GPS Tracking ROI

Going a little off the GPS tracking beaten path here … but you know me by now, GPS and ROI from using GPS tracking won’t be far away.  Especially since it’s almost time for the US hurricane season to kick off this is a very appropriate post for a couple of my other interests … emergency services and disaster recovery/mitigation.

This post is aimed mainly at a lot of my municipal, county, state disaster response readers.  You can sit on your hands and wait for the “Brownies” of FEMA to provide you after the fact” assistance of some sort or you can take action now to prepare yourself … in many cases with unclaimed FEMA disaster preparedness and Homeland Security funding:

How do you dispatch emergency calls if your 911 center isn’t available?  (my emphasis) That’s a very real question for Dixie County Emergency Services. Located just 18 miles from Florida’s Gulf Coast, the organization knows the community’s safety depends on being prepared to continue operations under any circumstances.
“There have been several major Gulf hurricanes, and we’ve seen the devastation that can result,” said Mike Gantt, 911 division chief for Dixie County Emergency Services. “Most of the communities hit by Hurricane Katrina were left with nothing. We wanted to make certain we had the ability to go back to work as a 911 center for the county, even if the building was inaccessible.”
Dixie County can now take its 911 center on the road and dispatch calls from further inland using a new integrated solution from Avaya and TCI. … read the full mobile command center story here:

Not too many people took note of the fact that during the World Trade Center terrorist attack in 2001, New York City, who deserves a lot of credit for trying to be ready for an emergency almost, unwittingly, exacerbated the disaster by an order of magnitude or more.  Mayor Guliani and many key disaster response leaders came within a hairsbreadth of being trapped inside the state-of-the-art NYC disaster preparedness center which turned out to be an ‘ancillary” casualty of the attack … World Trade Center Building 7.

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I write often about GPS ROI success stories … they aren’t hard to find, just set a Google News Alert for those keywords and you’ll get reports almost every day. Here’s another one, which once again points up my oft-made point that virtually any business or government agency will save, and save big … especially in productivity and reduction in overtime:

“We knew there was additional overtime being booked and that vehicles were being used for private mileage, which concerned us greatly as we couldn’t actually prove it. … we also saw some inefficiencies in the way our van fleet operated – an aspect that would have been impossible to see if not for the clarity of the vehicle tracking system…. “The Remote Asset Management vehicle tracking system is a common sense business tool that is saving us lots of money. It’s safe to say that it pays for itself many times over,”… Read the full release here:

My question for the day is … why do I continually read these reports from companies and agencies overseas and so seldom see similar reports from US entities? You know what shows up day after day in these alerts from the US? Using GPS on the golf course, either with handheld golfing aids or as course management tools on golf carts.

There’s nothing wrong with golf … and you certainly can get an a ROI from tracking golf carts. But there is so much more that could be done and I see so little of it. Do my fellow American businessmen just enjoy wasting $3 a gallon fuel? Do they just consider wasted employee hours as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Do they consider it an acceptable risk to let 90+% of our school children in buses travel unsupervised?

The answer, folks, is not money. If you integrate GPS tracking into your operations you will earn back the investment in less than a year and you’ll reap benefit after benefit in years to come. So what is the reason so many of you won’t position yourself for extra profit?

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.

I just posted Friday about a GPS road-oriented marketing event here in the Philippines.  A question that might be in some people’s mind is, how to they know where to drive?  Are there good maps available?  And the answer is an unqualified yes, no and maybe.

Unlike the US and much of the rest of the world where the ubiquitous Google has broken open the floodgates … made available previously closely held, for profit, mapping data, the Philippines suffers from a lack of readily available GPS-generated mapping data.  There are two ways to deal with this issue.

The first is the method demonstrated by the Philippines designated government mapping agency, NAMRIA (National Mapping and Resource Information Authority)  On their website, http://www.namria.gov.ph/home.asp (skip the annoying and totally inappropriate silliness of their Flash into) they profess to being tasked to meet the needs of commercial users of maps.  But, in fact, they don’t.  No one asks that they do this for free, but their charter instructs them to do this.  perhaps there is no one employed there who can understand the basic principle of commerce … make a product, charge more than it cost you to make and you’ll actually have profit (which can be plowed back into environmental projects they are also tasked with that wouldn’t be expected to earn a profit?  Too much to hope for, I believe.  In all my years in the business in the US I found that NAMRIA’s counterparts in the US were similarly anti-business.  The ultimate refuge of the government employee who doesn’t want to do anything is just to whine, “there’s no money”, even when there are potential customers trying to give them money.  So what other alternatives are there?

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It’s the weekend for most of you loyal readers, so, as usual, I’m sending out  a little eye candy to pass the time until we get back to GPS tracking ROI issues on Monday.

My friend Patrick Co of STARCOMM sent me an email recently giving me a heads-up on a neat advertising promo driving event here in the Philippines. It seems that Isuzu Philippines wants to show off the fuel mileage capabilities of some of their latest product lines and talk is cheap, but actions speak louder. Isuzu has already had some good press by demonstrating their cars over land (and sea) trips, promoting tourism, the Philippines’ convenient system of RORO (Roll On, Roll Off) inter-island ferries. There’s another road event scheduled for the 21st of this month (August, 2007) and this time the convoy will be “live tracked” using STARCOMM’s business-oriented GPS tracking systems. Here’s a thumbnail of the projected route … subject to revision as I get more details:

And here’s a little “teaser” to show the kind of sights you see along the road while taking a drive here in the Philippines.

Stay tuned and I’ll update the plans and progress … maybe we can get Isuzu Philippines to make it a live blogging event.

A recap in case you didn’t read the first part of this series … here … we are talking about what a commercial vehicle actual is, as defined by the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) and what commercial vehicles might be exempt from the general FCMSA requirement for RODS (Record Of Duty Status), commonly known in the business as a “Logbook”.

If your vehicles fall into one of the groups that do not require the maintenance of driver logbooks, don’t jump to another subject too quickly. Many activities your vehicles are engaged in might “cross the line” into RODS territory at a moment’s notice. Work hour records are almost always required as well … and if a vehicle or driver goes into an activity that does require RODS, remember that you are going to have to be able to “reconstruct” the work hours of the driver, perhaps as far back as the preceding 10 or 11 days (7 or 8 workdays and the last time the driver can be shown to have been “free of duties” for 34 continuous hours) in order to prove he or she is “legal” to drive. These rules aren’t like criminal law, where the state has the obligation to prove guilt. The FMCSA can assert that you and/or your driver violated the rules and the burden will be upon you to prove them wrong. This is one reason I have always been surprised at the reluctance of so many businesses to maintain detailed and provable records … the cost of not doing so can be far, far greater than the cost of keeping the records.

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Earlier this month I posted several hints to keep you legal if you operate commercial vehicles under the so-called “short haul” exemptions from the standard FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) HOS (Hours Of Service) or RODS (Record Of Duty Status) (log book) requirements. Wow! How’s that for an acronym-loaded sentence … do you think we have enough rules about trucking in the US, yet?

Anyway, to keep “in bounds” with the mileage restrictions on the local driving issues you only need a simple radios map centered on the place your vehicles will be departing and returning to. I detailed how you can make one quite simply with Microsoft MapPoint. But MapPoint has another very interesting similar function. It allows you to draw a “Drive Time Zone” around any point on the map in virtually a one-click operations. Very, very handy for business planning.

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