GPS Insight Blog » GPS Tracking

Mar 01 2013

Exclude sensitive speed data in certain reports

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Custom Reports,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 2:21 pm

A customer recently requested that we not include “Max Speed” in a summary report for them, where the recipient only wanted to see utilization, mileage, and idling information (etc.).

We added this account/user level permission here under user options:

Exclude Max Speed from summary reports

When running a typical Summary Report:

Running a Summary Report with/without Max Speed

With the Max Speed included:

Max Speed Included

And removing it by checking the “Suppress Max Speed” box, the entire column disappears from this and other reports (as well as scheduled versions of this and other reports):

Max Speed Column is removed

Thankfully, customer requests such as this are easy for GPS Insight to accommodate given our flexible architecture. We’re always happy to implement customer requirements as options which benefit our overall customer-base.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: drive time, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, remove max speed, Vehicle Tracking

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Jan 28 2013

New landmark alert feature lets you notify your customers a delivery is coming

Category: Alerts,Landmarks,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 8:35 pm

We have a potential customer who wanted to set up landmark alerts in advance for certain days to notify certain customers their delivery was almost there.

The problem was they had several different customers who all use the same corridor which served as the landmark for the alert.

The only way to solve this problem was to allow for landmark alerts to be scheduled for ONLY certain days in advance.

Here’s what the screen looks like for setting up a landmark alert, with an option to choose a starting and ending date range:

New Date Range functionality for Landmark Alerts

Now they can create one landmark alert per customer and activate it for just the day scheduled shipments are on their way.

And their customers are notified in advance so they can be ready to receive the shipment, without needing anyone to monitor the truck’s whereabouts, or expect the driver to know who to call in advance.

Rob.

Tags: customer requests, date range, delivery alert, delivery notification, GPS Tracking, landmark alert, landmark alerts

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Nov 26 2012

New jobsite mileage GPS tracking report saves customer 4 hours a month

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Extreme Return on Investment,New Features,New Features,Reports — rdonat @ 9:57 am

We have a new customer with a few hundred vehicles. But they have 4 delivery vehicles whose miles need to be internally billed to each of their various job sites for accounting purposes. It takes one of their employees about 4 hours each month to get this data out of the current stop detail report we provide.

They asked us if we would build them a custom GPS tracking report to help.

Here’s a depiction of how they assign mileage to job sites:

Delivery workflow & mileage calculation

All mileage from the warehouse or another job site needs to be allocated to the NEXT job site reached, to include miles spent going to non-job sites (such as McDonald’s, above).

The mileage spent heading BACK to the warehouse needs to be assigned to the most recent job site serviced.

Rather than go through a stop/detail report, line by line, for hundreds or thousands of trips for a month, we created this consolidated GPS tracking report, called the “Delivery Vehicle Mileage” report:

New Custom Delivery Mileage GPS Tracking Report

Here is the output with client specific information blurred out:

Easy totals for mileage to job sites

Note the red arrows illustrate mileage TO the job site, and a couple blue arrows show mileage FROM the job site deadheading back to the yard.

Any group of vehicles as well as starting/reset landmarks such as a warehouse and job site landmarks may be chosen and it can be run for 31 days at a time (and we can always increase that restriction if the number of vehicles/landmarks are reasonable and you need quarterly reports instead).

And the best part: Instead of it taking this customer 4 hours a month to tabulate through a mind-numbing stop detail report, they can now run it in about 2 seconds with this report we built for them (and any customers who may require it in the future):

2 seconds to do 4 hours work

As always, we appreciate customer requests, and accommodate them better than any other GPS Tracking provider out there. Keep them coming — when we help our customers, we help the product as well!

Rob.

Tags: billed jobs, custom gps tracking report, custom reports, customer requests, delivery mileage report, delivery vehicle mileage, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, gps mileage report, GPS Tracking, gps tracking provider, gps tracking report, gps vehicle tracking, mileage report, stop detail report, stop report, tracking mileage, tracking truck mileage, tracking vehicle mileage, vehicle mileage report, vehicle stop report, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 17 2012

Add Custom Fields to your GPS Tracking Reports (plus bonus columns)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Custom Categories and Attributes,Custom Reports,Extreme Return on Investment,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 10:16 pm

We give customers the ability to create and populate their own custom attributes and categories for vehicles and other GPS Insight objects. Now you can add them to your GPS tracking reports!

First you have to create and assign attributes and values to vehicles like this:

Assign "Compressor Type" to your vehicles

(this is just a test but you get the idea!)

Then you can add that and other custom attributes to your report definition:

Add Custom Attributes

Just choose each attribute you want, in the order in which you want them to appear in the report. If you decide to remove one, just check the “remove X” next to it.

Note there is a new extra “bonus” option of “show current location” which allows you to add the vehicle’s CURRENT location to most reports where it was typically left off (e.g. monthly utilization reports like this one). It is highlighted above, and I check it before running this report, but it’s off by default, as shown.

Now your GPS tracking report will contain YOUR custom data, as shown below:

Custom Attributes in GPS Tracking Reports

Note that you can now see Compressor Type, Bed_length, and Order Number (all just for illustration purposes) on the report as well as on the maps in the custom tab (below):

Custom Attributes and Categories in GPS Insight maps

We also support this in our 3D Google Earth-based maps (with a scrollable window so that you can fit everything in a single “bubble”):

Custom Attributes and Categories in GPS Insight maps

We need to complete the addition of these to our scheduled reports mechanism, but that will be available soon.

Eventually we will allow you to also SORT, FILTER, and GROUP BY by these custom attributes, but for now, much of that is possible just by utilizing the Excel/CSV export of the report.

Please get with our Support staff if you need any training or further information on these powerful GPS tracking capabilities.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: attributes and categories, custom attributes, custom categories, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking capabilities, gps tracking report, gps tracking reports, report categories

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Oct 03 2012

Show drivers in vehicle list – feature request completed within days

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Driver to Vehicle Mapping,Ease of use,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,User Preferences — rdonat @ 4:22 pm

We had a couple customers ask to view driver names as well as vehicle names in vehicle-centric report choosers.

Thanks to our speedy development team, this got completed quickly as it was simple to make a few changes to our adaptable framework.

Here is how to choose that, and what it looks like now:

New Driver-centric report pull-down list

Thanks to our customers for the good ideas and our developers for making them reality!

Rob.

Tags: custom requests, driver-centric report drop-down list, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, Reports

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Sep 27 2012

New USER ACTIVITY report lets you report on your users’ usage

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Administration,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 7:49 am

By the way, this is our 300th blog post! I’ve gotten very fast typing since starting the GPS Insight blog years ago.

We have had several customers ask about reporting on THEIR USERS (not drivers, users).

They want to see who is running reports, logging in to look at vehicles, and receiving scheduled reports and alerts.

We now have this functionality available here:

New GPS Insight User Activity Report

Bear in mind you can choose a range of dates the same way you always do within GPS Insight, by choosing a shortcut for Today, Yesterday, Week to date, last 7 days, Month to date, last 30 days, etc., or just choose the start/end date to choose a custom range.

Here is the output for our account for yesterday:

New GPS Insight User Activity GPS Tracking Report

Note this is only available for administrative users currently.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS System, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps tracking system, user activity report

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Sep 11 2012

New Time Format Preference (17:00 vs. 5:00 PM)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Alerts,Custom Reports,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports,Scheduled Reports,User Preferences — rdonat @ 5:42 pm

We’ve been asked to add this capability for a long time, and finally went through the entire product and added the ability for customers to choose which time format they prefer — 12 or 24 hour (military). We used to ONLY allow military time across the entire site.

Just open up user preferences, and choose your time format preference:

Change your Time Format user preference

And all Reports, Administration, Alerts, Maps, etc. will show the proper time format moving forward:

GPS Insight Activity Alert with AM/PM time

AM/PM Time in Administration Screens

And here are side-by-side alerts (different alerts), one with an account which chooses military time (the default) and one with 12 hour format AM/PM time:

2 different time formats in GPS Insight

This is probably the longest-standing customer request we had, and we finally took the time to make all the customers who wanted this feature happy.

Sorry it took so long, but now you can have your time format your way!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, time format, user preferences, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking systems

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Sep 04 2012

When idling really hits home

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Fuel Savings,GPS Insight Employees,reduced idling — rdonat @ 1:52 pm

As someone who works daily in the GPS Fleet Tracking space, I’m all-too aware of how much fuel is wasted by vehicles regularly by idling. Plus I’m very sensitive to it when walking around in the Phoenix area where I live. Just like that kid in Sixth Sense saw dead people, I see idling people. And GPS tracking generally helps them all.

I saw a TRULY DRAMATIC example of how much fuel is wasted while I was idling the other day — when trying to return a rental with a full tank after only having driven it for about 25 miles (from the airport to our office in Orange, with a side trip to the mall & back for lunch).

I used Google Earth to get a feel for how many miles it takes to move the needle on a full tank of gas on a rental car:

Computing mileage to & from the airport

I was coming to the airport, & needed to fill up the tank to return the car. But I could NOT find a gas station. I was running late so I just brought the vehicle back, knowing it would cost me $9.65 per gallon if I didn’t fill it if and the fuel gauge fell below F, where it had been all day.

Fuel gauge moves when idling

When I pulled into the garage it was still on “F” — I parked and left the vehicle running since I know they need to view the odometer & fuel before cashing me out for my receipt.

I literally sat there and watched for about 2 minutes while the needle dropped from F to 7/8th of a tank! Right in front of my eyes. Arggggg!

Of course, I realize that the needle isn’t 100% accurate, but idling for that 2 minutes was all that needle needed to drop back down to where it belonged — definitely not F after 25 miles in an SUV.

It was a Chevy Tahoe with a 26 gallon tank. At $9.65 per gallon “refill” rate at the rental company, those 2 minutes idling was going to cost me over $30!

Luckily my attendant didn’t pay close enough attention and I got away without getting gouged for those 3 gallons of fuel.

Either way, it was a truly poignant way of visualizing the wasted fuel associated with idling.

Here is a graph I made of the # of gallons a fleet of close to 1000 vehicles wastes idling in a month, which considers the LENGTH of the idling:

Fuel wasted idling with idle stops of minimum durations

Essentially, if this client could cut all idling to 15 minutes or less, they could save over $15,000 per month. If they could cut out all idling > 5 minutes, the savings are nearly $28,000. (this is based on an average of $4 per gallon, as half their vehicles are diesel, and half are gasoline).

Interestingly, the WORST offenders of idling, in the 60+ minute category, account for less than $2,000 per month — it’s everyone idling 5 minutes (vs. 1) which really comprises the majority of the wasted fuel which can actually be cut out.

Not every fleet and vehicle function can eliminate idling. PTO sensors help us to distinguish between “true idle” and “working idle” times. But this is food for thought. And a really simple way to pay back almost all of your GPS Tracking expense, if you can enact programs which meaningfully curb idling.

Here are some other articles about idling and how we help customers to reduce or eliminate it.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: fleet management, Fleet Tracking, fuel savings, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, idling, rental car, Vehicle Tracking

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Aug 06 2012

Choose which reports your users can run with new “Menu Permissions”

Category: Ease of use,Fleet Tracking,GPS Fleet Tracking,GPS Tracking,New Features,New Features,Reporting,User Preferences — rdonat @ 8:42 pm

We have quite a few reports available now, and some of our customers don’t want to make them all available to all end-users.

Now you can choose which reports do & don’t show up for each user, at the user level.

You can launch this capability here:

New GPS Insight Report Permissions

This brings up a list of reports across the top and a list of users vertically, where you can choose which reports are available to each user by checking/unchecking each box appropriately — for instance we will take away all but the Activity Detail, the Diagnostic Reports, and a Custom report called “Loaner Vehicles” for the user ar-ant.

Restrict Reports for certain employees

Notice the usability enhancements where we allow you to tab/space vertically OR horizontally to easily use the keyboard to make several changes quickly (space changes the selection of a checkbox and tab/alt-tab push you to the next/previous checkbox based on whether or not you have the “Tab Vertically” option chosen. Also, when you make a change, a green “checkbox” is shown, and gradually it turns dim so that you can see which changes you made most recently, or since you opened up the page.

Now when we log in as that user, we ONLY see the reports which have been granted to us:

Restricted Report options

We wanted this functionality out there sooner rather than later for a particular customer, so as I document it, I see we’re missing a few “must haves” — specifically the ability to rapidly “toggle all” for a user, a report, or a group of reports, to make it less time consuming for large customers. Additionally we need a “default reports” setting where the admin user can set what permissions a new user will receive without having to go in and change them. Last, we will EVENTUALLY need to support user “roles” (e.g. maintenance, management, dispatch) so we can either “apply” those roles’ permissions easily to members of those roles or assign users to those roles to augment their permissions. This will be a while though, as we have roughly 10,000 users so far and we’ve only heard that request a few times (plus it will be a lot of work, but eventually necessary).

The first 2 will be there in the next day/week, and next we will allow the same type of user-granular permissions for dashboard dashlets, map options, and alerts over the next few weeks. Happy restricting!

Rob.

Tags: fleet management, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, report permissions, truck tracking, user permissions, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 03 2012

Unsafe Golf Cart Usage by Rob (with alert follow-up)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Alerts,Arizona,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,GPS Fleet Tracking,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Reports,Safety — rdonat @ 5:59 pm

We have a golf cart and our house is near a really steep hill.

Doing 16 MPH up to the top of the hill in my golf cart

The golf cart is limited to 25 MPH, even downhill (it engine-brakes to keep you from going too fast).

Unless you turn the ignition off…

Then you can zoom down as long as you have guts before stomping on the brake or turning the car back on:

racing to the bottom of a hill in my golfcart

But when you turn the ignition off, you lose your speedometer, so you don’t know how fast you’re going.

I was curious how fast I could get it to go down the hill, & realized I could just look it up in GPS Insight:

Running an Activity Detail Report for my golfcart

And I can easily see the max speed of 45:

Going 45 MPH in a golf cart meant for 25

The reason the device keeps reporting even though the ignition is off is because I wanted an easy install & just wired it straight to the battery and programmed it to only report when the vehicle is moving.

This helps me to see that my golf cart hit 45 MPH max on the way down the hill. And notice that it interprets 5 minutes of non-movement in my garage as “Off” and stops reporting.

And the next step? Create an alert to let me know any time this is happening so that if my kids try it, they’re in huge trouble:

Alert to let me know any time the golf cart goes > 30 MPH

Any time “Rob Gemcar” goes > 30 MPH (only possible down a hill with the ignition turned off — otherwise it hits 28 or so absolute max), WITHIN our subdivision called Forest Highlands, I will get an SMS text message instantly, as well as an email, alerting me to this fact (along with a map of the location in the email). I included it in our subdivision so that if it’s ever put on a flatbed for transportation to the dealer or something, it won’t alert as it’s going > 30 MPH on surface streets outside our community (it’s not licensed for streets > 35 MPH).

By the way, we’ve worked with companies in the past to prove that their vehicles were going DOWNHILL when they exceeded the supposed maximum set by them in their rig — they did it by putting the truck in neutral and coasting to more than the max allowable speed. That’s where I got the idea to check GPS Insight to see how fast the vehicle was actually going (it felt more like 50!). I promise, it wasn’t that unsafe though… I value my life.

Don’t try this at home!

Rob.

[Update: I was late for dinner last night & at a friend's house, & in a hurry, so I performed the "go fast downhill" trick and predictably, got an alert emailed and via text to my phone -- here they are:]

GPS Insight alert email for speeding down the hill

And here’s the text I got:

GPS Insight SMS alert for speeding down the hill

Note that the actual reporting time of the point as 6:47:32 PM, and it was sent at 6:48:30 PM, which is why the alert appears to be 2 minutes later [it was only 58 seconds, which is typical]. We round “down” and the email/sms round “up” with dates:

Raw GPS Data for golf cart speeding event

Running an alert report shows it was sent at 18:48:30:

Running an alert report

Alert sent at 18:40:30

Just a good example of how much information we have available to support the alerts we send.

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, golf cart tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, gps vehicle tracking, speeding, unsafe driving, vehicle tracking system

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