GPS Insight Blog » gps vehicle tracking

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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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 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 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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Feb 05 2011

New Garmin Canned Messages interface

Category: Company Efficiency,Garmin Integration,Garmin Messaging,GPS Navigation,New Features,New Garmin Features,Safety — rdonat @ 4:38 pm

We have recently given customers the ability to store “canned messages” on their drivers’ Garmin in the vehicle.

This allows them to choose from a list of commonly sent messages, rather than have to type each one out on the mini-keyboard on each Garmin.

Here’s how you do it:

Open the Garmin page:

Open the Garmin interface

Choose the Canned Messages tab and then create new messages, assign them to message groups, and assign those message groups to vehicles:

GPS Insight Garmin Canned Messages Interface

Create a message:

Create a Canned Message

Assign it to a group of messages:

Assign Garmin canned messages to groups

Then assign them to vehicles:

Assign message groups to vehicles

Then press “Sync Now” and your messages will be “pushed” to the appropriate vehicle’s Garmin.

To send one from your Garmin to dispatch, follow these steps:

Push Dispatch

Push Messages

Push "Quick Message"

Then up comes a list of “your” quick (canned) messages. Scroll through to select the one you want:

Choose a Canned Message

The Garmin will then prompt you if you want to send OR EDIT the canned message, so you can make small changes, such as add an amount, change a time, etc.

This definitely beats using the small on-screen keyboard to send free-form/ad-hoc messages:

Edit a canned message

Keyboard interface for editing a canned message

And here’s the message, in “red” to indicate it’s new and un-read. Once you click on it, it turns back to white:

Canned Message in the Garmin dashlet

This will help our customers enable their drivers to communicate more effectively, and help avoid the potential for distracted texting on their Garmin.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet management software, gps fleet tracking, gps garmin integration, gps insight garmin tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps vehicle tracking

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Feb 05 2011

New comparison graph capabilities

Category: Graphs,New Features,New Features — rdonat @ 3:45 pm

We have been adding several useful graphs and this is the newest one you can put on your dashboard.

It shows the difference between 2 groups of vehicles in terms of mileage, idle hours, and speeding activity.

New GPS Insight Comparison Graph

Here’s how you can change it to be scaled on a per-vehicle basis rather than a group total basis:

Show graphs based on per-vehicle data, not the group total

And if you un-check certain vehicles, it changes the graph’s numbers accordingly:

Uncheck certain vehicles to exclude them from the graph

And last, you can change the groups in question just by changing them in the pull-down menu in the vehicle selector or in the “Reference Group” area:

Change the groups in each graph easily by selecting from a list

We’ll be adding more graph types soon as well, and an option to show any number of vehicle groups side-by-side also.

Rob.

Tags: comparison graph, fleet management software, fleet tracking devices, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, graphs, vehicle tracking software

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Feb 01 2011

New Garmin “tally” function — let us count your drivers’ activities for you using Garmin (or SMS)!

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Garmin Integration,Garmin Messaging,Graphs,New Features,New Garmin Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 9:51 pm

We have had a few customers ask for the ability to report on their drivers’ activities throughout the day.

One needed to count the number of passengers picked up.

One needed to count the number of mobile blood draws and mobile x-rays performed.

So we advised them to enter these numbers into the Garmin in their vehicle.

By doing so, with a space between the various numbers, we now allow them to report on the number of “activities” throughout the day/week/month.

They simply enter the # on their Garmin, and it shows up like this in a report

Reporting how many "things" a driver does throughout the month

This report shows the number of “draws” and “Xrays” performed, as input by the driver into the Garmin.

If you wanted to show it by day (then export into Excel, for instance) you would check the “Daily” box shown in this report below:

Reporting how many "things" a driver does daily for a week

This then breaks it out by day (and you can run up to 31 days currently):

Reporting how many "things" a driver does daily for a week

If you want to see exactly when the driver performed this, you can simply run a stop-notes report as shown below:

Running a Stop-Notes Report

This shows each stop’s detail, along with the entry by the driver stating how many of a “thing” he or she did:

Stop Notes detail on how many actions performed by a driver (via Garmin Entry)

Generically, we simply call these “Tally 1″, “Tally 2″, and “Tally 3″ — but if you want to let us know what your numbers mean (and in which order), then we will label them for your account so they show up more meaningfully in reports for you.

Then you can run your own simple analysis on this data within Excel, create graphs, etc:

Graph showing number of blood draws and X Rays performed over time

As always, we’re open for new ideas, and happy, willing, and QUICK to put these features into GPS Insight for your and other customers’ use.

Enjoy!

Rob.

Tags: fleet management software, fleet tracking devices, garmin input, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, stop notes, tally, vehicle tracking software

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