Oct 03 2012
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.
May 17 2012
We received a request today from a Government customer which I think is both a great idea, as well as something worth documenting in the blog.
At first glance, it’s a “simple” request:
“We want to report on driver take-home miles since that benefit is taxable to the driver.”
Here is a diagram of how “complicated” that request really is:
Personal Usage Report Complexity
Here’s why it gets so complicated quickly:
Thankfully, we have all of these capabilities built already — just not 100% integrated for the purposes of this report.
Taking seemingly unrelated aspects of a GPS Tracking product and combining them is the way to succeed — both for our customers as well as for us against other products — and a core aspect of how we approach our product and custom requests.
Taking these separately:
You can both import spreadsheets as well as organize landmarks into meaningful groups and hierarchical structures in GPS Insight:
Grouping and Import of Landmarks in GPS Insight
We recently launched user-specified, highly customizable attributes and categories. All we need to do is add support for two things — a landmark to be assigned to a vehicle or driver, etc. to specify their “home” (and to keep it highly flexible, we will generically support any GPS Insight object of any sort, such as vehicle, group, hierarchy node, etc.), as well the ability to categorize trips and stops (currently announced, just not yet officially supported).
These parts of this new report already exist in other standard report parameters, shown here in our Drive Time Summary Report and Begin/End of Day Reports, which already partially solve the problem this customer has:
Time Restriction on vehicle activity
Exclude first and last trip from payroll report based on stop time
Our Schedule creation tool for Scheduled Reports allows you to be highly custom in the dates for which a custom report is run. Plus you can always combine two separate schedules (e.g. the first Monday of every week plus every 15th and last date of the month) when scheduling a report:
Defining a custom report schedule within GPS Insight
So, the pieces are all there! There is a little bit of new development necessary, and then a fair amount of integration in order to complete this report for production usage. It is really helpful to be able to draw on prior capabilities in order to create highly custom reports which help not only this one customer’s needs, but many current and future customers’ needs.
I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this GPS tracking report, and aspects we develop for it will then become pieces of future development efforts.
Rob.
Mar 18 2012
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.
Feb 18 2011
GPS Insight has sent over 1.27 million automated reports to our customers.
We recently made them more convenient for everyone.
The “Scheduled” reports never had certain links activated such as “create landmark from this stop” or embedded maps, due to security concerns.
We just added a “Re-run Report” feature on every report which fixes this.
Now when you open your report via email, if you want to run it “live” in the system, you just click on the link shown below:
Re-Run a GPS Insight Report
This takes you straight to the report if you’re already logged in, or to an intermediate login screen if you are not:
Log in to GPS Insight to run your report automatically
Once you provide your login and password, you will be automatically shown the “live” report, which you can sort, click through links on, etc.:
Sort on the "live" version of a scheduled report
Then, if you feel like sharing this report with someone else, you can click “Email Report” and share it with them:
Email a report to a colleague
Note that I changed the email address to mine in order to actually receive the report. Also note that once you click “Email Now” we conveniently give you a link to that email address for you to send an additional explanatory email if necessary:
email address to click on to send additional information
And here is the emailed version of the report, which also contains the .xls, .csv, and .html versions for you to click through to if the “in line” html version isn’t enough (or if your email client doesn’t like to display html properly).
Emailed Report from GPS Insight
We’re always looking for good ways to make our product more useful, & it was a customer’s comment about how scheduled reports were great, but also limiting since they didn’t have the “live” feel — this is the only way to get the best of all 3 worlds — convenient (emailed nightly/weekly), powerful (live and clickable), and secure (requiring a valid login/password).
Enjoy!
Rob.
Sep 05 2010
We added a new report called the “Fleet Utilization Report” last week.
This allows you to view the following for up to a month for your fleet:
Now you can easily see in seconds (or less than a second, realistically):
Here is how you run it under Reports->Activity->Fleet Use:
Running the new Fleet Utilization Report
Here is what the summary looks like (without the “daily” option checked):
GPS Insight Fleet Utilization Report
If you want to see a “matrix” of vehicle utilization by day, you can click the “daily” box, and see 4 distinct matrices — one for each of the 4 categories of utilization, and columns for each day chosen:
GPS Insight Fleet Utilization Report (daily option)
It is important to note that we have run this report for fleets of 1000 vehicles for an entire month, in less than 30 seconds.
Most competitors’ reports time out and fail when you try to run this much data at once. This is around 2.5 million miles worth of data for 1000 trucks for a month, in around 25 seconds, which amounts to 100,000 miles per second which we can process for you and your company.
And this report is just one of the 35 or so we offer.
Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
