GPS Insight Blog » gps tracking software

Dec 05 2011

Landmark import now 40x faster in GPS Insight

Category: Landmarks — rdonat @ 2:21 pm

GPS Insight has always emphasized landmarks as a core capability of our GPS Tracking solution.

Landmarks are helpful because they make reports and real time location much more intuitive.

It’s easier for users to understand “Home Depot SW Phoenix” than it is “12525 W. Glendale Ave., Phoenix, AZ.”

But getting all your landmarks into the system used to take a lot of time (well, 5-10 minutes or so for a few thousand landmarks).

We spent some time optimizing this process so that large customers (or small customers with lots of landmarks) don’t need to wait so long.

We have made landmark spreadsheet import roughly 40x faster.

Now instead of 4 landmarks per second, you can expect over 175 per second (peaking to 200+).

Here are the results from today vs. 5 days ago (from our activity log):

Landmark Import in GPS Insight

If you need information on how to upload spreadsheets of landmarks, always feel free to call our support, or try it yourself here (it’s very intuitive):

Import landmark spreadsheet into GPS Insight

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: faster landmark uploads, Fleet Tracking, geofencing, google 3d earth landmarks, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps tracking solution, gps vehicle tracking system, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 02 2011

Send driver alerts in THEIR time zone now

Category: Alerts,Driver Assignment to Vehicles,Driver to Vehicle Mapping,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 7:54 am

Since alerts are sent in the USER’s time zone, and can be “copied” to the driver him or herself, there is sometimes a time zone conflict with the alert.

We have enhanced GPS Insight to ensure that alerts are sent to the driver in the time zone they are associated with in the system.

Here is a typical alert which has been set to send straight to the driver when they idle for more than 15 minutes:

Copy a driver with a generated alert

Here is the driver admin screen, where you can set the time zone:

Set a driver's time zone

And when the alerts come in, they will adjust depending on which time zone the driver or user (depending on who is receiving it) prefers:

Time zone adjusted alerts

Bear in mind that our choices ALSO compensate for daylight savings time (DST) which is why Arizona and Indiana are choices, as they do not celebrate DST.

This will help to ensure that when drivers receive data, it isn’t an hour or two “off” from the time they actually were idling/speeding/entering landmarks/etc.

Learn more about our fleet tracking alerts.

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, idle alerts, time zone adjustments, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 02 2011

Determine how much fuel and C02 idling is actually costing you and the environment

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Fuel Savings,New Features,New Features,reduced idling,Reports — rdonat @ 7:23 am

We have a customer that really needed to precisely measure how much fuel and CO2 emissions their idling was costing them.

Not all vehicles are created equal, so at the individual vehicle level, we made the fuel type and estimated number of gallons consumed per hour idling something our customers can set.

Here’s how you get there:

Open Vehicle Administration

There is a new option in vehicle admin called “Update fuel and emissions info”:

Update fuel and emissions info

We have a “liters engine size to gallons idled per hour” converter which allows you to plug in your engine size and determine a fairly accurate number of gallons idled away per hour:

compute and override the # of gallons per hour spent idling

Here I am editing a SALES vehicle driven by KEVINJS:

update fuel type and gallons per hour idling

Once you have overridden any defaults necessary (we default to unleaded and .4 gallons per hour spent idling), then you can run your report:

Run an idle report with fuel usage/CO2 emissions

I ran it for the September for the Albuquerque group (ALB) which contains the newly changed 5.0 liter F-150 which burns .55 gallons per hour of diesel:

How much fuel / emissions is idling costing me?

In this case, KEVINJS had roughly 7 hours and 3.863 gallons of idling, which we compute (based on the properties of the different types of fuels) to equate to .034 tons of emissions.

Together, the ALB group idled 512 hours, costing 209.6 gallons of fuel and 1.846 tons of CO2.

Now by using GPS Alerts, you can notify your drivers that they’re idling and ask them to shut down the vehicle with a text message or email (and since they’re idling and not actually driving, there are no distracted driving issues).

Then later on, you can easily determine your fuel and CO2 savings by running this or other idling reports available within GPS Insight.

Enjoy!

Rob

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

Tags: CO2 emissions, Fleet Tracking, fuel spent idling, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, idling, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 29 2011

New Timestamps in Garmin Dispatch/Messaging Module

Category: Driver Accountability,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,New Garmin Features — rdonat @ 11:44 am

With our new timestamp functionality you can now check the time a Garmin Message or Dispatch Item (stop) was:

Sent by Dispatch or GPS Insight automatically or via text
Delivered to the Garmin
Viewed by the Driver
Accepted by the Driver
Marked as complete by the driver

Here’s how:

The other day I Dispatched myself by texting “gps rob dis robhouse” which is short for “gps [rob 4000] [dispatch] [landmark named robhouse].”

Here are the timestamps of each of the status changes (available under the “Custom->Garmin” menu):

View Garmin Dispatch Status Change Timestamps in GPS Insight

Note all I need to do is “hover over” the “Done” status at the end of the Message field, and the date-stamped statuses are visible.

After dispatching myself at 4:09, it instantly appeared as a stop on my Garmin.

I saw it, but then drove a bit so it would have a different timestamp when it became “active”, at 4:10, as I was about to turn North onto Scottsdale Road. Note the change to “Active” at 4:10. Here is where everything happened, after running a 3D history like this:

Run a 3D Map History for a day for my vehicle

Leaving Work, accepting a stop to go home

It took me until 16:18, and 5.8 miles to get home, where I was prompted by the Garmin to mark that stop as “complete” (we shorten it to “Done”):

Getting home and marking the stop as "complete"

Even if I didn’t mark the stop as complete, we still have the timestamp of when I reach that landmark available in the landmark report, and will eventually incorporate all of this information into a single “dispatch report” which allows our customers to get a single-stop summary of all their Garmin dispatch activity.

Here’s how to run that landmark report:

Running a GPS Insight Landmark Report

Note that our “1 day” landmark report extends backward and forward automatically to show you how long the vehicle was there prior to LEAVING (if it started the day in that landmark) and how long it stayed there through the end of the stop, if it was parked there at the end of the day. These are the kind of “nice to have” features our customers (and we) insist on, so we provide it.

You can easily tell I left (late for the day, really…), then forgot something, came back, then left, and eventually came back, precisely at the same 4:18 PM time I marked the stop complete via the Garmin interface:

Times in and out of my house, matching the Garmin "Done" timestamp

At least I left early the next day to make up for it — 6:22 AM.

This new capability is very helpful for proving service to a customer, determining how quickly your drivers react to dispatch items, and other investigations about your drivers’ daily activity.

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, garmin dispatch, Garmin Timestamps, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 19 2011

GPS Insight helps a customer during a carjacking

Category: Extreme Return on Investment,Safety — rdonat @ 6:26 pm

We received this fax yesterday:

GPS Insight helps police arrest 2 carjackers

Our customer’s son was carjacked at gunpoint. The vehicle was quickly recovered and 2 suspects (and their firearm) were taken into custody.

The Press got it wrong — it was the customer’s cellphone which helped her track the vehicle and lead police to it. She was using our iPhone app to track the vehicle every 2 minutes. The GPS Insight device was inside the vehicle. Had it been a cellphone, they probably would have thrown it out the window.

So 2 bad guys should be going to jail for a long time.

We love these stories, and usually get one or two every month.

GPS Insight: $32.95 a month. Not losing your car, and putting the 2 guys who put a gun to your kid’s head in jail: Priceless.

Rob.

Tags: carjacking, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking device, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, theft recovery, vehicle recovery, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 19 2011

GPS Insight customer satisfaction survey

Category: GPS INSIGHT COMPANY SPECIFIC,GPS Insight Employees,PURCHASING CONSIDERATIONS — rdonat @ 11:17 am

We recently hired a dedicated representative to proactively contact all our customers regularly.

She will:

Determine customer satisfaction
Take note of (free) training requests
Inform customers of new functionality
Review the account for where there is potential for more usage/ROI
Be the customer’s dedicated resource for things non-support-oriented

Her name is Shelly, and she’s at extension x8060 (877-477-4321 is our toll free #).

I was pleased with the initial results of our customer satisfaction:

Initial GPS Insight customer satisfaction survey results

Of 59 customers surveyed, 39% were Extremely Satisfied, 54% were Satisfied, and only 5% were Dissatisfied.

One customer stated they want to cancel their service. When asked why, they stated that it was too expensive.

This particular customer has been threatening to quit unless we reduce their price since they became a customer in June of 2006.

Over 5 years later, we haven’t reduced (or raised) their price, and they’re still a customer.

In any case, over 93% of our customers asked are satisfied or extremely satisfied.

Maybe we should count that customer as satisfied, since they have remained a customer over 5 years.

That makes us 95%, which I think you’ll find is as good as it gets in this industry.

Even so, we now have someone to ask those 5% of customers why they aren’t satisfied, and I hope we can get that up to 100% by following up and fixing their complaints.

Rob.

Tags: customer satisfaction, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 18 2011

GPS Insight makes the Inc. 500/5000 again!

Category: PURCHASING CONSIDERATIONS — rdonat @ 4:34 pm

GPS Insight is happy to hear that we’ll be making the Inc. Magazine Inc. 500/5000 list again this year.

Last year, we made the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing privately held companies in the U.S. at #281.

This year I’ll be happy to make the Inc. 5000 list at a position around 1000-1500, since it’s based on growth, not income, and our 3 year growth was down from 1,076% last year to roughly 200% 3 year growth this year. As even Google found out, you can only keep crazy huge growth up for so long before it begins to taper off.

GPS Insight makes the Inc. list again

Thanks to all our customers, employees, vendors, partners, and families for their help making GPS Insight the success it has become.

Rob.

[P.S., don't tell the folks at Inc. Magazine that we let this out before they told us we could...]

Tags: Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, gps insight inc 500 2010, gps insight inc 500 2011, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, inc 500, inc. 5000, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 17 2011

GPS Insight saves my wife & daughter from 3 hours stranded in traffic

Category: Arizona,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Safety — rdonat @ 6:21 pm

As my wife was driving back home after dropping my boys off for a week at sleep-away camp, she hit the worst traffic you can hit. Cars were stopped dead on a divided mountain road, and people were getting out of their cars since no one was going anywhere.

She called me up to check traffic online through GPS Insight (since she has a device on her car (named “nav2″).

I got “directions” from our directions dashlet, then turned on Traffic :

Directions from my wife's car to mine

I was able to instantly pull up the fact that there was an accident 3 miles ahead of her which had the road completely closed, and it was estimated to be closed another 3 hours.

Pulling up crash data from Google Traffic within GPS Insight's directions functionality

Then I pulled up her location and recent 30 minutes of history within our 3D mapping (Google Earth):

Pull up Nav2's current status and recent history

She said people were turning around and driving on the shoulder of the road BACKWARDS to get to the nearest off-ramp. I told her it was .5 miles.

My wife, .5 miles from the nearest offramp

She called me back and told me everyone was going the wrong way down the on-ramp to get over to the other side of the highway.

Within 3 minutes she had escaped a really bad traffic-jam, before it got jammed up too much behind her.

Then she needed alternate directions which I was able to get her instantly, as well as watch her progress on a route only about 20 miles out of the way.

Which sure beats waiting in traffic for 3 hours.

And a quick right-click “directions from/directions to” in Google Earth tells me she’ll be home in 39 minutes.

Directions/ETA and recent history

So I can fire up the grill and have dinner ready when they get home. As I was typing this, she texted me the same thing:

Better go make dinner

Now I really better make dinner.

Rob.

Tags: accidents, GPS Tracking, gps tracking device, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, re-route employees, traffic, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking device

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Jun 30 2011

You can attach pictures to stops now in GPS Insight

Category: cell phone capabilities,GPS Insight Employees,Mapping,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 8:09 am

Using your smart phone, you can now attach a picture from the field to any stop’s detail.

Here’s how it works:

Take a picture that you want associated with your stop (or someone else’s stop, if you’re a supervisor in the field) — this can even be a screen shot from a dispatch system, etc.

Send that picture to our GPS Insight notes email address [you generate this in the system here under User Management:]

Add an inbound email address for GPS Insight queries/notes

You want to use our “gps [vehicle] note here is my note detail” format to annotate the note and minimally let us know which vehicle the picture should be associated with.

send a picture to GPS Insight to attach to a vehicle's activity

Once we receive the photo and note, it becomes available on our mapping and on the stop notes report:

Picture under the "notes" tab of the vehicle detail in mapping

When you “hover over” the note, the picture pops up to give you more information — this could be a picture proving service, showing a problem which justifies further time/billing, or just a reference photo to remind you later on about your customer.

Field pictures show up in Stop Notes Report

Adding pictures from the field into our mapping and reports will help better document (and verify) working conditions as well as pick-ups/drop-offs from stop to stop.

Close up of added Photo

Give us a call if you have any questions regarding this functionality. There is a “wizard” which is launched when you choose the option at the top from the Admin->User tab. It asks you to choose a user and a vehicle group, then provides you the email to use (and store in your phone for easy access in the future). For your convenience, you can click on that email to send to it, cc’ing yourself or your drivers so that they can just save it as a contact for future use.

Then all they need to do is email photos to that address in order to have them associated with their GPS tracking records for the day, available in both mapping and reports.

This is included in basic GPS Insight functionality, and available for all users at this time.

Enjoy!

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps truck tracking, gps vehicle tracking, photos, stop notes, truck tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Jun 27 2011

2 new alerts (DTC’s and Maintenance due)

Category: Alerts,maintenance,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 3:47 pm

We have added 2 new alerts, bringing the total we provide to 12!

2 new GPS Insight Alerts

The DTC alert will send you an email (or SMS text) when your vehicle experiences a diagnostic alert (diagnostics devices only).

The Maintenance alert will send emails (or SMS text) whenever you are X miles/hours/days within a mileage/hours/calendar-based maintenance alert for a vehicle’s scheduled maintenance (within GPS Insight’s maintenance module).

You set it like this, and can override the number of miles/hours/days:

GPS Insight Maintenance Alert

When you receive the alert, it looks like this:

GPS Insight Maintenance Alert email

As with all our alerts, you can specify “push” as the recipient address (or one of them) and we will “push” that data to your system for you to work with it programmatically. This requires your developers to expose a web service and provide us the details, and then all your alerts can be automatically populated in your systems (ERP, dispatch, maintenance, etc.).

If you’re not using our alerts, you’re missing a key benefit of GPS Insight. They’re available to all customers.

Enjoy!

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: DTC Alert, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, Maintenance Alert, new alerts, New Features, Vehicle Tracking

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