GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog

Mar 22 2012

Choose your Default Group now in the new User Preferences area

Category: Ease of use,New Features,New Features,User Preferences — rdonat @ 9:11 pm

Earlier this month, a customer asked for the ability for GPS Insight to remember his “default” group of vehicles he works with most frequently.

We completed this the other day for them, and all of our customers, and it is available in our new user preferences area. (apparently I forgot to mention this was completed since the blog article announcing that it was being developed)

Here’s why you may need it and how it works:

Default Group is always "ALL VEHICLES"

Whenever using GPS Insight, when you log in for the first time, we default the pre-chosen vehicle group for both mapping and reporting to “ALL VEHICLES” — unless it’s got more than 200 vehicles, and then we choose the first group (alphabetically) with fewer than 200 vehicles. (this is so that you don’t accidentally run a big map or report without thinking about it).

By going to the new user preferences area, you can override the default group:

New "Default Group" choice in User Preferences

I’ve chosen “SCOTTSDALE” from the list of groups, and chose “remember last used vehicle group” rather than “always use default group” — this means if I ever override that group to another one, it’s remembered for that session until I log in again.

Now when I log out/back in, it knows to pre-choose “SCOTTSDALE” as shown below:

Default group is pre-populated now

This is a good example of how we have made GPS Insight highly configurable and how quickly we are able to deploy enhancements based on customer feedback and requests.

This small change will save significant time for many customers over the course of each year, and we are glad to help make our product easier and faster for them (and us) to use.

Thanks!

Rob.

Tags: default vehicle group, user preferences

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Mar 19 2012

New GPS Insight Interface Enhancement

Category: Ease of use,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 6:44 pm

The Menu/Tab bar in GPS Insight has been improved to help distinguish between the two.

New "Split" tab/menu interface in GPS Insight

This is very helpful in a number of ways:

Hover-over the menu name to “drop down” that menu
Click above the menu on the icon area to bring up that tab’s customized dashboard
Click on the menu name to close it and subsequently to keep it “pinned” so it doesn’t disappear until you close it
iPad/iPhone/Android & other touch screen devices now allow the menu to be used without changing the tab you’re on

New GPS Insight Menu "split" interface

When you hover-over either the top or the bottom, it turns red accordingly:

Choose a tab without opening the menu

This is one area of our GPS fleet tracking interface customers have asked us to improve, and we have done so for everyone’s convenience (mine too!!).

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: dashboard interface, ease of use, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, New Features, portal interface, tracking software

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Mar 18 2012

New “true idling” feature determines PTO time, Boom use time, and true idle time

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Ease of use,Fuel Savings,New Features,New Features,reduced idling,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 9:08 am

GPS Insight now allows you to define your input switches to create a useful “true idle” time report.

We help you define what each switch “represents” in terms of both wiring as well as “what it means.” That way your idling reports can tell the difference between time spent idling vs. time with the PTO on, vs. time with the PTO on and the boom out (or pump on, or whatever you may need). This way you can tell “true idle” from “working idle.”

Here is a sample of how one customer’s switches are defined:

GPS Insight input switch definitions

When running an idle summary or idle detail, each vehicle’s idle status shows up with as much information as we have available based on which switches (states) are defined and wired. Here I run a full-month Idle Summary for a group of vehicles with PTO (and some with boom state) defined:

Running a GPS Insight "True Idle" Report

The result shows different totals for time with the PTO on, the boom out of the cradle (working idle) and neither (true idle):

GPS Insight idle summary (working idle, PTO idle, true idle)

By sorting or clicking on any vehicle, you can see what interests you most (e.g. total true idle, highest true idle percentage) and then see the corresponding detail report which supports that summary total:

GPS Insight "true idle" detail report

As with all our reports, hovering over a location shows a map of the activity and an address (here we abbreviated the location column to landmark names where they were created by the customer). And it is easy to export all idling activity to a map, Spreadsheet, or Google Earth.

So now, companies with a lot of “justified” idle time can start quantifying “wasteful” idle time without wondering if the time was spent working or wasting.

This report is available to any customers who use switches, and will automatically work for the definitions for those switches.

Rob.

Tags: fuel savings, idling report, Reports, true idling, wasteful idling

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Mar 12 2012

Do your drivers have a TV in their vehicle?

Category: cell phone capabilities,Company Efficiency,Driver Accountability,Safety — rdonat @ 11:44 am

For $29.95, they could!

While I think this is really cool technology, I’m guessing it’s being used by drivers across the country and costing companies in terms of both lost productivity and safety due to distracted driving.

I just hooked up a “slingbox” to my TV at home and it allows me to control and watch that TV ANYWHERE that I have WiFi or even Cellular access on my iPhone or iPad (or Android phone, which I don’t have).

This means I can literally watch live TV ANYWHERE at ANYTIME. I can even watch programs I’ve recorded in the past.

Here’s a quick video of how it works on my iPad:

And here are some screenshots of my watching TV, choosing a Spongebob Squarepants episode my kids have got taped, and streaming it to my iPhone.

Going through the live TV guide

After looking at the guide, I can press “Menu” from the Keypad option and get a list of taped shows:

Watching a Spongebob Squarepants on my iPhone

Choose an episode next:

Watching a Spongebob Squarepants on my iPhone

Press “Play”:

Watching a Spongebob Squarepants on my iPhone

And now it’s like you’re in your living room watching TV:

Watching a Spongebob Squarepants on my iPhone

I think this is fantastic technology, since I can watch the occasional taped TV show when I’m traveling without waiting until I get home.

But I can’t imagine how this will affect both driver productivity and safety. I hope drivers know enough to keep from wasting time on the job by watching TV shows, and certainly hope they don’t have them on while driving. However, I would certainly check productivity between your drivers to get a feel for who may be utilizing this new TV capability.

GPS Tracking services are a great way to monitor stop times as well other metrics which may help to pinpoint trouble with drivers who are using applications such as this. And it’s not just Slingbox — it’s Angry Birds, and just about any iPhone/iPad/Android app which might suck the productivity or safety right out of them. An example of a report which might show one driver vs. another

Here’s just the newest example I’ve seen.

Rob.

Tags: driver distractions, driver productivity, Slingbox

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Mar 11 2012

New “Cycle Time” Detail and Summary Reports

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Company Efficiency,Driver Accountability,Graphs,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Truck Tracking — rdonat @ 8:00 pm

GPS Insight has completed two new reports for our customers who have vehicles going “back and forth” between two landmarks frequently, and where those “cycles” should be either above or below a “standard” drive and work time. This is a huge requirement for aggregate, trash, fuel, or other materials haulers who do the same thing day in and day out, and where hitting the standard turn and drive times is key to making a profit.

These reports are the “Cycle Time” Detail and Summary report.

This report runs a “Cycle Summary” for all our vehicles running between “RobHouse” (my house) and “GPS Insight Headquarters” (work):

GPS Insight's new Cycle Summary

Here is the output summarizing all of our trips from my house, to work, then back to my house:

GPS Insight Cycle Summary

This quickly displays a full month’s for all vehicles completing that pattern at least once during the month. Bear in mind that the data doesn’t make much sense since we don’t work driving back & forth between my house and work, but this will be more useful to companies which have this business model.

Running the Cycle Detail report for ONLY my 2 vehicles like this:

GPS Insight Cycle Detail Report

We get the following output (shrunk to fit, but you get the idea):

GPS Insight Cycle Detail Report

These reports still have some work to be done, but we wanted to get them out there for customers who require this functionality.

They are NOT going to help all customers in all situations, and while we are happy to listen to suggestions, these are two fairly specialized reports which may or may not see further development based on customer feedback/requests.

That said, we will most likely add functionality for an “upper limit” for drive and/or turn times before they are ignored (so that when I go to the airport for 4 days, then back to my home, that doesn’t count as a “cycle” for instance) and also, we will allow a “half cycle” to count toward the totals (where someone only completes half the cycle that day then completes the day without completing the cycle).

You will not see these reports show up in the Landmark menu by default, but if you want them turned on, please let us know and we will be happy to make them available.

Enjoy and Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: aggregate hauling, cycle time report, new GPS Insight reports

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Feb 22 2012

More fuel pumped than the vehicle’s capacity? We let you know that in a new addition to our Fuel Transaction Report

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Driver Accountability,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 9:15 pm

We’ve added new functionality to our Wright Express Fuel Card integration.

Now you can specify how big your fuel tanks are for each vehicle, and be alerted whenever more than that amount of fuel is pumped using a Wright Express Fuel Card.

Here is where you edit the vehicle from the vehicle administration page:

Opening the Vehicle Edit Page

And where you enter the # of gallons for the gas tank:

Enter the number of gallons the fuel tank holds

Now when you run the WEX Fuel Transaction Report you have a new option, which is to show ONLY the exceptions:

New "Exceptions only" option to Wright Express Transaction Card

The arrows pointing from “Too Much Fuel” show you where your fuel card was used to purchase more fuel than the vehicle’s capacity. We have artificially understated the fuel tank capacity in some of our vehicles in order to simulate a true exception in this report:

New % of tank capacity column in WEX Transaction Report

So now you can check to see when a vehicle’s card is used for non-fuel purchases, too much fuel for the vehicle’s tank, or when it’s used and the vehicle isn’t actually present.

This is a great report for validating your drivers’ use of your fuel cards, and to make sure they aren’t taking advantage of them.

Additionally, you can sort on percentage of fuel tank and see when drivers are fueling when they don’t really need to.

Next change, I think, will be LONG STOPS at fuel stations, which can be used to determine both drivers who take too long to fuel, as well as stations with really slow pumps (I experienced this recently and spent 12 minutes pumping 20 gallons of fuel in the middle of nowhere — it was the inspiration for this modification….)

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fuel card reporting, fuel tank capacity, gps fleet tracking, gps vehicle tracking system, Wright Express Fuel Card Integration. gps tracking

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Feb 21 2012

View Garmin Message/Stop status within the Garmin Dashlet

Category: Garmin Integration,Garmin Messaging,GPS Navigation,New Features,New Features,New Garmin Features — rdonat @ 11:04 pm

I send myself test and actual messages/stops all the time in my car. I have a Garmin in my cars (even the one with the in-dash Garmin) so I can easily use and test our Garmin capabilities, which are really useful.

I looked at the Garmin Dashlet on our account today and noticed I had a number of unread/inactive messages/stops which I KNOW I read. But in order for them to show up as read or allow the driver to reply to them, you need to actually click on them, which I hadn’t done.

Garmin Dashlet shows several unread/inactive messages and stops

I went out to my car, turned it on, and did a couple things. I read the “Good Evening” message from 11 days ago and responded “Yes It Is!” I also deleted the Desert Ridge (a mall) stop, as I already went there, but deactivated it before arriving, since I got tired of listening to the Garmin tell me how to go once I was close. I also responded “Ok” to the “We have a meeting…” message which I also hadn’t clicked on.

When I came back into my office, the screen had changed (as it’s supposed to…) to this, reflecting the changes I had made by interacting with the Garmin in my car. Note that the messages have changed from “Unread” to “Read”

Updated Garmin Dashlet

The red lines are to indicated new messages (they turn white once you acknowledge them by clicking the message). If you like, you can have a pop-up message appear by turning on this option within the edit properties screen, and you can see that once I clicked on the top line, it turned back to white:

Click on a new message to clear the "new message" color

When clicking on each of the various statuses, the history and timestamps show up for each line, such as the time I just now read the “good evening” message:

Timestamp for when a message was read

Here we can see what time the stop was received, read, selected (Active), de-selected (Read Inactive again) then deleted (just now):

Full history of a stop sent to my Garmin

And if more information is required, there is a dedicated Garmin interface under the “Custom-> Garmin” menu option. It gives more details and may be more suitable than a dashboard dashlet for a full-scale dispatch operation, depending on your requirements:

Full information in the main Garmin screen

It is highly configurable, and better suited to historical queries about past messages/stops and their history.

Rob.

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

Tags: Fleet Tracking, Garmin, Garmin Messages, Garmin Stops, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, Message History, vehicle tracking system

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Feb 20 2012

New User Preferences coming to GPS Insight soon

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Ease of use,New Features,New Features,User Preferences — rdonat @ 5:55 pm

For a LONG time, in GPS Insight, speeding meant > 67 MPH, idling meant speed=0, and red meant stopped for > 60 minutes.

A customer recently asked for us to change this to 72 MPH, idling for > 5 minutes, and stopped for > 120 minutes.

We made an exception for them and it now shows up as such on the map, as well as on the legend:

Custom Legend within GPS Insight

You’ll note that the vehicle below has been stopped for 1 hour, 50 minutes, and is yellow still (by default it would be red at the 60 minute mark) based on this change.

Custom color threshold for stopped vehicles

We also have lots of other semi-custom requests from customers, such as when they want a different list of speed thresholds to drop down as choices in a report, etc.

And we make those changes here & there as customers request them.

However, we thought we would put this capability into our customers hands, on an account-by-account basis where applicable, and down to the user-by-user basis as an account-level override.

Here is where you’ll find the interface we’re developing to make it easy for our customers to make these changes themselves (should be another week or so until it’s available to all customers):

GPS Insight custom preferences button

And here’s what that interface will look like, for starters:

GPS Insight custom preferences interface

There are many more highly custom attributes you can expect to see within GPS Insight such as:

How granular the time options are in report pull-downs (e.g. 1, 5, 10 minute intervals)
The language for the interface (currently just English and Spanish)
Default values for time choices in reports and historical maps, etc.
Color schemes with customer logos/colors (this will take a while but in the meantime you can always ask if we can accommodate your request)
You name it — anything customers ask us to change regularly will be an option here

We’re always listening to customer needs, and here is a great example of us modifying the product to meet those expectations.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: custom capabilities, customer preferences, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking system

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Feb 08 2012

Ease of Use is hard to find

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Company Efficiency,Ease of use,Google Earth,Mapping,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 3:40 pm

I use a lot of web-based applications — checking, CRM, email, etc.

Not all of them (in fact few of them) are easy to use and many require you to do the same thing over & over again which wastes a lot of time.

I am happy to say that at GPS Insight, we do everything we can to make it easy to use our product efficiently.

I needed to look into a customer’s question earlier today and this attention to usability made my life easy.

I needed BOTH a 3D map AND an activity detail report — these exist on 2 separate menus on the Mapping & Reporting tabs.

I ran the first one:

Running a 3D History map for a vehicle for 3 days

Then all I needed to do was move my mouse over to the Reports Menu, click on “Activity Detail” and both my vehicle AND date range (several months back, which involved a few clicks to achieve the first time) were carried over to this report. Then one last click on “Run Report” and VOILA, my report:

Running an Activity Report for a vehicle for 3 days

Now I could stare and compare the 3D map vs. the Activity Detail Report easily and see what my customer was curious about — he wondered why the latitude/longitude wasn’t changing for multiple lines in the Activity Detail Report:

GPS Insight Activity Detail Report

We don’t recommend trying to “interpret” latitude / longitude, as it doesn’t make any sense to us humans, but in our mapping, it shows what happened very obviously:

17 minute idle event

The vehicle didn’t change latitude / longitude for all those points since it was idling for 17 minutes! The map made that clear.

And it only took a few clicks, due to our interface which “remembers” what you’re doing. If you have 10 different reports for the same group of vehicles or single vehicle, for the same range of dates, it takes only a few clicks. You don’t need to re-select the group/vehicle, then re-select the date range. What a drag it is when I have to use someone else’s interface and wish they did the same things we do to make our customers efficient and happy to use GPS Insight.

Rob.

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

Tags: dashboard features, ease of use, fleet reports, fleet tracking software, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking, gps insight dashboard, GPS Tracking, gps tracking device, track vehicle map, vehicle data, Vehicle Tracking

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Jan 17 2012

It took less than 3 minutes to make my wife happy using GPS Insight

Category: Alerts,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Driver Accountability,Landmarks — rdonat @ 4:28 pm

I was getting some work done today when my wife sent me this email at 3:35 PM:

Request from my wife to fix an alert

I bought a new car, so my old car (Rob 4000) doesn’t alert her like it used to when I set it up to text her automatically whenever I leave the office (blog article about that here).

I have a new car and new device (Rob 3900) and sometimes drive another car (Rubicon) now so instead of a single car notifying her, I thought I would do the following:

Make a group called “Robs Cars”
Change the Landmark Alert from a single vehicle (Rob 4000) to a Group of vehicles (RobCars) containing these 2 vehicles (devices)

So here’s how I did all that in less than 3 minutes (1 minute of it was just opening a window and signing in):

3:36:15 PM: I opened up Vehicle Administration to add a new vehicle group: [the screen capture program I use timestamped the files so that's how I can get the timeline easily]

Open Vehicle Administration in GPS Insight

3:36:27: I clicked on “Create New Vehicle Group”:

Create new vehicle group

3:37:02: Add the vehicles to the new RobCars Group

Add 2 devices (vehicles) to new RobCars group

3:37:24: Open the Alerts Manager:

Open the GPS Insight Alerts Manager

3:37:43: Open up the “Coming Home Alert” for edit:

Edit an alert in GPS Insight

3:37:56: Change the single vehicle “Rob 4000″ to the Group of vehicles “RobsCars”:

Change vehicle to a group

All done in less than 3 minutes:

3 minutes to make a change in GPS Insight

Now I don’t need to call my wife when heading home to see if she needs anything — she’ll get an email and text message every time now (again).

And because it takes just a couple minutes to make substantial changes within GPS Insight, I did it right away — just like our customers can make changes to ensure their alerts, reports, groups, etc. are always up to date. And if the system is easy to administer, it actually gets used properly and to the full extent.

If it only took me less than 30 minutes to fix up the images and write the blog article about it…

Rob.

Tags: ease of use, family, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, powerful alerts, vehicle tracking alerts

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