I use a lot of web-based applications — checking, CRM, email, etc.

Not all of them (in fact few of them) are easy to use and many require you to do the same thing over & over again which wastes a lot of time.

I am happy to say that at GPS Insight, we do everything we can to make it easy to use our product efficiently.

I needed to look into a customer’s question earlier today and this attention to usability made my life easy.

I needed BOTH a 3D map AND an activity detail report — these exist on 2 separate menus on the Mapping & Reporting tabs.

I ran the first one:

Running a 3D History map for a vehicle for 3 days

Then all I needed to do was move my mouse over to the Reports Menu, click on “Activity Detail” and both my vehicle AND date range (several months back, which involved a few clicks to achieve the first time) were carried over to this report.  Then one last click on “Run Report” and VOILA, my report:

Running an Activity Report for a vehicle for 3 days

Now I could stare and compare the 3D map vs. the Activity Detail Report easily and see what my customer was curious about — he wondered why the latitude/longitude wasn’t changing for multiple lines in the Activity Detail Report:

GPS Insight Activity Detail Report

We don’t recommend trying to “interpret” latitude / longitude, as it doesn’t make any sense to us humans, but in our mapping, it shows what happened very obviously:

17 minute idle event

The vehicle didn’t change latitude / longitude for all those points since it was idling for 17 minutes!  The map made that clear.

And it only took a few clicks, due to our interface which “remembers” what you’re doing.  If you have 10 different reports for the same group of vehicles or single vehicle, for the same range of dates, it takes only a few clicks.  You don’t need to re-select the group/vehicle, then re-select the date range.  What a drag it is when I have to use someone else’s interface and wish they did the same things we do to make our customers efficient and happy to use GPS Insight.

Rob.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in seeing a more in-depth demonstration of our GPS fleet tracking solution.

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

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.

Not all companies who track their vehicles need to worry about which cellular provider they use.  Most don’t even know they may have a choice.

But if you do work in remote areas, you should pay attention and work with your GPS provider to ensure you get the right network.

I went to see ‘Mission Impossible’ today with my son and drove into town (Flagstaff) from our house which is in EXTREMELY bad AT&T coverage.

On the way home, I drove a couple miles around in our neighborhood to try to compare the reliability between AT&T and Verizon coverage.

My vehicle has both a Verizon-based device (labeled Rubicon) and an AT&T device (labeled Rubicon PNP).

We have a couple of internal mechanisms for determining how good the coverage ACTUALLY by:

• Viewing purported AT&T or Verizon coverage
• Showing ACTUAL cellular “lag” on a map
• Generating a report of ACTUAL cellular “lag” with a graph

Below is an actual AT&T coverage map showing the area where I typically lose coverage in “light blue” which is not ideal coverage.  In the “dark blue” area, you can see there are very few places where the time for the device to report through the cellular network is more than a few seconds.  In my area, you can see some “tall” pins which visually represent how long it took the device to report (which is really a measure of how far the vehicle had to move before forwarding that data once it recovers cellular coverage):

AT&T coverage vs. time it took for a device to report

Note that the Verizon device (Rubicon) has a “pink” line and the AT&T device (Rubicon PNP) is in white.  Verizon shows perfect coverage throughout (not pictured).

Here is how I pulled up the “lag report” version of the 3D map within GPS Insight:

Choosing both Rubicon devices once at a time

Choose the "Lag Report" option for a 3D History Map

[note this functionality is internal to GPS Insight support staff and is only available to end-customers upon special request]

Here is the display of my drive WITHOUT the coverage map.  Notice that there are very few “tall” pins meaning very few “lagged” points:

Slight lag (24 seconds to 3 minutes) for remote AT&T device

Next I will run a quantitative analysis of today’s data, for just the 2 devices in this vehicle, after quickly creating a “Rubicons” vehicle group containing them both:

Create a "Rubicons" Vehicle Group containing both devices

I can then run this (internal use) “Lag Report” on the “Rubicons” for today:

Cellular "Lag Report" between AT&T and Verizon

Note there is a “landmark” option where we could restrict the report to ONLY data within a certain area we define, such as a mine, or wherever a customer may be concerned about coverage.  Also note above, that GPS Insight still thinks I am driving, since when I pull into my bad coverage and put the car in the garage, sometimes the final ignition off event doesn’t get transmitted until I drive back into coverage the next time I leave.  This is normal behavior for poor coverage areas, and is unavoidable (unless you know enough to choose Verizon when purchasing in these cases, which is the point of this article).

Here is the output, showing 100% coverage for Verizon and 95.8% coverage for AT&T for today’s drive:

Verizon 100%, AT&T 95.8%

The AVERAGE time to report for Verizon is 2 seconds, whereas AT&T averages 7 seconds.  The max for Verizon is 4 seconds, and for AT&T, the max times are 51 seconds and 3 minutes, for when the report reports within 1 minute or 10 minutes (we break it out into 1, 10, 30, 30+ minute “bands”).

Here is the past week, since I drove up to Flagstaff for vacation from Scottsdale, driving through notoriously bad AT&T coverage in the mountains (I know this because my iPhone is AT&T & worthless for that drive) — note that the percentage of < 1 minute reports is 100% for Verizon and only 83.7% for AT&T:

Poor AT&T Performance in mountains between Scottsdale and Flagstaff

However, the week PRIOR to me leaving for vacation, driving around the more populated Scottsdale/Phoenix area, shows a much better 95.1% performance for AT&T vs. a 99.9% availability percentage for Verizon:

AT&T vs. Verizon coverage in Phoenix/Scottsdale

The moral of the story here is threefold:

BEFORE you purchase GPS Tracking devices for your fleet, make sure to determine A) if you have coverage issues in the areas your vehicles travel and B) whether or not you can afford to wait the minutes, hours, or sometimes overnight before the device reports in these areas.

If you may be affected, and aren’t sure, then make sure your GPS Tracking provider can provide not just multiple coverage options, but ALSO the tools to determine if there is a need for one coverage or another, as shown above.

As a point of reference, Verizon devices cost roughly $50 more than AT&T devices (due to additional modem and CDMA licensing costs).  But that’s a onetime cost and will probably amount to less than 5% over the life of the device and service.

If that $50 keeps you from experiencing occasional cellular delays due to poor (typically) AT&T coverage, then it, and finding a company which provides the right coverage (e.g GPS Insight…), is certainly worth considering.

Thanks,

Rob.

We finally have an Android App under development.

I can’t guarantee it will be available soon, but hopefully by January we’ll have something our customers can start using.

Here’s a very simple preview:

GPS Insight Android Application

We’ll let you know when it’s available in Beta.

Thanks,

Rob.

GPS Insight has always emphasized landmarks as a core capability of our GPS Tracking solution.

Landmarks are helpful because they make reports and real time location much more intuitive.

It’s easier for users to understand “Home Depot SW Phoenix” than it is “12525 W. Glendale Ave., Phoenix, AZ.”

But getting all your landmarks into the system used to take a lot of time (well, 5-10 minutes or so for a few thousand landmarks).

We spent some time optimizing this process so that large customers (or small customers with lots of landmarks) don’t need to wait so long.

We have made landmark spreadsheet import roughly 40x faster.

Now instead of 4 landmarks per second, you can expect over 175 per second (peaking to 200+).

Here are the results from today vs. 5 days ago (from our activity log):

Landmark Import in GPS Insight

If you need information on how to upload spreadsheets of landmarks, always feel free to call our support, or try it yourself here (it’s very intuitive):

Import landmark spreadsheet into GPS Insight

Import landmark spreadsheet into GPS Insight

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Would you do away with email for your company to save a few dollars?

Of course not!

Email is an invaluable tool for any organization, and its value is known to be far more than its cost.

But many companies don’t realize that by delaying the inevitable purchase of GPS Tracking for their fleet of vehicles, it’s essentially doing away with email. For their vehicles.

And these vehicles have lots to tell us, but without GPS Tracking Systems, they can’t.

They might want to tell you, the fleet administrator or supervisor:

• I’m being used for side jobs and during weekends/evenings for personal usage
• I’m exceeding the speed limit frequently and recklessly
• I’m not being used when you’re paying my driver to use me
• I’m iding excessively and wasting your fuel and money
• I’m skipping customers or driving out of the way so you can pay more overtime
• I’m due for an oil change and tire rotation
• I wasn’t there when your driver used his fuel card over the weekend (but his other car probably was…)

And these emails can come automatically, just by subscribing to scheduled, regular reports:

Odd Hours Driving Report

Or they can come in real time as alerts which let not only you, but also your driver know about the idling, speeding, odd-hours, or inefficient driving behavior.

Or maybe they would only say:

• My driver is doing a great job
• Everything is OK
• Go to sleep and stop worrying for a change…

And most importantly, you get instant chat for free with GPS Tracking — you never need to wonder where the vehicle is again, and you can communicate with its driver in real time if desired.

Someday soon, if you don’t have GPS Tracking on your vehicles, and aren’t using it to its full potential, you’ll be just as in the dark ages as if you didn’t have email. Just like when you needed to use the USPS to send and receive information (we’ll even skip the FAX ages).

And for the price of 2-3 stamps or so per day, you can track a vehicle using GPS.

If you’re not already doing so, give it a try to see what you’re missing.

The ROI of having your vehicle email you regularly is something you’ll realize is as invaluable as the email you receive from your peers. Actually, maybe even more valuable.

Rob.