Planet GeoSpatial

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:

• Miles
• Hours driven
• Trips
• Days of use

Now you can easily see in seconds (or less than a second, realistically):

• Which vehicles are being over-used
• Which vehicles are being under-used
• How many miles/Trips/Hours/Days of use per month

Here is how you run it under Reports->Activity->Fleet Use:

Here is what the summary looks like (without the “daily” option checked):

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:

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.

GPS Insight includes the ability to group vehicles and assign shapes to them, and also color-codes them based on what their activity is.

Now that works on most mobile mapping platforms – but NOT on the iPhone, which isn’t up to date yet

Additionally, we reduced the length of the URL you need to type (once) to get to your vehicles on GPS Insight on your smart phone.

Here are some screenshots:

Here is a list of your vehicles — scroll and choose one to drill down to see it on the map:

Viewing many vehicles, most stopped > 1 hour (red) at GPS Insight headquarters.  No idea what Google thinks “House Hangout” is.

Note that now we show the direction of travel on the phone as well with an arrow:

Clicking through gives more information:

If you are a GPS Insight user, here is how you access the administration area to create your unique URL which you can then use to see current locations of your vehicles on your phone running Google Mobile Maps (most phones):

Enjoy!

Rob.

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We have recently added a really good new Idle Detail Report & Map.

Scrutinizing idle times and improving driver behavior as a result saves our customers a lot of money.  Knowing this we added this functionality to allow individual vehicles’ idle times to be examined more closely.  Improvements have also been made to the Idle Time Report (to include the ability to “drill down” from the summary to the detail for a particular vehicle/driver).

The Idle Detail Report can be run on an individual vehicle or a group of vehicles.  It will display individual idle events for each selected vehicle, along with the driver, address, and greenhouse gas emissions information for that event.  (The odometer values are also shown in the exportable spreadsheet version.)  Most of the columns are sortable – note the blue column headers shown below.

The Idle Time Report now allows more columns to be sorted too, including the % Idle column.  Clicking on individual vehicle labels will open an Idle Detail Report for the vehicle, with the same parameters that were previously selected.  Here is a sample detail report (note that one vehicle idled over 9 HOURS!):

After pressing the button for “Google Earth” all idle stops in the report are shown on a map (this one is 30 minutes or more):

Zooming down on another mapped idle stop shows the vehicle in a school parking lot:

This new report and associated mapping functionality will really help you understand who is idling your vehicles and costing you fuel and wear and tear, and let you instantly drill down to see where & in what context the vehicles are being left on when they’re not moving.

It is available for all customers & can be run for a month at a time.

It is extremely fast — running it for a full month for a customer with 279 vehicles only takes 2 seconds to finish.

Enjoy!

Thanks,

Rob.

That seems like I’m stating the obvious, but GPS does not equal accurate odometer readings.

Many of our competitors don’t even give you that information — just the # of miles driven.

Here at GPS Insight, we have recently released a VERY ACCURATE odometer calibration mechanism to ensure that no matter what type of vehicle or GPS Tracking device you use, your odometer readings will be about 99.8% accurate.  This is a big improvement from the typical 98% “best” we see with competitors.

If your vehicle drives 10,000 miles a quarter, we may be off 20 miles.  They may be off 200!  Even so, that’s not going to cause an engine blowout, but if you are billing or charging departments based on accurate mileage, GPS Insight will help you avoid the inevitable questions once GPS mileages are scrutinized.

A year and a half ago, we allowed our customers to enter multiple historical corrections, which is much better than the single “offset” which most companies provide.

Now we have improved this in 2 ways:

• Offsets (corrections) are “spread out” historically to avoid spikes in mileage
• Corrections are used going forward as a calibration to more accurately depict odometer readings so odometer corrections are much less necessary & can be done once or twice a year, vs. once or twice a month.

This was surprisingly a HUGE amount of work, which explains why none of the other providers we’ve seen have ever bothered to fix this fundamental flaw in GPS tracking devices.

Here’s why they’re not accurate, by the way:

GPS Tracking devices typically pull mileage from “GPS Interpolation” — since they know where a vehicle is at any point, they can compute the mileage between points.  Our GPS-based odometer calculations take place 4 times a second, but they are still slightly off — typically 1-3% lower than reality.  This is also because we are adding to mileage when a vehicle is in reverse, even though the odometer isn’t incrementing.

Some devices, such as our LD-3500, pull odometer readings as a function of data from the engine’s computer — but not the odometer reading itself.  Again, this is typically 1-2% off, overstating mileage.

There are all sorts of nightmarish billing and leasing problems which we’ve heard about from our customers when odometer readings aren’t 100% (or at least 99.8%) within GPS Insight, so we made these changes.  After a few weeks since the newest, now “calibrated” adjustment, my vehicle is within 1 mile of accuracy, which is partly due to the rounding on this report.  I probably won’t need to adjust the odometer again all year as a result of these changes — here is what GPS Insight thinks my odometer is for each device, when my actual odometer reading is 35,482.  By the way, some people claim GPS is MORE accurate, since tire pressure & size, as well as tire slippage can throw off an odometer.  Good luck proving that one though.  The reality is everyone goes by the odometer reading & we need to ensure we’re as close to that as possible.

Show historical odometer correction history:

Here is the new interface for viewing and editing historical odometer corrections, along with a really cool new graphing mechanism we’ll be using within the site going forward for other things:

So, to summarize, just know that GPS Insight is working very hard to ensure your data is as accurate as humanly possible, given technical limitations which exist with GPS Tracking devices.  By the way, the good news is that Heavy Duty Vehicles (J-1939/1708) using our 3500-HD have always had 100% accurate odometer readings since that is the only device available which gets real odometer readings from the engine.

Enough about Odometer Readings — I’m very glad this project is over — very important but not the most exciting thing in the world…

On to more interesting things now (like user-definable categories & attributes for vehicles, drivers, landmarks, users, stops, and trips)!

Rob.

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:

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:

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:

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.

Although our iPhone app works, the iPad gives us many more capabilities, so we will be developing an app for it soon.  In the meantime, search the app store for “GPS Insight” and download it for free.

The first screenshot for the iPad app is shown below:

There is a lot of potential for this app, so please let us know what would be convenient for you, and we will make sure to consider it for inclusion.

Thanks,

Rob.

We have new Mapping and Dashlet functionality for users of touch-pad devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

Touchpad clients such as the iPad and iPhone do not allow the same “drag and drop” or “pan” capabilities as a mouse and a browser, so we had to make a few additions.

The new scroll arrows allow you to easily move through a Mapping Dashlet. Clicking the middle square button will zoom to fit the vehicles on the map, or vehicle/group that is shown within that map (such as the “WEST” group here):

We added a new arrow “popup” which allows you to move Dashlets around within your dashboard. Click up, down, left, or right and the Dashlet will move accordingly. To access this feature just click on the icon.  Then to close it, click that icon again.

Here is an example of the new navigational features on an iPhone:

Bear in mind that on an iPhone, the main product is functional, but you will need to zoom/pan around since the resolution is pretty small.  On an iPad you will still need to zoom a bit in order to ensure your finger “clicks” the appropriate icons/vehicles, etc.

We also added a new feature to the Dashlet Dock, called “Add-Dashlet”. You will now notice a plus sign (+) to the right of each Dashlet name. Clicking the plus sign will load the Dashlet. Originally, to add a new Dashlet you would have to drag and drop. Now both options are available.

These new features are available to everyone, but were added specifically for touch-pad users. If you have a suggestion for a new feature or for a specific device, please let us know.

Thanks,

Rob.

We have finally received “approval” from Apple so our new iPhone app (version 1) is available to anyone with an iPhone running OS version 3.1.3 here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gps-insight/id376128487?mt=8

Here are some screen shots:  Bear in mind you’ll need your login & password to make this work for your account.

This is just the first version of the app, and we have much more planned for both iPhone and iPad (as well as Android and Blackberry, depending on customer requests).

Please download and play around with it for your account.  It is a free app.

Be sure to give us a good rating!

Thanks,

Rob.

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:

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):

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):

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:

And always remember to save your dashboard!

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.