising, as it’s 2:30 AM East Coast time and 11:30 West Coast time. Here’s a picture with some current weather:

Night Clouds (small)

Not too many vehicles are moving, & those which are tend to be the street sweepers, tow trucks, security/police, and long haul vehicles. Mostly street sweepers.

Here is a view of Phoenix:

Night Street Sweepers

Picking a local street sweeping company and displaying a 30 minute trail behind all their vehicles, we see they’re pretty busy this time of night — only two vehicles have been stopped for more than an hour:

Sweepers at night:

I think I would fall asleep doing that job. Good night!

Rob.

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Sep 10 2007

Using GPS Data to find cell phone dead zones

Category: Arizona,Cellular Coverage,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 4:41 pm

In this article I will detail how I use GPS Data to answer questions about cell phone signal inadequacy in Arizona using all of our data collected in August.


We have a large municipal customer who commands some respect from AT&T and is able to actually ask them to put up new cell phone towers in certain areas which are lacking.

They track a large number of vehicles using our GPS Tracking product, and asked us if we could help them determine the worst cell coverage areas in Arizona, based on our customers’ data.

Since we track several thousand vehicles in Arizona, we were able to do this.

Above is shown a real-time location of all several thousand vehicles we track in the Arizona and San Diego area.

I took the data from August so far and compared the track time with the time we received the data, where the “lag” is due to cell signal being unavailable.

We pulled 2500 points ranked by longest to shortest lag, where the shortest lag was 6 minutes — bear in mind our updates occur in 2 minute intervals and typically take 5 seconds to make it from the tracking device and another 10 seconds to be processed and pushed down to your map.

I plotted these lagged position updates and color and height coded them based on how long they took to ultimately get forwarded.

This shows all places where there was some level of poor cell coverage in Arizona for August:

Thankfully, when comparing where the vehicles we track are, relative to where the “dead spots” are, they are not very troublesome, and do not cover where most of our drivers tend to be:

Then we can place it in a 3-D view where the height of the lagged positions indicates how bad that coverage is (e.g. how long the vehicle was out of range after it collected that point):


Then I can pull both a Cingular/AT&T Coverage image I prepared (from their website) and overlay it with Arizona. This map is not 100% accurate, and there are a lot of T-Mobile and partner network areas where our product works which are NOT depicted, but it gives a good idea of where our coverage is (it follows the roads and major metro areas typically. Note the edges are not exactly aligned since our mapping knows about curvature of the earth but the Cingular map does not:

Zooming down we see that the worst area of coverage is not “orange” (which indicates areas AT&T claims to work in):

Zooming down on this area, we see it’s a desolate road leading to a mine:

Looking at the data points relative to the aerial photo, we see how accurate our GPS Track is. Then we can zoom WAY down and see the exact areas of the mine which are being driven in.

So if I was Cingular, I wouldn’t worry about covering this remote mine, but I would worry about coverage where I pointed out with 2 arrows below, and perhaps place or adjust the cell tower there.

Knowing there are around 800 square miles in all of Arizona where our typical vehicles (e.g. forgetting about the mining vehicles) go out of range for more than 5 minutes is great to know, since there are 111,500 square miles in Arizona.

This means we are out of range less than 1% of the time. Since most GPS tracking products (ours included) store this data until the vehicles return to coverage, there is never any data lost. We store roughly 45 days of typical driving, so if a vehicle goes down into Mexico (where we do not currently have service) and back, we still will be able to show the exact locations they were at, if they were speeding, etc, once they return.

One of our customers drives back & forth to Mexico and is currently using our service to include our polygon geofences in order to ensure compliance with Federal law, and to check their times spent at the border (which helps them in their business due to certain reporting requirements). I will cover this company and their unique usage of the GPS Insight product in the future.

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Sep 10 2007

Creative ways to get the most of your GPS tracking data

Category: Ease of use,Extreme Return on Investment,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 4:39 pm

I believe one of the biggest problem plaguing GPS implementations in the past, and currently, has been “what do I do with all of this data?” Additionally, in order to enhance its usefulness to your business, it should be used for strategic decisions such as whether to close down or build up certain routes, areas of business, etc.

Back when GPS tracking was getting its start, vehicles would report in every 60 minutes, maybe every 15.

These days, 2 minute updates are the norm, and a mid-sized, active fleet can easily accumulate 25,000 points of data per day.

The right reports, used in the right way, and with the right mapping, is ABSOLUTELY necessary to get anything useful out of this valuable data.

Finding a GPS tracking system which allows you to actually make sense of this data is crucial, or your ROI (Return On Investment) won’t be nearly as large. GPS Tracking yields a positive ROI in just about every implementation, but can be MUCH larger when the data and reports are used and acted upon properly.

Thankfully many GPS products out there have reports which help you drill down to the most important aspects of what you need to see for your particular situation and industry.

Here are a few ways we at GPS Insight (GPSI for short, or “Gypsy”) help you gain the insight you need to make important adjustments and business decisions based on this tremendous amount of data.

Getting a quick overview of your fleet’s activity for the day is a 2 click activity — choose yesterday, click “History Map” and a multi-colored plot of all your vehicles is shown:

This Arizona delivery company has 75 vehicles whose activity is shown below at the “200 mile” view — the user can actually play this day’s data as a movie to very realistically see the vehicles as they “drive” throughout Arizona as an animation (see our Demos for this type of thing at www.gpsinsight.com :

Instantly zooming down by double-clicking shows much more detail, and we can drill into a certain time with the “time slider” at the top to see where all the vehicles are at 11:59 AM.

Then we can drill down to what seems to be the farthest route, and instantly see which vehicle that is and isolate it for ease of viewing:

Now we can drill WAY down to the furthest point along the route and get a feel for whether or not it makes sense to send our driver that far out (or perhaps to start branching out beyond that point):

This looks like it’s the middle of nowhere. Do we want to spend the labor time and gas to service this customer any longer? Or should we market to the neighbors to make it worth our while driving all that way?

Let’s use a favorite Web Tool of mine to determine the type of neighborhood that is, in terms of price per home and/or square foot:

Zillow.com has a lot of good data, so we can navigate to that particular neighborhood using Zillow and see that the 3 nearest homes to our delivery are all very expensive ones, in the $650-$925k range, and that the least expensive one is a whopping $350 per square foot! This may be a good neighborhood for expanding into and spending some advertising on, since we’re already there, making a delivery anyway, once a day.

Here is the Zillow screen where we see this information:

Let’s run a custom report on this particular vehicle in this particular area to see how frequently it goes there. We can draw a VERY precise polygon landmark over the neighborhood and then run a landmark report to see the dates, times, and stop times for this area.

As you can see, there are a lot of creative ways we can drill down into our data to answer not just “where are my vehicles” type questions, but also “how should I adjust my business” type questions.

Running a 30 day report on just that truck and just that particular neighborhood takes 3 clicks and a few seconds and shows that the vehicle has been there only 4 times over the past 30 days, but most days recently and for most visits, between 2 and 8 minutes. We can pull this data into Excel and use it for further business analysis at this point [more useful for large reports, not this sample one].


How you, the business owner, interpret this data is up to you — obviously there are a number of business and economic factors. But using GPS Insight to track, report upon, and ultimately help you make these business decisions is something you should benefit from regardless of your industry.

We have a large number of capabilities, reports, maps, and custom enhancements you can use to gain insight into your company’s fleet and driver activity. This blog is mainly used to show practical examples of how you can benefit by using our product (and GPS Tracking in general, assuming you have a good provider which gives you these types of reports and maps).

Please feel free to call or email us for more information on how we will work to help your business and your industry in general.

Thanks,
Rob.

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Sep 07 2007

Detecting unauthorized usage trends with GPS

Category: Company Efficiency,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 4:26 pm

This article details an interesting view of “Macroeconomic” level understanding of fleets using GPS data which we get here at GPS Insight. On a typical day for one set of our servers, the number of GPS data points from vehicles under management reaches around 700. This is indicative of the number of moving vehicles, and with two minute updates for these vehicles, it roughly means 1500 vehicles are moving (and we are tracking) at that time for those servers.

Here is a graph of the activity throughout a typical work week day, with a yellow “15 minute moving average.” The Pink lines indicate our users’ activity on the system, and the blue/yellow lines ultimately indicate their vehicle movement and/or idling time:

dc_weekday1.png

On a WEEKEND, however, the trend is much less smooth, and some interesting “spikes” occur which could show why you probably want GPS tracking for your vehicles if your drivers take them home on the weekend (we also see that the level our customers use GPS Insight is down considerably on the weekends):

dc_saturday1.png

You may want to click on the image above to show a larger version. The day appears to spike at only 600 or so vehicles moving (vs. 1500) at once, and while the day begins about the same time as a typical weekday, there are a couple late-day spikes.

I imagine these spikes illustrate just how many people use their company vehicles to drive to restaurants/bars, particularly the late night return spike which we never see during the week but which is prevalent on the weekends.

Running a quick back-end report, I identified some likely culprits and drilled down on one (there were 150 vehicles driving during that time frame). This driver, a salesperson by the vehicle’s label, went on a 11:45 diaper run from what it looks like, thankfully less than a mile from home, stopping 7 minutes, then heading back. We see that this is a “Fry’s Food Stores” by turning on the shopping overlay/layer which gives useful information about an area within the 3-D mapping we utilize for GPS Insight.

This type of company vehicle utilization may be completely fine with the customer, but it could also be something more dangerous (late night drinking and driving). To see if this vehicle engages in late-night usage we can run a simply “odd-hours” report:

And luckily, we see that in the last 30 days, the only activity this vehicle has had between 10PM and 2AM is this event to the store and a 1 minute movement, most likely moving the vehicle in or out of the garage.

This is a simple example on the first vehicle (of 150) I checked, and for customer privacy we won’t give out much information about others, but the spikes and the trends are compelling evidence that your drivers may be taking your vehicles out at night for fun on weekends, and with GPS Insight, you can easily detect and deter this type of behavior. After all, it’s your company on the line from a risk standpoint if an accident occurs, and minimally, the fuel and maintenance for off-hours/weekend usage is something our customers wish to avoid.

For more information about these types of reports and maps, visit GPS Insight or our Wiki with more examples and documentation about the GPS Insight Vehicle tracking product.

Rob Donat.

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Sep 07 2007

GPS Tracking and US Army training

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,GPS Tracking,Military,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 3:46 pm


Here at GPS Insight, we are continually working with new and existing customers to help meet their requirements. That includes the US Army (of which I was a member years ago — I was an Artillery officer for some time, so these requirements came easy to me to define and implement with the help of our team here).

We were asked to provide GPS Tracking devices for training purposes, since the Army has a hard time getting (and paying for) the expensive military grade GPS Tracking devices in a training environment.

That means our troops don’t train the same as when they get into battle, and otherwise they need to learn how to use GPS tracking “on the job” which defeats the purpose of training!

So we have been working with the Army on a training program to provide low-cost, high functionality GPS tracking to troops BEFORE they get to the urban battlefield.

GPS Insight leverages several high tech mapping capabilities including Google Earth and cell-phone mapping which make it similar to what our troops use in the desert, and we have enhanced our offering for the Army.

We now allow customers to use GPS Insight as a repository of map “overlays” which could be anything from a subdivision plan to a high-resolution aerial photo to, in the Army’s case, a training map with grid-lines as are typical in the military (a grid line is a 1 x 1 kilometer numbered square and an “eight digit” grid equates to a position on the map within 10 meters).

We put a “reference map” capability together for the Army which allows them to enter 6, 8, 10 digit grid coordinates and exactly pinpoint the location using Google Earth. Additionally, we have given them a repository of map overlays to bring into Google Earth as well.

Here are some screenshots:

Enter an 8 digit grid to the side of a lake where there may be some training being conducted:

This yields the following:

Then pulling the military map from the overlay repository:

We see the location on top of an Army map:

Then finally changing the opacity of the overlay to see both “reality” and the map really brings the two together intuitively:

We look forward to helping the Army with training our soldiers — the GPS tracking technology they use in battle helps to locate our troops, identify hostile areas, tag potential IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices), and better their understanding of the battlefield.

GPS Insight and I are proud to be helping with this training mission and wish our troops the best.

Rob Donat

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Sep 07 2007

SoBe Beverages Love Bus Tour & GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 3:36 pm

SoBe Beverages just launched their Love Bus tour across the country and uses GPS Insight to track their vehicles and let their website users know their location in real time via www.sobebev.com/lovebus.

In addition to tracking the Love Bus tour (6 buses across the country distributing delicious SoBe beverages to fans at various locations), GPS Insight tracks the Lizard King, a 160 Mercury 4 Door Woody Station Wagon with 700 horsepower which was built on the Discovery Channel’s American Hotrod show over several episodes.

It’s pictured here:

The Love Busses or the Lizard King may be coming to a town near you — check it out on SoBe’s website and get some good stuff to drink and some SWAG to take home with you!

Thanks to SoBe for being one of our cool GPS Insight customers and for using the product in an exciting way that helps their customers find these promotional vehicles in real time.

Here’s a screenshot of the GPS tracking map they use from GPS Insight but host on their website with only a small amount of code — we let any of our customers use this technology to let their customers, partners, and employees see the current status of any/all of their vehicles in real time without logging in (or they can choose to password protect this information):

Find one near you!
Rob.


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Sep 07 2007

Benefits to fleet-based companies from using GPS Tracking

Category: Company Efficiency,Ease of use,Extreme Return on Investment,GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 2:39 pm

At GPS Insight, we see a wide variety of customers from just about every industry. Our typical customers are from the service and trucking industries, and here is a list of industries I’ve been compiling recently in order to detail the specific advantages GPS Tracking (aka Vehicle Tracking) will afford each of them. They are in absolutely no order than what order I started typing them, which is somewhat based on how typical they are of our customer base at GPS Insight.

  • HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning)
  • Plumbing
  • Garage door repair
  • Auto Glass
  • Roofing
  • Telecommunications (Cable, Phone and Internet providers)
  • Street Sweeping
  • Landscape Design and Construction
  • Landscape Maintenance
  • General Engineering
  • Energy/Fuel/Gas Companies
  • Construction (General)
  • Construction Supply
  • Excavation
  • Automotive (parts delivery, demo & courtesy vehicles, dealer vehicles)
  • Construction trades (drywall, flooring, painting, bricklaying, tile, electrical, lighting, etc.)
  • Trucking, Long Haul (OTR)
  • Trucking, Local Delivery
  • Security firms (patrol, dispatch)
  • Courier and package delivery
  • Beverage distribution & coffee service
  • Fuel & Oil delivery
  • Military
  • Federal and State, Municipal Government
  • Retail delivery (furniture, appliance, office supplies, medical supply, floral)
  • Installation firms (satellite, broadband, home audio/video, water treatment, basement systems)
  • Limousine, Taxi
  • Concrete Placement/Pumping
  • Agricultural (farming and produce delivery)
  • Boat rental
  • Sales (business equipment, pharmaceutical, company representatives)
  • Police
  • Concrete
  • Vending firms
  • General Services (Pool maintenence, Janitorial, Pest control, Carpet cleaning)
  • Solid Waste (Commercial, Residential, Subcontractors)
  • Personal usage
  • Marketing vehicles
  • Mobile advertising
  • Education (campus plant operations, etc.)
  • Towing
  • Tire delivery/service
  • Mobile Car Wash
  • Mobile Shredding / Document Management
  • Rental companies
  • Catering, food delivery
  • Medical transport
  • Moving

The primary benefits of GPS Tracking to most service industries are:

  • Dispatch: Know where your vehicles are at all time using real time mapping
  • Fuel: Save a lot on your fuel bill by curbing off-hours usage, excessive idling, speeding, and fuel-card fraud
  • Labor: Your drivers will stop reporting time worked that they didn’t actually work. This typically provides instant return on investment (ROI) well past the ~$1.50/day the typical GPS Tracking product costs when the hardware is leased or built into the monthly cost
  • Billing: Prove to your customers your hours at their facility, which helps avoid “goodwill” credits where they’re not deserved — likewise, it helps you to get on top of problem drivers who are claming to work longer than they did — this cost you more than hours paid to your workers. It will cost you your customers as well!
  • Risk: When you implement and enforce a speeding policy, your drivers will stop speeding within a week. We have seen it so many times, and it is simply impossible for your drivers to avoid speeding detection with GPS Tracking. Additionally, you can establish and enforce an off-hours driving policy for your vehicles which will lessen the likelihood of an accident in a company vehicle, particularly a drunk-driving accident after hours when used to drive to the local bar.
  • Maintenence: Our GPS Tracking product talks to the engine’s diagnostics port, which means we know when your engine light is on and why. You get instant email alerts that there are “critical” problems with your vehicle such as transmission & brake issues, low oil pressure, and other major engine issues. Less critical problems come in a nightly email as well as on demand via the web interface. Very few GPS Tracking providers give this information and it is a key differentiator for GPS Insight typically.
  • Routing: By utilizing intelligent and optimized routes, your fleet’s efficiency will be significantly increased. Fewer miles driving to customers in the wrong order, less fuel, less labor, less maintenence, happier customers — they all add up to a significant advantage for your company after installing GPS Tracking devices.
  • Reports: Most GPS Tracking companies provide detailed activity, summary, stop, idling, speeding, off-hours, and landmark/geofence reports. Some companies provide more custom (or completely custom) reports such as State Mileage reporting (for fuel tax reporting), route compliance/deviation, etc.

As more and more benefits warrant detailing here, we will do so — there are many other lesser reasons for using GPS Insight — call several companies and ask their salespeople for more information (us included…). Some of the lesser reasons: Idling, maintenence logs, mileage reports, etc.

Rob

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Sep 07 2007

Inaugural Post

Category: Arizona,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 2:27 pm

This is the first post to go into this new GPS Tracking, Reporting, and Mapping Blog. The intention of this blog is for me to share my ideas, experience, and experiences with GPS tracking with the fleet community as well as the GPS Insight customers and employees who frequent this blog. I will make it a point to be product neutral and strictly “positive” about other products in the marketplace, but of course any examples or screen shots will likely be from our GPS Insight product, with more information available at www.gpsinsight.com. Comments and questions are welcome, and the overlap on this blog with both wiki.gpsinsight.com and forums.gpsinsight.com will eventually be apparent as content gets duplicated to all of the appropriate areas. Thanks for your interest, I hope this blog will help you, as well as help us to help you…

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