GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog

Jun 04 2008

Selling Diesel for Crack

Category: detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Fleet Tracking,GPS Tracking,Stolen Vehicle Recovery,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 12:07 am

Apparently that’s what is starting to happen with Diesel nearing $6 per gallon.

We got a call from a long-time customer asking for our help sorting out the crazy behavior he was seeing from a brand new employee driving one of his big rig trucks. Since not all of our customers use every feature (notably our 3-D mapping in this case), we occasionally help customers out with these types of investigative requests.

The new driver was driving back and forth in a particular part of town, stopping for a period of time, then doing it again.

It became clear to us what was happening as soon as we pulled up these pictures (plus the police filled us in on the details once he was questioned):

High concentration of activity inside the town the driver should have driven straight through:

Zooming down, we see a semi-truck driving around almost canvassing the local area looking for people to buy diesel from him in order to fund his drug habit:

Here is one apparent set of stops where he is siphoning fuel out of his tanks and selling it on the side of the road.

Here is another where much of the activity seems to have taken place (note how many red, yellow, and blue dots there are — they correspond to stops > 1 hour, stops < 1 hour, and idle stops):

Our customer called the state troopers which were hesitant to do anything about it until he told them the driver was severely incoherent on the cell phone when he called him. Then they were happy to pull the driver over (with GPS Insight’s help pinpointing the location), and arrest him for driving while under the influence. Our customer had to have someone drive to pick up the truck and trailer, but that beats any of the other possible outcomes:

lost vehicle
wrecked vehicle with a driver under the influence of drugs
harm to other drivers/pedestrians by the driver
stolen/illegally sold goods in the trailer

This is the second “drugged up driver” we’ve helped a customer with in the past two weeks, and we’ve heard MANY stories from thankful customers of how they’re able to detect, and immediately put an end to problems such as this by watching new driver behavior closely, monitoring for off-hours/weekend usage, excessive speeding, etc. — all using the GPS Insight product which costs between $1-2 per day.

If we were curious how much time, how many miles, and and how many stops were made in this town, we could just draw a quick polygon landmark around it and run a report (as I did here):

Then run a quick report (.36 seconds to complete for all vehicles & 7 days history):

This report is available in this format only at GPS Insight:

It clearly shows that truck 402 drove 100 miles in this small area in one day, which itself cost roughly $90 (I ran a MPG report and saw this vehicle gets 6.2 MPG, and guessed that diesel costs $5.50 in that area). The time spent in that small area was 14 1/2 hours.

The next truck to enter and exit took only 2-4 minutes to get through town, and was probably the vehicle used to drop off a driver to retrieve the vehicle after the driver was arrested.

This is obviously a sad situation, but could have been a whole lot more sad if our customer wasn’t scrutinizing his new driver’s activity, and had we not been able to show him very clearly what was going on. By alerting the police and ending it quickly, everyone is a lot happier with the end of the story (maybe even eventually the driver).

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

Comments (0)

Apr 20 2008

Google Earth 4.3 gives GPS Insight street views

Category: Company Efficiency,Driver Accountability,Google Earth,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 12:58 pm

Google just released a new version of Google Earth at earth.google.com. It’s slightly different from a navigation standpoint, but one of the nicest new features is the “Street View” which helps our customers to put their vehicles’ activity in context.

Here is a picture of many thousands of our vehicles which we track, most of which are red (it’s Sunday & everyone’s been parked > 1 hour). What’s new are these little camera icons in major metro areas, which appear when you turn on “Street View” under Layers on the left.

These cameras indicate that street views are available for that area.

Now when you want to know where someone is (or was) stopped you can see more than just an overhead image:

Here is one of our resellers named John and he’s parked at a large warehouse with many pools set up. I happen to know it’s Paddock Pools in Phoenix since that’s where we got our pool.

But John is there right now, & if I wanted to see this “as if you were there” you just click on that camera on the road to “zoom into” a real picture:

Clicking on “Show Full Screen” brings you into a 3-D picture where you can look around by dragging the world whichever direction you need:

If you want to go down the road a bit you can just click on a new camera icon which represents another photo.

Now you can look at the same building but from a completely different angle:

And when you click on “exit photo” you can then show where the various photos are along the road to pick the best one for your investigative needs…:

All very cool and powerful capabilities, I’m sure this will shed some light on where drivers are taking their lunches for some of our customers…

In addition, you can always turn on “Bars/Clubs” under “Places of Interests” under “Layers” for a comprehensive listing along-side the cameras (they show up as martini glasses) to get a feel for what restaurants/bars are located near driver activity:

There are almost an unlimited number of street photos, and it’s getting more comprehensive, so start making use of this information within your organization.

Rob

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

Comments (0)

Apr 07 2008

Police chase & “Horrific Crash” — How GPS Insight helped an ambulance company react

Category: California,Company Efficiency,Emergency Response,Fleet Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 2:29 pm

Today a customer of ours in Southern California near our Orange office let us know that they used our product to both help 7 of their ambulances get to the scene of a California police chase that ended in a “horrific crash.” They also let us know they were able to use GPS Insight in order to assess their responsiveness to this large scale emergency.

Here is a video of the news story, where a drunk woman in a stolen SUV tried to escape police and crashed into 5 vehicles going the wrong way down the street in Tustin, California:

http://www.cbs2.com/video/?id=63039@kcbs.dayport.com

Using GPS Insight, their dispatch personnel can view their vehicle locations in real time (1 minute map updates and 2 minute vehicle updates). That screen allows them to also visualize their custom-built color-coded zones, click for a zoomed in detail of a vehicle or speed/stopped time type details. This particular screen shot is from a different company since the ambulance company’s regions and vehicles require understandable privacy. However it gives a good example of what a mid-sized fleet looks like in the GPS Insight dispatch map view.

When the call comes in for the emergency, they probably only had the cross streets, Warner Avenue and Red Hill Ave, in Tustin (technically close to Tustin in Santa Ana). By typing that into the GPS Insight “Find Address” box and zooming/marking it, the location can be instantly found:

This brings up the following map view, from which turn-by-turn directions to (or from) that location to any vehicle or other location/landmark can be brought up just by clicking on the “directions” links:

Now using the mouse scroll wheel, the zoom level allows you to see the two closest ambulances, 76 and 79, as well as their recent history as a “trail.” They are yellow which indicates they’re turned off but haven’t been stopped more than an hour (then they would be red, and this is all configurable by the customer with GPS Insight). By clicking on them we see more information. Ambulance#76 has been stopped for 27 minutes.

Not that this company needs directions — they know exactly where they are going to get to the calls in the most efficient way possible, but for many of our customers, turn-by-turn directions are necessary. All that needs to be done is to simply click on “Directions From Here” and exact directions are shown from that vehicle to the crash site. Note that you can turn on real time traffic and adjust the route simply by dragging the purple route line from one road to another.

Now the dispatcher has all the information necessary to send that emergency vehicle to the scene of the accident.

As for what it looks like in the GPS Insight 3D history at that time, we can run an all vehicles 3D history for that date like this with just a couple clicks:

Now we can “dial in” the time of the accident by gradually opening up the time slider until the first vehicle “arrives” on the scene at 3:22 PM (shown as a green vehicle “78 3/24 15:22″) — since this is a historical map history, we show the date as well.

Then we can open up more “time” to see which other vehicles arrived. The differently colored lines correspond to the paths of different vehicles.

While there may be too many “dots” to easily see which vehicles arrived when, and how long they stayed, quickly clicking on the blue ones will show length of visit information (blue = idling):

Then if we want an exact report, just draw an exact polygon landmark around the crash site (we name it CrashSite here), and run a report as such:

Here is the report which takes less than a second to run, and which tells you exactly which vehicles arrived, and at what exact time (to the second), along with how long they were there.

This data can be exported to Excel for further analysis, and of course the times and speeds of the ambulances from their prior locations when they were dispatched can be investigated as well in great detail using GPS Insight.

We’re glad we helped this company out, and hope the victims recover quickly. Thanks to the ambulance company for helping the victims (and even the suspect) so quickly.

Rob.

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

Comments (1)

Mar 23 2008

GPS Insight and the US Border

Category: Arizona,Mexico,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 10:12 pm

That sounds like a lot more important title than it really is. My family and I went to Mexico for Spring Break last week and came back today. It takes a lot less time to get INTO Mexico than it does to get back. Everyone asked us “How long did you spend in line at the border?”

So I thought I would take a quick look.

We all loaded up in the family truckster (Navigator) and left town Wednesday (after 2 botched attempts trying to leave Scottsdale forgetting, in order, the radar detector, and then our passports [note passports aren't necessary but I didn't want to find out that changed recently]). We came home today (Easter Sunday) and had to leave Rocky Point early since we’ve heard about the wait on Sundays back to Arizona taking over 4 hours.

Here’s a quick 10 second map-based history which I ran:

Here is where we parked the car for a day and a half before venturing out to town to buy the obligatory tourista materials each year (maraca’s, mini-guitars, vanilla, tons of shrimp, and the obligatory “Cuban” cigars…).

Zooming down on where we stayed shows where I parked the car for a few minutes while checking in (beautiful property, by the way, called Las Palomas at Rocky Point, Mexico) — note that while we drove 257.5 miles up to that point on Wednesday, the last “leg” of the trip (after getting lunch) ws 103.1 miles. By the way, I would have lost my sanity on this as well as all other long trips if not for Sirius Satellite Radio and 2 DVD players for our 3 kids on the way down…

Now for the fun part, heading back to the border — unless you want to get stuck in line for 4 hours, you need to leave early in the AM. With one screenshot, I can tell the following:

* We left at 8:12 AM (first point under the March 23, 2008 folder)

* We stopped for breakfast from 8:22 until 8:35 getting some doughnuts and coffee for the drive [note the blue idle dot, yellow “off” stop, and second blue “idle” stop from 8:22 until 8:33. There was one person in front of us in line — all I can say is that things move slowly south of the border…

* We went under the posted speed limit numerically (although our units of measure were off) — all of the light green dots show “Speedy Gonzalez activity” over 67 mph. The one I clicked upon (86 MPH) was technically below the limit of 90, but that was KPH…

* Not all of our maps support non US roads (not really a problem, since we won’t actively sell to non-US customers until Q3 2008)

* We spent less than 40 minutes from the time we arrived “in line” at the border until we got past it and back on our way — the first “clumped together” point has a 9:44 timestamp on it, and the first point across the border was at 10:24.

Let’s quantify just how long it took getting INTO Mexico vs. coming back from Mexico by drawing a quick polygon geofence around the border area:

Running a quick report with a couple mouse clicks looks like this:

Yields this report, which shows us that it took 2 minutes to clear the border going INTO Mexico but 40 minutes coming back. This report only took .12 seconds to run and also shows us that we spent 3 days, 18 hours, 9 minutes between border visits:

Because we use AT&T/T-Mobile’s GPRS network, we lose contact with the vehicle once it’s over the border, and will show you how quickly we forward that data back once we regain coverage. The “vertical” lines show long “lags” between a point being recorded & it being reported via cellular transmission.

For the entire trip, the vast majority of the points are into our database and available to the end user/customer within 3-5 seconds. Predictably, where we stop network compatibility, we stop reporting in real time — however, the second we hit coverage again at the border (typically, a couple miles prior to the border) all of that data is forwarded up within seconds so no history is ever lost:

In reality, we forwarded up all of that data at exactly 9:48:29, 1/3 of one mile South of the border:

But here’s a better idea of what is going on .31 miles south of the border while waiting in line to get through — everything imaginable is being sold, none of which would fly with my homeowner’s association. My favorite was the gold painted grim reaper:

I was told it was almost free. Only 5,000 pesos. Maybe next time I’ll pick it up if I stay too long and wind up spending 4 hours in the line at the border. Today we were OK with some fresh tortillas for 2 bucks.

Rob.

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

Comments (0)

Jan 31 2008

Cell-based sales notes/report and movement alerts

Category: cell phone capabilities,GPS Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 9:23 pm

January was a busy month for us, we completed a number of customer requests and a few stand out.

A sales based customer wanted to allow their salespeople to “text in” stop descriptions such as “stopped at Joe’s Convenience Store to stock the shelves with our product.”

So we now allow our customers to associate their drivers’ everyday cell phones with that vehicle, so that when they text in “gps note here is my note” it will asssociate the “here is my note” (or whatever they text) with that stop.

What’s better is you can see the note appear within seconds on our real time updating maps.

The red or yellow stop icon for that vehicle changes in real time to show an envelope, indicating a note.

I am going to send a note via my cell phone right now, saying “gps note I am at home blogging about GPS Insight.”

Before I send it, here is the picture of my vehicle (and my wife’s, down the street at our neighbor’s) with a couple of red icons (stopped for > 1 hour) .

Now that I’ve sent the note, I can see the new icon style with the envelope, and click on it for more details, as well as the ability to rapidly send a text message to that vehicle, check its history for the recent 3 days, or create a landmark around it:

Also, I can associate a note with another vehicle (in this case, my wife’s vehicle) by sending “gps navigator [or nav for short] note at the neighbor’s” — this allows you to easily “tag” a vehicle in your fleet with either notes or the ability to go back and check on its history, perhaps if you’re out of the office and curious where someone is at that time. Of course you can just request their address/landmark/stop time/speed by texting “gps vehiclename” where vehiclename is the name of the vehicle in question.

Here’s the new note for the Navigator:

Now if I want to be alerted via text message to when that vehicle starts up to leave, I can text “gps nav parked” and it will begin to monitor that vehicle, sending me a message when it starts up. This is convenient if you are waiting for someone to leave to go to the next stop but don’t want to sit and watch the screen for movement.

Of course, you need to be “logged in” via your cell phone in order to use these and other cell phone capabilities. You do so simply by sending a text message of “gps login username password” where username/password are yours. You also need to sign up for this enhanced capability, which usually costs between $2 and 4 per vehicle per month. At that point you can use any of these capabilities, which are really helpful for some of our customers and for us.

Now I know when my wife will be headed home. That reminds me of a “would-be” customer from years ago who called us to buy a unit to put in his Dad’s car so he would know when he was almost home. The kid seemed like he was in high school. Pretty funny, but we don’t sell for non-commercial purposes, so I guess he has to listen for the garage door like everybody else who doesn’t have GPS Insight…

Bear in mind we’ve got detailed specifications and instructions available at http://support.gpsinsight.com/wiki/support/how_do_i_locate_my_vehicles_using_cell_phone_text_messaging

Here is an update — we now show these notes on our newer stop detail report here:

Clicking on the “show on a map” icon brings up the following screen:

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

Comments (0)

Jan 24 2008

Insane Idling times & the associated costs

Category: Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 3:43 pm

With the cost of fuel over $3 per gallon, by far, the easiest way to save money with the GPS Insight product is to curb your fleet’s idling activity.

A GPS Insight salesperson asked our tech support to look into one of his customers’ vehices today, since he used it in a demonstration and it showed as having been idling for more than 23 HOURS. 23 HOURS!

Because we get our idling data off of the engine’s computer using RPM and battery voltage it is always 100% accurate. Other products can’t tell the difference between someone sitting with the key in “ACC” mode so they can listen to the radio and whether or not the engine is really running.

So, once we double-checked to see that the vehicle was truly idling, I decided it was the perfect candidate to compute just how much money 1 hour of idling costs a company.

Since the vehicle started idling at 9:09:39 on Wednesday, and ultimately stopped idling at 10:31 on Thursday, for over a 24 hour period of time, I decided to calculate how much fuel it burned through to determine a fairly accurate “waste” rate.

I determined when it started and stopped idling by running a GPS Insight 3D history map for today and yesterday like this (3 mouse clicks to choose the vehicle, the dates, and run the report).

It takes about a second to pull down that data, and we see that the vehicle finally turns itself off at 10:31:16:

So, now I can check the diagnostics side of the GPS Insight solution to see how many gallons of fuel were consumed during that period:

At close to the time the vehicle STOPPED idling (1/24 at 10:22 AM), the vehicle had a cumulative total idle fuel used of 1945 gallons, per our diagnostics history, which updates roughly every 40 minutes:

Roughly when the vehicle started idling, there were only 1928 gallons of fuel used at that point:

That’s a difference of 1945 – 1928 gallons = 17 gallons of diesel.

17 gallons of diesel for 25.5 hours of idling time.

That’s 2/3rds of a gallon of diesel per hour.

At Diesel at $3.25 a gallon, that’s $55.25 for one day’s worth of tracking, and more than what the cost of GPS Insight is per month.

How much does this truck idle? Let’s pull a report for a few days:

Why could that be? Well, the company is in the horse transport business, and it’s probably to keep their horses warm in the Winter months if they aren’t able to board them immediately.

Let’s pull the weather quickly into the high end, 3D Google Earth-based GPS Insight mapping:

It’s only 45 degrees F where they’re parked, and there may not be enough room where it’s warm to house these horses. They’re probably keeping them warm by running the engine to the truck. Of course I have no idea if that’s the case — just an educated guess. But thanks to this very long idle stop, I now have a good statistic for how much an hour of idling costs a truck owner — 2/3 of $3.25 per gallon = $2.16 an hour.

Rob.

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

Comments (0)

Nov 17 2007

Map books meet GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Ease of use,GPS Tracking,Las Vegas,Mapping,Overlays,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 3:20 pm

I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to “Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let’s say “Heather St.”).

I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content – that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.

Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I’m able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):

Then by scanning and overlaying an actual “map page” we can get precise boundaries for each page:

We can then create a “placemark” and put the “pin” precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:

Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose “directions from” which populates the latitude/longitude into the “directions” box:

Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don’t need to be computed for every single corner.

Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:

Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant
Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric “box” and takes them there
Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box

We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.

It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and “A-6″ style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight’s quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.

Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:

Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):

We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:

Here is the full polygon:

Then we can run a quick report on “Page24″ within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:

7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report — this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:

Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we’ll probably make them freely available, and I’ll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.

Thanks,

Rob.

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

Comments (0)

Nov 03 2007

Route Reporting in GPS Insight

Category: Arizona,Company Efficiency,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Ease of use,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 1:26 pm

In an earlier article I mentioned I would do a blog article about the GPS Insight route report. Here I will create a simple route (from my house to work) and run the report to see which of our vehicles ran that route. It should only be (and is) both my vehicle as well as my wife’s, since she sometimes comes by the office, or I sometimes take her car to work (I did the other day).

We construct the route by creating, then selecting a begin & end landmark, in this case “Rob House” and “GPS2″ :

Then we run a report for a range of dates, a group of vehicles, and a particular route:

Which yields this report, which shows that the only two vehicles making this trip between Rob House and GPS2 (our office) are mine (Rob) and my wife’s (Navigator). I have put red boxes around strange entries, where I either leave my car at the office for days (e.g. someone drops me off at the airport), or it takes me a long time to drive the 6.6 miles I live from work (e.g. I go to a customer meeting before heading to work), or it takes me a while to get home from work (e.g. I go out to dinner with a customer or my family).

At the very bottom I put a red box around the only time I’ve used the Navigator to go to work, this being because my wife took my car to the airport for a trip and left hers so I can take the kids to school/soccer/etc.

Perhaps I want a “median” time it takes me to get to work, and how long I usually stay at work. In this case, I would pull the data easily into Excel like this and run whichever custom calculations I need to:

Now I know it takes me 19 minutes median for me to get to work (the middle of all the samples, sometimes better than an average), and 10 minutes median to get home.

This is because I typically drop my sons off at school on my way to work, which takes around 10 minutes, but I come straight home.

This is a simple example of how you can use GPS Insight to calculate route statistics and use them to gain valuable insight into your fleet and your drivers.

Thanks for your interest, & call us at 866-GPS-4321 to talk about how we can help your company to do similar analysis with its GPS tracking project.

Rob.

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

Comments (2)

Nov 03 2007

Proving a vehicle was towed with GPS Insight

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Ease of use,GPS Tracking,Las Vegas,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 12:04 pm

Occasionally for large customers, I will print out a large overview of a day’s data, since we have a large format plotter which can print enormous (3 1/2 by 6 foot) images.

I had a few minutes the other day & decided to do this for a large Las Vegas based customer when I noticed what looked like an anomaly in their data. There was a long line connecting two position “pins” which was not “OK.” Since we report location every 2 minutes, it looked like the vehicle magically transported itself 8 miles away.

I hoped this wasn’t a problem with their vehicle’s GPS Tracking device so I looked at it, & realized it may have been towed to that facility. This customer has lots of large delivery vehicles and there’s no reason they couldn’t have used one to “deliver” another without the vehicle being turned on (maybe to save gas, or they didn’t have a driver to take it over there).

Here is the image with the anomaly:

Zooming down, it is simple to identify which vehicle this was — LVD-15405-18, with a 59 minute ‘stop’ (tow) beginning at 4:12 PM.

Now here is the hard part — there are tens of thousands of points — we need to filter out ONLY the vehicle which may have been towed, and the vehicles which could have potentially towed it, as well as just the data points from the time it was towed. Otherwise there is simply too much data to be able to see what happened here and get to the bottom of things. Thankfully that’s what GPS Insight allows our customers to do very easily, using something called the “time slider” and by using the inherent strengths of Google Earth.

We go to the opposite side of the long by clicking the next point in that vehicle’s history, an idle stop (blue) at 5:11 PM, where the vehicle “appeared” spontaneously, and see there was only one other truck there that day — that makes it easy to view ONLY those two trucks at once. One (our towed one with the long line) has a orangish-red line, and the other vehicle ahs a green line and is truck LVD-40209-RIG:

Because we know the 2 trucks, we can easily look at ONLY their history and because we know the vehicle was towed between 16:12 and 17:11 (4:12 PM and 5:11 PM) we can use the “time slider” to show ONLY the location “points” during that time & a little bit before & after. It shows exactly what I thought — the vehicle “towing” the other vehicle leaves that location shortly after it stops at 4:12, and arrives just a couple minutes before it starts again at its new location at 5:11 PM.

I have put big red arrows to show the direction it traveled to get there, and have highlighed the fact that it was just pulling in at 5:05 PM, 6 minutes before the vehicle was started up again, probably to back it off of the large delivery vehicle it was parked upon:

Another way to quantify this would be to create a “TowStart” and “TowStop” landmark at each of the two ends of the line and then run a route report for them for that day to see which vehicles went from one to the other — this is done by clicking on “Landmark: Create from point” which brings up this screen to easily place/adjust your landmarks.

Routes are a good topic for another blog article, so I’ll just show you how easy it is to create a route in our system, and the next article I will cover this topic in greater detail:

In a nutshell, with no knowledge of this customer’s business activity today, I was able to gain insight into an event which occurred to one of their trucks. It was towed by another one of their trucks, and evidence of this fact took only a couple minutes to get out of tens of thousands of data points, using GPS Insight. That’s what we do — give our customers (and sometimes ourselves) insight into what their fleets are doing at all times.

Thanks,
Rob.

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

Comments (0)

Nov 03 2007

My pool guy uses GPS Insight to prove service to his customers

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Arizona,GPS Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 10:18 am

I was talking to Jerry, my pool guy, the other day while he was servicing my pool in the morning, and he has been using GPS Insight for some time. He has a customer who complained that he hadn’t been to her house while she was out of town, and she said she was canceling and not going to pay. Jerry owns AZ’s Best Pool Service and does a great job, & does half of my neighborhood based on my referrals, so I know he wouldn’t skip a customer.

He was able to prove service in the following way. He remembered he goes there Thursday, and she was gone sometime in the middle of September, but not which truck he would have sent or used. So with a couple mouse clicks, he ran a history report for Thursday the 13th of Sep through Thursday the 20th:

This yields the following map (after selecting only the first/last days of service and turning off roads to see the two vehicles’ paths more clearly in Green/Blue):

We can easily adapt the map to show ONLY stops > a certain number of minutes (e.g. 5 minutes) and then zoom down to the neighborhood and see several “pairs” of stop pins (in yellow, which indicates a stop less than 60 minutes):

Clicking on one of the two stops shows the number of minutes stopped (13) and the exact time to the second that the vehicle was turned off. For space reasons I only show one of the two stops. With this information, Jerry can easily prove that he attended to his customer’s pool.

Another way to prove a service is to use a circular or polygon shaped landmark.

I can show the amount of time Jerry spends at my house on my pool for the month, to include last Friday, which should be a longer than usual stop because we were talking about this & pulling it up on my office computer since he wanted me to see how it helped him. Or better yet, we can draw a polygon around our neighborhood like so, and run a polygon inclusion report which will show the visits and the amount of time between visits:

We run a polygon Geofence report like this:

And can see just exactly when Jerry (or one of his employees) drive any of their vehicles into and out of our neighborhood, how long the visit was for, and additionally how long “between” visits:

I highlighted the trip from the other day where I talked with Jerry for 20 minutes, which slowed him down and made his neighborhood visit longer than the typical. He obviously had some single visits scattered throughout the month, and if you wanted to do things like average/max/min stop times, you can easily export the data into Excel by clicking on “Download Now.”

This is one of the best aspects of the GPS Insight product, and GPS tracking in general — service companies are always able to prove (or disprove) service in order to ensure the customer is being taken care of, and that additionally, billing which is due can be proven. Comparing historical times of service can be used to determine how efficient a driver is, or alternatively, if that driver is not taking the necessary time at each of his or her stops.

Rob.

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

Comments (1)

« Previous Page — Next Page »