GPS Tracking ROI

Nice news that I picked up today from my former hometown paper, The Gazette:

The Air Force is moving control of its navigation satellites to a new computer system at Schriever Air Force Base next month. They expect no one to notice. If things go seriously haywire, however, consequences could vary from bombs missing their targets in Iraq to the world financial markets collapsing into chaos.
That’s why senior Air Force officials are saying that failure is not an option as the GPS ground control system is switched from a room-sized mainframe computer to a state-of-the-art network.
There’s a big safety net in place, and the worst-case scenario is extremely unlikely, but the big shift won’t be easy…

I’m glad to see the modernization going on line.  This has long been needed.  The article, however, is a bit too sensational for me.  I’m not sure if it’s some higher-ups in the Air Force trying to make a bit more of the day-to-day boredom of their existence a bit more exciting, or the news reporter being a little too much in awe of the folks he’s reporting on.

The GPS satellites themselves, once established on orbit and checked out  are essentially autonomous for at least 30 days.  This is the way the system was designed from day one, and the reason the “money men” at the Pentagon have resisted moves for years to establish a second, autonomous control center for the GPS at a location removed from Schriever AFB.  Each bird “takes care” of itself if left alone … so if there is some “glitch” that hasn’t been foreseen in the switchover, no planes are going astray and no world financial systems are going to crash … that’s a bit much, Tom, don’t you think?

 2 SOPS people at Falcon Schriever have done way more than the minimums to keep the system healthy and to improve accuracy above and beyond the system standard accuracies.  They basically “touch” each bird once or twice a day and update clock rates and other parameters that improve the accuracy beyond specs.  They also have been very innovative over the years in doing sophisticated “remote maintenance” to the batteries onboard each satellite to make them “love” long past their designed life.  But any day they don’t “touch’” a specific space segment assets only means the asset will routinely and gradually begin regressing back toward the designed, minimum performance goals … let’s not throw too much drama into the mix.

None the less this is important news because the existing system dates from the 1970s and 1980s and is really no longer maintainable.  Moving the control system software onto a modern, supportable platform will provide  a positive ROI in terms of easier (and thus cheaper) maintenance and will make the control contacts that the operators perform work better, faster, cheaper as well.  As I have said here before, my hat is always off to my former colleagues at Schriever … military, government civil service and contractor personnel.  Keep ‘em flying, guys and gals!

I’ve written before about the interesting positive “side effects” (fortuitous circumstances) that so often come along when a company invests in GPS tracking for the initial purpose of saving money. There is no doubt that using GPS tracking will save you money. In fact, no matter what you select you will likely see a return on investment in 6 months or less. I’ve got years of experience to show that and there are thousands of other professionals in the field who can testify to that fact as well.

But what if GPS tracking actually made you money? Think that’s far fetched? It’s not at all. here’s real-world testimony from a trucking company operations exec … not a GPS salesman, marketer or any other third-party ‘expert”:

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Here’s a site that will be well worth your time exploring.  If you are interested in aircraft and flying … as I am, or if you just are forced to be a passenger on airplanes from time to time and hate the darn things:

It’s certainly no secret we could do better in the field of aviation safety. It’s also almost a secret just how poorly we … all countries of the world …actually track aircraft in flight. The world of aeronautical tracking, whether to gain the simple, provable benefits of proving the vehicles are used properly to the esoteric but often indispensable area of crash investigation is still stuck back in the late 1930 … with analog radar signals tracking aircraft )in some areas of the world) and not much else.

Appareo has a line of products to monitor day-to-day performance and they also have taken on the big “Beltway Bandits” also make the costs of flight data recorders astronomical (mainly because the engineering hasn’t changed in 30 years) and out of reach of all but the large aircraft operators.

If your son or daughter “bought the farm” in a smaller aircraft, what would it be worth to learn the cause and prevent future tragedies. Don’t play around with this information like the state of Minnesota did with 7 years of data that told them where and how the bridge would fail.

Read.

Heed.

Do something!

As always, I welcome comments, disagreement is encouraged, and you can also email me direct at: davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me on 1-719-423-8872. If you liked this article, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you get all my news and views.

OK, fellas and gals … the weekend is nearly here, eh?  You know what day that is … that’s the day I always try to publish something interesting to look at … usually involving how to get a better handle on your business’s bottom line and an ROI on GPS tracking.

Today I came across the website of a decent-looking US GPS tracking provider known as S&L Services.  I immediately liked what I saw because unlike so many companies in the industry, SLS provides live demos of their products … no log ins, “email squeezes” and other annoying pushy sales techniques … and they publish their prices.  Refreshing.  Go here: http://70.169.216.3/map.aspx?cid=slservices, ignore the login boxes and click on live demo.  You can hover your mouse over any vehicle and see details on it, with the time mapped to the time zone you are logged in from.

Looking over SLS’s offering brings up something I’ve been meaning to writer about for along time now … update frequency or “ping rates” for vehicles … tune in Monday and I’ll discuss this subject in a little depth.

Happy viewing and enjoy your well-earned weekend.

As always, I welcome comments, disagreement is encouraged, and you can also email me direct at: davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me on 1-719-423-8872. If you liked this article, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you get all my news and views.

Free money.  If you service or repair at customer locations this could very well be free or found money.

Are You Late in Completing Service Work-Orders?

A recent Aberdeen survey revealed that companies do not complete nearly 21% of work orders on-time. Lack of insight into near and long term service workload and resource (people, parts) capacity resulting from poor planning and forecasting
is to blame for the sub-optimal service performance.

Please take a 10-minute survey to:

• Benchmark financial and operational service
  metrics relative to peers; and

• Compare how your service organization’s
  business processes stack up against those
  of best-in-class companies

• Learn what your peers are doing to reduce technician overtime and fulfill service commitments on time

The Aberdeen group provides one heck of a lot of good information to business owners and marketers.  One of the things I find especially fascinating is how hard they hit the service side of industry.  that’s because they, as I have found by personal experience, find that most businesses spend a ton of money, often losing big to fulfill service commitments which could actually be a big profit center if managed correctly.  The report is free, I am sure you’ll more than get you money’s worth.

And for my institutional, school and government readers?  Not so fast, you need to read the report too.  How much do you spend in tasks involving employees going out to sties to fix things, install things, adjust things?  (School system White Fleets come immediately to mind) Just because you’re not a profit-making entity doesn’t mean you should be reducing costs and using scare money in better places … while:

Improving customer service!

As always, I welcome comments, disagreement is encouraged, and you can also email me direct at: davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me on 1-719-423-8872. If you liked this article, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you get all my news and views.

Sometimes the simplest things just turn on one of those cartoon image “light bulbs” in my mind.  One would think this idea would just be so intuitive it is too simple to post.  But then, reviewing years of watching people using various models of GPS navigators and GPS tracking systems one realizes one would be wrong.  So …

Talking Electronics: The GPS zoom

By Bill Diedrich, Special to the Star Tribune

Last update: August 08, 2007 – 1:37 AM

The zoom feature on your GPS helps improve your destination accuracy. As you approach your destination, continue to zoom in, 1 mile, 0.1 mile, 0.05 mile. This allows you to accurately interpret your waypoint location. Here’s why: One pixel on a 480-pixel-width screen and a 1-mile scale represents 11 feet; on a 0.1-mile scale one pixel represents 0.9 feet. Smaller scale, more accurate interpretation.   Full article here:

Bill Diedrich Of Minnetonka Is A Retired Math Teacher With A Love Of Fishing electronics…

Simplistic?  You bet.  Needed?  You bet.  Another simple trick that seems not so intuitive is to adjust your screen resolution when viewing GPS tracking data on your computer.  Today’s monitors are capable of absolutely astounding screen resolution but they normally default to a lowest common denominator like 1024×768 or even (I see them coming to this site all the time) 640×480.  This is like buying expensive eyeglasses and leaving them home while you sightsee .. or subscribing to HBO and watching your TV through a tiny square cut in cardboard and taped over the screen … widen up, sharpen up, zoom in and enjoy … you’ll be glad Bill and I told you to once you try it.

A lot of my posts fall under the general category of negativity … why don’t more people use GPS, why doesn’t this work that way, etc.  Well today the positive thinkers can rejoice.  I’m positive this is a great idea and I’m positive a lot of smart people out there are going to take up on this product.

As many of you know there are three main components to GPS tracking.  The GPS system itself … 24 plus satellites in orbit continuously broadcasting timing messages and system status reports to the second component … a GPS receiver that calculates its position mathematically from the signals it receives.  There is very little difference in any GPS tracking system up to this point in the equation.  Some use more satellites than others, some calculate position to a greater degree of accuracy, some solve the positioning equation more often than others … but at the consumer and business owner levels these differences don’t matter all that much.

What does matter, and matters large, especially in countries like the US, Canada, Australia and others with wide open spaces is the third leg in the three-legged stool of GPS tracking.  “The Backhaul”.  In order to get any useful information for personal tracking, business tracking or emergency search and rescue location, the positron calculated by the receiver has got to be brought back to the user/business operations center/search and rescue command post.  Without this part of the puzzle there is no reason to even consider GPS tracking … remember the GPS does not “track” anything … it only provides the means to calculate a positron for the asset you want to track.  Until that positron is on your screen, in the words of Tony Soprano’s lawyers, “You have bupkus.”

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