Friday, September 21, 2007

GPS vehicle and performanance tracking system essential to cut waste

With fuel prices increasing and expectation of further inevitable increases, vehicle maintenance and repair cost increasing, workers' salary increasing, it is essential for companies to maintain and even increase efficiency - fuel efficiency, workers' efficiency and productivity, vehicle engines efficiency and problems. It will be good if you can have a system to be able to track and analyse information on these factors easily and if necessary, take proactive and preventive actions. If your company operates a fleet, it is also important to monitor speed violation as such violations can lead to costly accidents and costly speeding tickets. You may want to monitor the usage of your company's vehicles like off hours and unauthorised activities. If your company operates interstate, you may have to keep records of state miles and if done manually, it can be pretty tedious you may have to assign the task to an employee to do that which means you are taking him or her away from more productive tasks. If your fleet is large, you may even have to employ someone to do it, meaning more cost to your company.

Our generation is very fortunate to live in an era of Internet, space satellites, GPS (Global Positioning System), Geomap such as Google Earth, etc. Not only that, there are companies that makes very innovative applications of these technologies that our ancestors never have. That for example GPS Insight. They have exploited Global Positioning System, Internet and Geomap to the full to help companies cut waste, improve efficiency, take proactive and preventive measures to control the cost of maintaining a fleet of vehicles. I did a review of that site, and I will report on some of the things I found below, but you really have to review yourself GPS Insight to fully appreciate how their system can help your company. After my brief review, in my opinion, if your company operate a fleet or have to reimburse employees for usage of their own vehicles for company's operation or you need to keep track of activities of employees who work outside your company's office or offices, and you take the trouble to review GPS Insight yourself, I am pretty sure you too will come realise why this is absolutely necessary.

In brief, GPS Insight offers a hardware and web software-based vehicle tracking product and they claim that their product is the only one currently on the market which gets direct engine diagnostics (fault codes, speed, fuel consumption, odometer readings, idle time, etc.). According to them, their product is easy to install (it plugs directly into the vehicles diagnostics port which vehicles manufactured after 1998 will have, I think.

Here is a screenshot of GPS Insight homepage:

GPS Insight vehicle tracking system homepage

I clicked on their "New Products Demos" (highlighted with a red arrow) and was pretty impressed at how their product can help your company cut waste, optimize route planning, get engine diagnostic information to control fuel consumption, be informed of engine problems and thus help fix them quickly and avoid higher repair costs from such problems causing more serious engine problems, etc.

One of the most valuable tool they offer for cutting waste is their route-planning tool. As an example, here is a screenshot of a route map after route optimization:

route optimization map

Note that the route goes in a nice logical sequence. You should view their demo and see the route before optimization and see how much this tool can help optimize the route, help plan routes for vehicle drivers to save time, fuel consumption, vehicle wear and tear.

With their tool, you can get a list of vehicles violating speed limits which can help your company control such undesirable activities. Overspeeding can lead to costly accidents and having to pay for speeding tickets, and I suspect may lead to higher motor insurance cost. See a screenshot of an example of a speed violation report below (click to enlarge):



You can also get GPS Insight email you scheduled various kind of reports such as the "Fuel usage and miles per gallon report" as Excel file. See screenshot below (click to enlarge):

Fuel usage and mpg report

Their Support and Contact Information page will give you more information on what GPS Insight can do for your company. They also have a GPS Insight Blog which can keep you updated on the new developments, news on the company, posts on companies using their products and their experience, etc.

You just have to surf over to their website to see for yourself as this review cannot give you all the benefits that usage of their product can bring to your company.