GPS Tracking ROI

Recently I had a comment and later a series of emails from a nice guy, Rick, who runs a GPS company and is also a security professional. See: http://www.hallmarksecurity.com/ . Our conversation made me think about my time running my own GPS tracking business and some of the experiences I had trying to sell into the private security market.

To refresh myself with what’s going on their today I Googled and looked at the top 10 results for companies offering private security patrol service … roving patrolmen or ‘watchmen” to keep businesses safe.

Only one out of the 10 even mentioned the magic letters “GPS” and they didn’t make much noise about it.  Apparently people in the security business are so overwrought with keeping things “private” and ’secure” that they are missing the whole point … it takes very little to set up in such a business and in any big metro areas there are dozens of competitors.  Every one has ‘the best” personnel, the “most impressive” resume, etc.  Just how on earth would a person wanting to hire the services of these guys ever differentiate one from the other?

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Today’s title as well as this quote below come from one of my personal hero’s, Peter Drucker (American management writer (1909 - 2005))

Know Thy Time

Effective executives start with their time.

“Know thyself,” the old prescription for wisdom, is almost impossibly difficult for mortal men. But everyone can follow the injunction “Know thy time” if one wants to, and be well on the road toward contribution and effectiveness.

Effective executives do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.

If you don’t read anything else for your business and personal well-being this week, go back and re-read that mini-essay on time.  There is nothing, literally not one single ting that you can do for your business that will have more impact and will cost you less than to stop running around stomping on cockroaches long enough to sit down, organize your thoughts and put enough time together in contiguous blocks to find their nest and poison them.

Believe me, Peter knew whereof he spoke.

Now, is there anything at all today about GPS Tracking ROI?  You bet there is.  Peter F. Drucker would have been a very effective GPS tracking salesman had he chosen that line of work.

• Your trucks are on the road … where, how often and how long?
• Your customers need service visits … where, how often and how long?
• Your technicians left the office when?  They took how long for lunch?

I was watching CNN last night and I see that oil futures just passed the $80 a barrel mark for the first time in history.  Just a year ago I was writing about the the industry’s “head in the sand” approach to fuel savings when the price of oil was shocking at $70 a barrel.  Where do you think it will be in September 2008?  <ore importantly, are you holding your breath waiting for the “shoe” of the next oil prices increase to drop?  or are you taking action to save your business now?  Leadership or management?

Measure, manage and insulated yourself from third-party threats … it doesn’t cost, it pays.

It’s really about time the trucking industry moved into the twentieth century … especially since we are now a number of years into the twenty-first.  

MILWAUKEE — Most truckers play by the rules.

Mile for mile, they have fewer accidents than cars. When a car and truck collide in serious accidents, it’s usually the car driver’s fault.

But every day, significant percentages of commercial truck drivers disregard the rules that are supposed to limit how long they work. Every month, surveys have indicated, one in eight long-haul truckers dozes at the wheel. And every year, hundreds of people die in collisions involving tired truck drivers… “It would be difficult to construct a more irresponsible approach to a technology that can help control hours-of-service violations, reduce fatigue and help improve driver help,” Donaldson, senior research director of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said at a hearing in March. “This proposed rule is so utterly ludicrous, so contemptuous of the need to curtail the epidemic of drivers falsifying their logbooks so they can drive until they literally fall asleep at the wheel.” …”That’s between 14 and 15 fatalities every day,” said Don Osterberg, vice president of safety and driver training for Green Bay, Wis.-based Schneider National Inc., one of the country’s largest trucking firms. “I firmly believe that that is unacceptable…” As reported here in the Arizona Daily Star, most truckers play by the rules, but some don’t.

The “rules” in question for interstate truckers are in the US Code of Federal Regulations, (49 CFR, Part 395) , written out in semi-plan English here at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration site.

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I only get my US mail every two weeks here at the current home of the GPS ROI blog. This is fine with me … I do almost everythig on line anyway. It does, however make the bi-weekly arrival of the courier a bit more of an event than the USPS letter carrier dropping of the dreck that passes for mail back in the USA.

While I was working on a few other projects I needed to do before I got ’round to posting on this blog, the doorbell rang and there was the courier with my mail packet. I noticed rigt away it was thick and larger than usual.

It’s as if Christmas had arrived here in September. The annual ESRI Map Book. Between that and the Sopranos DvD I got for my birthday this week, blog posting may be a little slow (er than normal)

ESRI, as many of my regular readers know is a fantastically successful GIS (Geographic Information System) company based in Redlands, California that has become the world leader in GIS. A basic description of GIS is to take graphical map data, when possible GPS-derived locations on the map and combine the “picture” side with database information. Census data to show income in areas of a city, geophysical survey data to paint a map with the most potentially successful areas to find oil, you name it … anything you have tabular data on for your business or research work almost certainly has some geographical component and almost everything can benefit from being visualized on a map.

The Map Book is a collection of work submitted by ESRI users to show the ways they have used maps and data to illustrate information … and the combination of diverse busiess and socially beneficial ideas combined with the actual artistic beauty of many of the products is simply fascinating. Fortunately, ESRI publishes the best of the Map book online. Go, look, learn, enjoy.

GPS creates new £345m advertising market

Author: Ian Grant

More than 40,000,000 people will be using their mobile phones to look up maps and routes by 2012, creating a search-based advertising market worth £354m, says market researcher Berg Insight.

It found that the market for map-related applications should grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60% from 4,000,000 users in 2007 to 43,000,000 users in 2012. Revenue from subscriptions and advertisement is expected to reach £345m 2012 from £60m in 2007, a CAGR of 40%.

The adoption rate will be driven mainly by adding GPS-technology in smartphone handsets and bundling navigation and map content with mobile devices or service plans, said Andre Malm, telecom analyst at Berg Insight…  read more about the advertising potential of GPS … LBS. Location Based Advertising at ComputerWeekly.

For the majority of my fellow Americans who never believe there is a world outside our borders, that’s about $700,000,000 USD (at least it is at today’s exchange rate, Lord knows what the slumping dollar will be worth tomorrow).  It’s a lot of boxes of canolis in Tony Soprano terms.

We in the GPS business tend to think of GPS only as a tool to navigate, help save lives and to save the all-mighty operating dollar for business.  It is all those things.  But, as with this look into the future, GPS is also things many of us have not imagined.

Advertising has long been the engine of business.  But today most forms of advertising have a glaring inadequacy … they are forced to use “peanut butter’ delivery systems.  Decide upon an ad spend (the amount of peanut butter in the jar) and spread it as thin as possible (to get maximum coverage) across the media vehicle selected … radio spot, TV commercial, news paper or web site.

The web is making headway in offering a degree of localization … you can buy ads through companies like Google AdWords (see sidebar) which deliver ads based on a user’s perceived location from his/her IP address.

But what could possibly beat the “punch” of sending a special on today’s hamburger extravaganza at the moment a car with a family of hungry kids turns off the Interstate at lunch time?  Talk about targeting!  And useful, too.  Can’t say how many times I have pulled off the highway wondering which of the totally unknown establishments ahead have anything good to offer.  Quite frankly I would welcome something that differentiated a business from another … when I was nearby and it meant something to me.  What do you think?  Useful?  Or too intrusive?

The Conde Nast Portfolio published a nice blog recently about the sad and senseless NY taxi strike.  I decided to furnish a few comments. 

New York Taxi Strike, GPS, and What Can Be

by Kevin Maney

I stood on Third Avenue in New York today, trying to hail a cab, and wondering why there seemed to be so few. Well, it’s because about one-third of them are on strike to protest the city’s insistence that each taxi install a GPS tracking system.

The opposition comes from one of the taxi drivers’ unions, which doesn’t like the fact that the system will cost drivers (who often own their own cabs and have to pay for improvements like this) some $6,000 a car.

This is one of my top objections to this whole madness.  I’ve written about it before, regarding both the New York fiasco and it’s very si8milar “train wreck’ companion in Philadelphia. See  More On How _Not_ To Implement GPS Tracking , NYC Cabbies Add New Reason To Hate GPS , Who The Heck Is Ron Blount And Why Should You Care? for a little background.

GPS tracking does NOT cost $6,000 per vehicle … by any stretch of the imagination.  yes, I know these are “sophisticated” units, credit card readers, (potentially) live video feeds, and so on, but this cost is way, way out of line.  Someone is being taken for a ride!  I’ve been specifying, writing proposals and doing government source selection for live GPS tracking systems since 1999.  I’ve also been a commercial seller of the technology, implemented a number of government and commercial systems, and I emphatically state that no matter if the drivers have to pay or the city should foot the cost, the costs are out of line with reality.  In Philadelphia, with a similar project, the city attorney even voiced his opinion that the deal was “improper’ ( Does GPS Tracking Have to Involve Crooked Dealing? ) but no one seems to have the “stones” to call a spade a spade … even in New York?

But in the long run, these things could reshape the way taxis work in a big city. The GPS can track the taxis, …. Or perhaps you could click on one of the dots on the map to let that taxi know you’re nearby and looking for a ride. The possibilities could get exciting.

Exactly, Kevin.  exciting and profitable.  In cites where GPS tracking, even in more rudimentary forms, has been successfully implemented many drivers are profiting from it. big time.  As I have said before, it is not the GPS tracking idea that has caused the strike, it’s mismanagement, ignorance of basic educational needs and a blatant power struggle between the city and the drivers … which need never have happened  … just start by 1., following sensible, honest procurement methods and 2., having some basic respect for the drivers human and civil rights.

CHANDLER, Ariz., Sept. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — ProLink Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ProLink Holdings Corp. and the world’s leading provider of Global Positioning Satellite (”GPS”) golf course management systems and digital out-of-home on-course advertising, today announced The Golf Club of The Wharf (Gulf Shores, Ala.) now features the ProLink Solutions GPS system used at many of the world’s most famous golf courses and plans to participate in ProLink’s exclusive national advertising opportunity.

Formerly called Gulf Shores Golf Club, The Golf Club of The Wharf underwent an extensive renovation in 2005-06 at the hands of father-son design team Jay and Carter Morrish. The overhaul lengthened the par-71 course by 300 yards and added numerous water features, bunkers and enhanced fairways. Now boasting five sets of tees ranging from 4,866 to 6,919 yards, the club is associated with The Wharf resort development in nearby Orange Beach, Ala.

“Thanks to ProLink GPS, our longtime golfers are able to quickly familiarize themselves with the changes to the course,” said Rea Schuessler, Head Golf Professional at The Golf Club of the Wharf. “It’s also a great tool for speeding pace of play, managing carts and food and beverage functions, while the advertising revenue-share component makes ProLink a truly sound investment.”  Full CNN GPS golf tracking story here.

Once again, incontrovertible proof that golf makes you smart!  Really kind of interesting to me.  I’ve published a number of articles in the past about gold courses and GPS.  See GPS And Google On The Golf Course? and What Do You Bet He “Can’t Afford” GPS Tracking For Company Vehicles for a few samples.

 I never learned to play.  I encouraged both my sons to learn to play also, but they didn’t choose to.  If only I had taken up golf … ideally back in high school, where my grades went to the toilet … perhaps I’d be running a golf course today and able to do the math that proves that a small investment can yield dividends far greater than the modest up-front cost.

More than 90% of US businessmen can’t do that simple math … and probably more than 95% of public fleet managers find such “rocket science” eludes them … but hardly a week goes by that I don’t see an article like this one.

GPS tracking costs a modest amount to implement.  The cost to get the program underway is normally recovered in six-months time … often much quicker.  The payoffs then roll in, month after month, year after year.  learn about it, get the true cost, then try it, you’ll like it.  As my old dearly departed friend Justin E. Wilson (April 24, 1914 - September 5, 2001) was famous for saying, “I gar-on-tee!“