Apr 04 2012

Get notified of inbound messages even when you’re not paying attention

Earlier today I was showing how to send messages to multiple vehicles’ Garmin devices to a partner company.

I sent a couple vehicles (our employees) “This is a test, disregard please.”

Then an hour or so later I was composing an email when my browser screen went dim, behind  my email, which got my attention:

 

GPS Insight interface dims to let you know there's a new message

GPS Insight interface dims to let you know there's a new message

So I went to that window and saw the notification that I had a new inbound Garmin message (from Ray, telling me he “Rec’d” the test message):

Inbound message notification

Inbound message notification

Once I click “OK” the screen lights up again.  It is still easy to see which message is new, since it’s highlighted in pink:

Inbound message notification

Inbound message notification

Clicking it once clears its color so it doesn’t stand out any longer:

Clearing an "unread" message

Clearing an "unread" message

And if you prefer that we NOT behave this way to notify you whenever we detect an inbound message, all you need to do is clear that option in the properties of the Garmin dashlet:

"Display new message alert" option

"Display new message alert" option

This is an option which we introduced some time ago, but since we rarely dispatch or communicate with our own employees (since we’re not really a fleet-oriented company like our customers) it’s rare that I see this capability do its thing, which is why I thought I would show how it works for you.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Apr 05 2011

3 BILLION alert checks and still checking!

We just hit our 3 billionth alert check yesterday.  Alerts have become a preferred way of using GPS Insight for many customers.  All you do is set your alert up, and we will let you know when someone triggers it.

Of all those checks, only 3,573,734 yielded an actual email/SMS message to the supervisor or driver, or about .118%.  You set it, and we check it — and about once every 847 times we check for you (on average), we’ll let you know that something isn’t right.

GPS Insight alert types

GPS Insight alert types

We have very configurable alerts – you can combine most in order to be really specific:

  • Alert drivers when their vehicles idle > 7 (or whatever you specify) but ONLY when the vehicle is not at a maintenance yard, and only during business hours
  • Alert security whenever a take home vehicle is started, but ONLY if it leaves the driver’s home
  • Set a speeding alert which is different for daytime hours than nighttime hours
  • A nighttime warehouse landmark alert — for when your vehicles should not be “getting supplied”

And we are almost ready to release our posted speed limit alert.  It’s been ready for a while and available in beta, but due to the occasional inaccurate piece of posted speed/road data, we don’t want to send out false alerts and are working on a system to ensure each alert is “triple-checked” before it goes out.  That will be available soon, along with the ability to “override” certain speed limits where you know better than the data we have.

We are also working on route-based alerts to let you know when a vehicle is “behind schedule” — more to come soon!

Rob.

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Dec 18 2010

Use it or lose it! (ROI that is…)

I was looking at one of our customers’ accounts the other day.  They have 23 vehicles.  Many people with that many vehicles think they “have a handle” on what’s going on.

I was thrilled to see that this company was using GPS Insight to see what was going on with their fleet.

Specifically, they were using our:

  • Alerts
  • Scheduled Reports

I call these 2 features “Unattended ROI” since you don’t have to do anything except let US monitor your fleet for exceptional situations and alert you to them, as well as run a summary report automatically and look at it in your inbox in the morning.

Scheduling Reports to alert to exceptions

Scheduling Reports to alert to exceptions

You can see there are landmark, idling, speeding, and “long stop” alerts set up here.  This customer wants to know every time a vehicle gets to the office “late” which is between 6 PM and 5 AM.  That can be used to identify people working late as well as people sneaking into the office when it is not manned in order to load up on parts for side jobs.

We have checked this for them 728,641 times since they set up that alert.  We’ve alerted them only 820 times (which is typical — usually 1 in 1000 alert checks results in an alert).

They have also set up a number of scheduled reports:

Scheduling fleet tracking reports to automate your job

Scheduling fleet tracking reports to automate your job

Just by setting up these 8, we have sent them 1300 reports and all they have to do is read them in their email every day.  They come as .html, Excel/CSV, and associated maps (for speeding, idling, and odd-hours violations).

I wish all our customers (and users of GPS Tracking in general) were this diligent about setting up MEANINGFUL alerts and reports.  It drives significant ROI knowing in real time what is going on with your fleet.  If you don’t use them, you are throwing away this return on your investment.

Use it or Lose it!

Rob.

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Nov 26 2010

GPS Insight introduces new remote panic switch capability

Category: Alerts,New Features,New Features,Safety,Switchesrdonat @ 12:04 pm

We had a customer who needed to allow their drivers to remotely trigger a panic alarm which would go to their dispatch/safety personnel instantly.

We found a good hardware vendor for the wireless keyfob component, and programmed the necessary parts to make this work with our existing panic alerts.

Here is the hardware:

GPS Insight introduces wireless panic switches

GPS Insight introduces wireless panic switches

This is a $50 one time hardware option which includes the wireless keyfobs (2), receiver, and a bright LED to let anyone in the vehicle know that the panic switch has been turned “on.”

It can be canceled by pressing the “off” button on the keyfob.

This new option is available immediately, and the service is a free upgrade.

Rob.

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Aug 14 2010

GPS Insight has sent out over two million alerts based on driver behavior!

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.”  You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so!  They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

  • Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
  • Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
  • Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
  • Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight.  We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

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Jul 15 2010

New alert tells you when vehicles take too long to get where they’re going

Category: Alerts,Company Efficiency,Ease of use,New Featuresrdonat @ 9:57 am

A customer needed an alert to let them know whenever a vehicle took to long getting from A to B.

We put the new “Late Arrival Alert” into the product as a result:

New "Late Arrival" alert

New "Late Arrival" Alert

Here’s what it does:

You can enter an origination and destination landmark or group of landmarks.  Maybe it’s all your customers & all your vendors.  Or just your headquarters & the first stops on each of your drivers’ routes.  Or in my case, my home, & the office.

Then you enter how many minutes MAXIMUM it should take to get from the originating point to the destination point.

Here is one I created on myself, for my 7 minute (typical) commute from home to the office:

From Home to work should take 7 minutes

From Home to Work should take 7 minutes

Now, whenever it takes me more than 7 minutes to get from home to work, I get an alert about it.  You can optionally send the driver an alert to their cell phone/email (blackberry, etc.) as well.

I purposely took a long way to work today to trip the alert & here is the email I received:

New GPS Insight "Late Arrival Alert" via Email

New GPS Insight "Late Arrival Alert" via Email


New "Late Arrival Alert" via SMS

New "Late Arrival Alert" via SMS

Since I have 2 devices on my vehicle, and the “Robgroup” includes them both, it “consolidated” both alerts into a single email for me.

This will be good for companies which want to know their drivers aren’t taking their time between vendors and customers, and even highly custom applications such as golf management.  If a player’s cart which is being tracked takes more than 30 minutes to get from the 1st tee to the 4th green (or fairway, etc.), you can alert the ranger to go work on speeding up the pace of play.  There are hundreds of applications for this alert, particularly if you group all your landmarks intelligently & generically apply this logic to them.

Call us to see how we can help you and your business to detect and fix inefficient driving patterns using this alert and others we offer.

Thanks,

Rob.

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May 24 2010

New “Recent Alerts” dashlet in GPS Insight

Category: Alerts,dashboard dashlets,Ease of use,New Featuresrdonat @ 11:04 pm

A couple weeks ago, a customer with ambulances asked if we could give them a dashlet which showed a list of recent landmark visits.

Presumably they wanted to know when their medical personnel arrived/left certain hospitals.

That was too “specific” to just their one particular request, so we opened the requirement up to fit more than just that one need.

I had our developers work on an “alert ticker” (we call it “Recent Alerts” on the Dashboard).

It looks like this:

GPS Insight Alerts ticker

GPS Insight Alerts ticker

Like all dashlets, you drag and drop it onto the dashboard where you want it to go.

Then you configure the settings (which vehicle group, which alert (or all alerts), how far back you want to see, and how many lines you want to see at once):

New GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashlet

New GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashlet

You will notice that for our account, we have multiple redundant alerts, and many of our devices are temporary so they go “out of range” since they aren’t installed into our vehicles permanently since we’re constantly testing on our own vehicles (e.g. they lose power when we shut the vehicle off).  This is why there are some duplicate alerts and we have a few “Out of Range” alerts, battery voltage alerts, etc.

The point though is to show you that when alerts are triggered, you can see them on the dashboard as well as receive them on your cell phone/email.

In fact, we made it so that you no longer need to send alerts to an email/SMS phone # — you can leave that blank, & they’ll only be viewable on this dashlet.

Since our “fleet” of employees tends not to idle or drive off-hours (at least not right now for me to show you), I pulled up another customer & they had a few recent problems with their drivers.  Notice that I “hid” the Alert Type column, since it’s only there until you figure out what the various colors represent, and can be “unchecked” along with “Alert Name” in the edit properties area (click on the pencil to get there):

Odd Hours & idling alerts on the GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashboard Dashlet

Odd Hours & idling alerts on the GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashboard Dashlet

If you want, you can create a dashboard full of these for all of your various alerts, and segment them into different areas:

This one I created quickly for our account:

GPS Insight Multiple Alert History Dashboard

GPS Insight Multiple Alert History Dashboard

And always remember to save your dashboard!

Save your Dashboard after creating it!

Save your Dashboard after creating it!

So now next time you log in you can recall it!

So now next time you log in you can recall it!

This is a pretty useful capability.  And it took us only 5 days to create based on this requirement — make sure to ask us in case you ever have a need you would like help with.  Usually it’s in the product, where you might not know we do what you require, and if it isn’t, we’ll typically put it on the list of new capabilities and sometimes get to it as quickly as within the week.  We’re really that quick!

To learn more about GPS Fleet Tracking Alerts visit  our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Feb 17 2010

GPS Insight sends out our Millionth Alert!

Category: Alertsrdonat @ 1:32 am
GPS Insight sends out our Millionth Alert

GPS Insight sends out our Millionth Alert

GPS Insight sent out our millionth alert on Sunday, February 14.  GPS Insight has checked just shy of one BILLION alerts, so that means that only one out of 1,000 driver events is “exceptional.”  Depending on how the alerts are defined, that could be good or bad…

Either way, we’re glad to be sending these to our customers, and ensuring they know what is happening with their fleets at all times — day or night, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour.

If you’re not using our alerts, you should be — let us do the work.  “Set it and forget it!”

Rob.

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