GPS Tracking ROI

Monitor Technician and Fleet Performance in Real-Time

• Best-in-Class report an 84% success rate in meeting promised response times compared to 20% for Laggards.
• Best-in-Class report a 4x advantage over Laggards in current workforce utilization.
• Best-in-Class reported service margin improvements four-times those of Laggard firms over the last two years.

Demand from customers for improved service performance, in the form of faster service resolution and improved asset uptime is forcing service organizations to leverage location intelligence to appropriately allocate their field resources. Firms that have leveraged location intelligence have seen sizeable improvements to service response times, workforce utilization, and service profitability.

• You have $50,000 invested in a truck, tools and test equipment
• You invest more than $50,000 a year in labor and training per tech
• You spend thousands and thousand per year in truck operating costs
• But you can’t see that less than $1 a day can quadruple profits?

sign up for and read the report … the people who wrote it now more than I do … but I know they are right.

Monday, 11 February 2008
YARMOUTH, Maine - DeLorme, a long-time leader in affordable GIS innovation, today announced the release of Public Land Survey System (PLSS) data for use in all current versions of XMap, their GIS software.

These free downloadable Openspace GIS layers display township, range, and section boundaries for each of the 30 states covered by the PLSS. Derived from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Geological Survey, and state GIS agencies, the data has been processed into a consistent and easy-to-use format… read more here, including a nice capsule description of the PLSS

One of the things that made America great and certainly differentiates us from other countries with large land areas is the Public Land Survey System (PLSS).  Instead of waiting for surveys to make their way to each parcel of land here and there as the population moved westward our government used foresight and invested public funds in surveying the land ahead of time .. marking off lines of latitude and longitude and carving up the wide open spaces into standardized units that could describe tracts of land from a tiny garden plot to a huge ranching empire.

You’ve all seen this system if you’ve flown over the mid-west and west … the long (almost) parallel lines of ’section line roads’, the checkerboard grid of farms and towns and the slicing angles of railroads and Interstates that chose not to follow the lines.  It truly is a remarkable piece of American enterprise and history.

There’s a small problem, though.  The surveyors of 100 years and more in the past used the best instruments and techniques they had, but today PLSS features and property descriptions do not always match up with modern GPS-based maps.

I chased communication cables across the plains of the Northern Tier for years, wishing there was a way to get all the data onto one map.  This has long been one of those "keys to the kingdom" issues I have mentioned often in the past … where holders of the information … sometimes even public entities … wanted to keep what they had locked away from others … the "it’s Our data" syndrome.  believe me, it has hurt a lot of GIS and GPS development ideas.

Hat’s off to DeLorme for breaking yet another log jam.  Information yearns to be free, needs to be free, and little by little we’re getting there.

Trucking companies consider suing Canadian province

Some trucking companies in Quebec are considering suing the province’s Transport Ministry for effectively putting 135 bridges off-limits by increasing the weight restrictions.

Today’s Trucking reports that heavy haulers in particular claim the restrictions have paralyzed their businesses.

The restrictions were put in place after a bridge collapse in Laval killed five people and injured six in September 2006.

I wasn’t even planning to write again today, but I came across this news item and I just couldn’t resist.  It isn’t even about GPS Tracking directly … although it certainly could be … if trucking companies wanted to deal with the real world where bridges have finite weight limits and they were to use GPS navigation to find alternate routes and GPS tracking to assure their loaded trucks went the most efficient (oh, and safe also) routes.

But apparently the real world has little to do with business these days.  A obstacle to running things exactly the way the company and drivers want to run them crops up.  So let’s see … courses of appropriate action….

Well, if you are George Bush you start a war with whomever you feel is not on your side.  Hmm, strike that, most trucking companies don’t have the firepower of the Canadian Armed Forces, and there don’t seem to be any Muslims or gays at fault, so we can’t claim the "high moral ground".

Oh, let’s see, apparently canada has a surplus of attorneys spilling over the border from the US and not enough real legal issues for them to be occupied with, so, let’s sue the government.  After all, this is clearly a case of the government going wild .. a bridge collapses and kills people.  Engineers determine overloading to be a factor and restrict existing bridges that haven’t yet collapsed and killed anybody before they collapse.  That’s grounds for a suit in anyone’s book, eh?  Not to mention that if you business is suffering from decreased income and profits you really are going to get more money to the bottom line by paying millions ad millions to litigious ‘legal gladiators’.  You know lawyers are not the only educated professionals with a tradition of ethics.

Candia, in particular, is blessed by a triton of very high regard for engineers, symbolized by the Iron Ring.  The Ring is given as part of "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer" [1], written by Rudyard Kipling….. The Ring is a symbol of both pride and humility for the engineering profession.

When engineers don’t do their work properly, this sort of thing results … and in addition to loss of life, it makes profits for trucking firms who planned tot use the bridge pretty hard to come by as well.

I read several recent articles on the calling of an Engineer which claim the 1907 Quebec bridge disaster was not the spark that started the Canadian ring tradition … I’ll not argue the point, but I had the opportunity to work for a long line of Canadian engineers in a past job and I doubt they would agree.

So is attempting to support bridges by legal pleadings rather than the proper amount of steel the dumbest thing in this article?  Might be.

But if you have a working knowledge of the English language, read the first paragraph and tell me how "Increasing" weight restrictions poses a problem for truckers?  An imaginary super-bridge would have no weight restrictions and truckers and engineers would never have to consider weight.  but in the real world, government agencies progressively decrease and sometimes decrease again the weight allowed on a bridge until it does become a significant factor.  Increasing weight restrictions can only lead to heavier trucks and thus more profit.  Increase?  Decrease?  just pick one and let’s go for coffee.

I sincerely hope the trucking companies considering this legal process hire lawyers who can write better than the editorial staff at "LandLine", because I read, and then re-read the  little article and am at a complete loss as to how a professional copy editor would let that out the door.  A sad commentary on the death of our language.

I

It’s an industry where miles and minutes are king.

"It’s a game of pennies," said Jeff Berlin, executive vice president and chief financial officer of E.L. Hollingsworth & Co., a Flint-based trucking firm. "It’s a game of cents per mile."

And the roughly 30 dispatchers who work around the clock for the trucking company now have a high-tech center. They track and monitor 420 trailers and nearly 300 trucks for the company and its customers, primarily in the automotive industry.

The new $70,000 renovation — featuring a tiered design, open room and 6- by 4-foot screens and 50-inch plasma TVs — is a far cry from the cubicles where they used to work.

The dispatch center, which was garage space, features screens that show such things as a weather map; views of the company’s truck yards in Flint, Burton, Dearborn and Lebanon, Tenn. … and one that alerts dispatchers of drivers who may be getting close to U.S. Department of Transportation limits for driving hours.

Another screen, a large U.S. map, shows dispatchers where drivers are. Color-coded dots indicate if they are running on time or behind schedule or are empty and available to pick up freight.

"I’ll put that up against anything in the state of Michigan right now," Berlin said. "There’s just a lot of technology in trucking these days."

The company said the dispatch center gives the company a competitive advantage and helps them provide exceptional service. You can read the source for the original Flint Journal via Michigan Live write up here:

I  really thought an article this interesting deserved a picture or two so I wrote to Mr. Berlin of Hollingsworth & Co. and he was kind enough to provide a few and answer some important questions.  I appreciate the assistance.

What he couldn’t really answer and what I can’t as well is actually why this article is so newsworthy.  The GPS tracking system that E. L. Hollingsworth & Co. uses, the  Qualcomm Omnitracs is an excellent, industry-standard tool, but it’s not new … the large white Qualcomm "bubbles" have been a frequent site on US highways for at least 12 or 14 years now.

But companies willing to spend what amounts to, le’s face it, the cost of a cargo trailers or two to put the Qualcomm and the rest of their business IT investment to use by all areas of the company are still few and far between.

Even more rare are the companies who do make smart use of the technology who take the time to get their innovation out into public view, so that prospective drivers, potential shippers and the general public learn just a bit about how far trucking has come and how far it is going to go forward in the coming years. 

Does your company already make smart use of their existing technology?  Do your prime customers use it, as Hollingsworth’s do, to get a better bank for their buck (and cement the idea they are dealing with an industry leader)? 

I make a tip of the GPS ROI blog hat to ELHC and offer a challenge to anyone doing something equal or better … let me know, I’d love to write about your work too. 

OPAD Day 5

Well, gee, no of course not, what a silly question to ask … or not.

Those who have read my writings for along time know that one of the primary reasons GPS ‘got off the ground’ literally was the support from the US Navy for a new system to replace the existing Transit satellite system which was built specifically to allow missile submarines (Boomers in the trade) to update their postions accurately … you cna’t control where a missile is going to land unless you know where you are firing it from.

But these vessels still need to surface (or come close enough to raise an antenna) in order to use GPS.  GPS on ships, though has revolutionized the face of maritime transportation.  Ships are no longer "somewhere between here and there"

One of the most interesting applications GPS has made much simpler and more precise is the laying down, maintenance and emergency repair of undersea cable systems.

Somehow a lot of people seem tothink that most of the world’s data gets from place to place via satellite … but this just isn’t so.

Satellites have some very important uses and in some locations of the world are heavily depended upon, but when you live in one populated country and click on a URL to visit a web page of interests the chances that your request and the information that comes back travels via undersea cable are high.

We, of course, were re-awakened to this fact just this morning when a couple of cables under the Mediterranean Sea apparently suffered some sort of damage and whole areas of the Middle East and India started receiving nothing but error messages.  here’s a map and write-up from a fascinating company that tracks these undersea cable systems … I think the average person would be absolutely amazed at how many systems there are already in place and how many are being built.  the world’s appetitive for digital information seems insatiable and underseas fiber optics is the only way to keep it in check.

So what’s GPS got to do with this?  In the simplest way we can be sure that one or more cable repair ships like this one (a ship I’ve personally spent time on as KDD maintained cables for me in Japan, … domo arigato, guys … are already steaming to the suspected break locations, of course navigating there via the shortest possible route using GPS.

Once over the site of the damage, they will use extremely precise survey-grade GPS systems to locate their positron within centimeters, fish up the cable, repair and restore to full operation.  It’s a fascinating process, and although it can be done without GPS … it was for more than 100 years … it works better. faster, cheaper today and brings us a lot of data we take for granted.

So, no, GPS signals can’t effectively be used underwater, but GPS has certainly reshaped the face of underwater work.