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:

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.

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).

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report

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!):

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report

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):

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map

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

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map

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.

We added some functionality to our product to help a customer with a recent IRS reality:

Personal usage of take-home vehicles is taxable as income.

Now it’s pretty easy to quantify just how much of that usage is taxable using GPS Insight.

We have a new way to choose which hours of the day for several reports, to include the drive time summary (down to 5 minute levels):

New Time Selection capability within GPS Insight Reports

So when you run a month-long report with the default (00:00 through 00:00), which is what we used to allow (just a full day, not just certain hours of the day), you would get this:

Run a GPS Insight Drive Time Summary for All of May

This shows 193,887 TOTAL miles

Now run it for JUST personal hours (this would vary based on your company’s schedule of course):

Choose your exact hours for the report

The options allow you to specify the time “band” (e.g. 7PM until 5AM in this case) as well as whether to include or exclude trips which happen only partially within that time.  Also, you can apply this to EVERY day or just the start/ending days by clicking “Apply Each Day.”

We will soon have a 3rd “split trips” option which literally split activity in half at the exact time you specify — e.g. if you say 19:00 and a trip starts at 18:00 and ends at 21:00, it will only report 2, not 3 hours & the mileage of those 2 hours.

Additionally, there will be weekend support as well, which will help quantify personal usage (although we already do this in our odd-hours/weekends report.

Here is the result of that particular “personal hours” report:

Quickly determine how many miles need to be taxed

The personal usage miles, based on the 7PM-5AM filter are 29,074 for May, 15% of total miles driven.

A) you may want to curb this usage, since it’s costing your company money for fuel & wear and tear

B) you need to report this as income if it fits the IRS’s definition, and avoid putting your employees in a bad position of owing taxes if/when you/they are audited.

The IRS just announced an audit of all State of California take-home vehicles, reported by Government Fleet Magazine:

IRS is auditing California take home vehicle usage

Here is the link to that article.

Be prepared!  Start quantifying your vehicle usage.  Also, know that GPS Insight stores 3-5 years of your data, so an 18 month audit will take you no time at all to complete.  Good luck with most other GPS providers which only give you 3-6 months of data.  If you want that data, they will usually charge you thousands of dollars for archived data requests.  Not us though…

Rob.

This is a REALLY exciting report, and is the culmination of months of work on top of years of getting ready for this report.

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

This suite of reports will essentially pinpoint your inefficient drivers on an overall as well as a trip-by-trip basis.

Here’s a an early version (the final reports are on the way & will also include an overall vehicle-by-vehicle comparison/summary):

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

Up comes a graph showing all your drivers’ trips for that period of time (a work week in this case) & how efficient they are relative to both SHORTEST and FASTEST routes which we determine WOULD HAVE BEEN IDEAL:

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

Then looking at the detail, we pick on the top “most inefficient” driver (sorting on # of unnecessary miles beyond the fastest route from A to B):

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

Then hovering over an entry, it tells us that the “James – Garmin” vehicle went 34.2 miles, but only needed to go 19.03.

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

By clicking on the 3 entries, we instantly pull up the actual (pink), shortest (red), and fastest (blue) routes for a visual comparison:

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

In reality, the “turnaround” out of the way is where several of our employees meet to car pool every day:

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

So this behavior is all right, since it saves a lot of miles and cars on the road.

But look at #2 and #3 on the list (and there are countless more inefficient trips):

Driving way out of way (in Purple) to get from A to B

Driving way out of way (in Orange ) to get from A to B vs. fastest/shortest routes in blue & red

These are our employees & our own cars, so it’s not exactly the end of the world that we’re sometimes driving all over the place inefficiently, & we have our reasons.

But if you run this against your fleet, you will find drivers who:

• Get Lost
• Make Wrong Turns
• Intentionally Take the Long Way (padding hours)
• Literally Drive In Circles (and should be probably be fired for fraudulent wasting of fuel/mileage and padding of hours)

This report will be available in late May, and is going to surprise a lot of customers.  And probably a lot of drivers too.

It will save our customers a HUGE amount of money on drivers they didn’t know were this inefficient, or were specifically defrauding them of labor hours.

Additionally, it will be available in June as a real-time alert to supervisors as well as drivers to “coach” them on better ways to complete their trips when they do so inefficiently.

Oh, and by the way, on a slow development server, for all 50 of our vehicles for a full work week, that report only took 1/3 of a second to run:

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

For more information on our main GPS Fleet Tracking Reports visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

From our support page:

We just added several new reports so that you will know which of your DRIVERS (not just vehicles) were associated with certain activity:

Drivers Are Now Shown in Most Utilized Reports

Driver-to Vehicle assignment information is now shown on the majority of our most utilized reports and maps.

(If you’d like to learn more about Drivers, please read Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping!)

The Driver was previously an option to be shown in dashlets on the website and to be listed in the Activity Detail Report:

Map and Location Dashlets

Activity Detail Report

The Driver information has been newly added to four more reports:

Begin/End of Day Report

Drive Time Summary Report (It replaced the VIN on this report.)

Run Time Report

Stop Detail Report (It appears only in the exported spreadsheet version of this report.)

GPS Insight allows you to assign drivers 5 different ways:

• Web Interface
• Automatic DriverID fob/reader
• Garmin login capability
• SMS Text Message from driver “assigning” himself/herself to the vehicle
• Application Programming Interface (API) to allow your systems to automate the assignment of your vehicles to your employees

This makes reporting much more useful if your drivers aren’t always tied to the same vehicle.

Rob.

This is very to the point:

Our reports and proactive alerts help you to ensure your drivers are not idling.

It’s both wasteful and impacts our environment.

I pulled up a relatively new customer at random & ran an idling report for them & was happy to see that they CUT THEIR IDLING 75% WITH PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT!

Here is how I ran the report:

Run a GPS Insight Idle Time History Report

The report came up in 1.6 seconds & quantified 33,400 hours of driving since January, and the Purple Line (the important line) shows a marked decrease from a high of 20% idling to a current low of 5%:

75% Reduction in idling percentage

The full report shows all the particulars & shows very clearly the effects of both using GPS Insight as well as managing the drivers to stop idling:

Decrease from 20% to 5% idling over 3 months

Note that this is only one of our thousand customers, and only 234 vehicles. I like the fact that GPS Insight truly is helping our customers make a big difference both in terms of saving fuel money, and the environment.

Another report shows that they have saved roughly TWO THOUSAND IDLING HOURS across their fleet of 234 vehicles by eliminating that 15% idling (based on 13,000 hours driven in the past month). With fuel costs plus wear & tear easily costing $5 per hour, they’ve seen a $10,000 PER MONTH savings, which is $42 per vehicle. We charge them $32.95.  So they make $9 per month just by reducing idling, and now they have all the other benefits of GPS Insight for free – efficient dispatch, proof of delivery, proof of driver hours worked, reduction in speeding, theft recovery, and so on.

Plus they’re not pi$$ing on the planet anymore…

Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Rob.

We now have support for saving a custom hierarchical view — as well as using that in a scheduled report.

We still have not given access to the hierarchy to all customers, but are happy to allow you access as a beta customer if you just ask.

Here’s how it works:

When running a report, select “Custom Hierarchy Selection”:

Saving a Custom Hierarchy Selection

Then after running the report, an intermediate screen is shown where you can choose/exclude any groups from the hierarchies you have defined:

Drag and Drop hierarchy nodes to include them in the custom group

Choose another hierarchy and drag/drop nodes to “intersect” (restrict to the vehicles in the SouthWest which are Delivery, Parts, or Service), and “exclude” (in this case get rid of all Nevada and “big rig’s.”

Restricting to just the 55 vehicles you need

Then save this highly custom group as “MySavedHierarchy” by typing the group name and pressing “save.”

Saving a custom hierarchy group

Then click on “Run Report” to run the report you started & you’ll see that the Vehicle Group is a Custom Hierarchy with those 55 vehicles:

Report based on a custom hierarchy

(tip: make sure to refresh the main site to pick up the newly created hierarchy group in the main menu) Now you can use it to run any report moving forward:

Recalling a saved hierarchy group for running your GPS Tracking reports

Additionally, they now show up under scheduled report choices:

Use a Custom Hierarchy Group in your scheduled reports

Any time you make a change to your hierarchy structure or members moving forward, they will automatically be reflected in the ad-hoc or scheduled reports you run using that custom group.

This is a big deal for large organizations since they can “intersect” multiple functional/organizational/geographic groups of vehicles very easily without having to manually (tediously) create groups for every combination of interest.

Rob.

This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Click for information on the other reports we offer.

Thanks,
Rob.

I lost my keys the other day which is awesome. I think they’re in a toy chest somewhere courtesy of my daughter.

So today after we rolled out a new improved Driver-to-Vehicle mapping product, I grabbed a new DriverID at work and put it on my (new) keychain.

I forgot to “log in” — we do however support mandatory login using a really obnoxious buzzer which goes off after 30 seconds until you press the driver ID button to the reader.

So after dinner, I decided to test everything for myself. Since I’m not the only person who will lose a DriverID or their keys, we made sure to make it easy to give out & assign new driverID’s.

After my drive, I logged in and launched the right administrative screen where we see 3 unassigned driverID buttons — one has been used in my car (Rob 4000) and has today’s date and a recent time.

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So I choose my previously defined Driver record with the drop-down:

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So then we run an activity detail report for my vehicle for today to see the driverID switch. My “wife’s” driverID had been recently assigned to my car, so the change was very apparent. (I quote “wife” not because she’s not real, but she doesn’t really use a driverID — she might be more colorful than some of our customers’ drivers about telling me where to put my driverID if I asked her to use one…)

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

So here’s the switch — exactly when I took the car for a quick spin around the neighborhood:

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

And here is my path with my name now in the Driver field within the information bubble:

New DriverID assigned to my vehicle after losing my keys

After working diligently lately, we’ve streamlined this process as much as possible for as many use case/problem cases (e.g. drivers losing their keys…) as possible, and it’s trivial to reassign a new driverID to a driver now.

I wish we tracked keys though…

[Side note, I found them today, 1/24/10, finally, outside by the hose, rusted after a couple weeks of sitting out in the rain, but the car door openers still work...]

For more GPS Insight features, please see our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features page.

Rob.

We have a customer in San Francisco who wanted to be able to reconcile the # of trips they make across the Bay Bridge (since they pay a toll when coming into the city).

Here is a picture of the landmark they defined (along with a nice 3D representation in Google Earth):

GPS Insight Landmark of the San Francisco Bay Bridge

We added a “Passing Through” option to our standard landmark report to help with this requirement. Before this, the landmark visit would have required the vehicle to either stop or idle for a minute to register. If you click the “Passing Through” checkbox, it will count any activity through that “zone.”

GPS Insight landmark report adds "passing through" option

Now when running the report (which took less than 3 seconds), you get each time a vehicle went through that area (I’ve blurred out the vehicle names for customer privacy).

GPS Insight vehicle tracking landmark report

This makes it easy to see that 7 vehicles went a total of 23 times across the Bay Bridge.

But how many tolls is that?

You only get charged on the way INTO the city. Exporting that report to Excel gives us some additional information such as heading (what direction the trip took through the landmark). So only Southwest trips should incur a toll. That shows 8 of them according to this Excel Screenshot:

How many tolls should we be charged across the Bay Bridge?

We added Heading as well to the exported version of the report. Since space isn’t at a premium in Excel, we usually put all columns into the exported versions of the reports there.

This helps our customer, & I thought it would be worth detailing here in case other customers can think of a good use for this.

Thanks,
Rob.