GPS Tracking ROI

My letter to Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott would go like this:
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During an October speech to employees, Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott said that by 2015, the retailer’s fleet of 7,100 trucks would achieve 13 mpg. Currently, its fleet averages 6.5 mpg.
The improvements “will not only change our fleet but eventually change trucks everywhere in the world,” Scott said in the October address.
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Dear Mr. Scott. Congratulations on taking the bill by the horns on an issue of deep importance. Today’s trucking industry is suffering from an epidemic of whining and hand wringing mainly brought out by the 2007 EPA Emissions regulations which will force more economic, and hence more profitable engines in an industry whose major impediment to progress is its own fear of change. The 2007 regulations will increase economy as a byproduct of the lower emissions standards but in terms of moving the country forward, I feel, they do not go far enough.

It’s very interesting that Wal-Mart, an enterprise which only relies on trucks as am adjunct to their main business role would be the first to publicly see the advantages to taking an important but well-considered and certainly doable step to increased profits.

We live in a country that placed men on the moan numerous times and yet now can hardly put a man in earth orbit. We live in a world that flew the Atlantic in 3 hours routinely and comfortably and now can’t do it in six. We are assailed by whiners on a daily basis predicting how “foreign” manufacturing and outsourcing will be the death of America and yet have corporations like Wal-Mart leading the way in making huge strides in employing Americans, at a profit, by using foreign production as what it is meant to be … a tool in the business leader’s portfolio of methods of growing his or her business.

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Jim Dugan, a spokesman for Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar Inc., a supplier of truck and bus engines, said that while customers desire improved fuel efficiency, predicting what mileage rates diesel engines will be able to reach in the future is not easy.
“It’s hard to hazard a guess that far in advance,” Dugan said.
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Caterpillar supplies a lot of engines to Wal-Mart. Isn’t that a wonderfully supportive statement to come from a major supplier to a major customer who wants to spend more? “It’s hard to hazard a guess…”, well Mr. Dugan, I would submit you and Caterpillar are expected by your stockholders to do more than hazard guesses. Right now you are sitting back and enjoying your ample salary and benefits because there has always been a Caterpillar and there always will be. If I were with a world-class engine manufacturer I’d be telling Mr. Scott, “You bet we will, in fact we’ll do 14 mpg.”. A few years from now when some Chinese diesel manufacturer (or here’s a thought, someone brave enough to look beyond heavy, stinky diesels) says , “here’s your 13 mpg engine, Wal-Mart.” the Mr. Dugans of the US transportation industry will go crying to Washington for relief, citing all the American jobs lost to “those damn foreigners”.

Here’s a thought for Mr. Dugan and the rest of the naysayers out there … some free advice which I would usually charge professional service fees for …. get a clue! Those American jobs won’t be lost (and they will be lost with your present attitude) due to ‘the foreigners’. They will be lost to you, the highly paid American business leaders sitting on your duffs telling major customers what can’t be done. The writing is on the wall, can you read it?

To conclude with Mr. Scott, go for it, sir. Stay the course and realize that you know more than these naysayers, that Wal-Mart is more powerful and has more business savvy, even if you’re not in their particular market niche. 13 mpg is doable, and more.

Oh, and as a PS., Wal-Mart is a big-time Qualcomm GPS user. So is Werner and a number of other large trucking firms. Yet Werner is the only company making use of their OmniTRACS GPS tracking systems to run automated log books? Why is that one wonders? It’s not only a great employee-pleasure and a recognized risk management tool, it’s apart of the more mileage equation just as much as new tire technology of fender skirts.

PPS. For anyone who wants to save 10 to 15% on their fuel costs the technology is ready today, see: www.satviz.com

ok, seems like you can’t mention GPS without the word cost in the same sentence, even though the basic infrastructure of the technology is free and equipment is cheaper every day.

Secondly, when it comes to preventing crime, everyone thinks it’s good idea, but nobody wants to leap out and pay for it. Hard to blame anyone in government for not taking the lead on this either, nobody (except the police officer on the beat) actually gets paid to reduce crime.

The article I posted above, though, has some masterful thought behind it. It’s well worth a read and some thoughtful reflection. We all know crime ought to be reduced, and we all know there’s a huge emotional as well as a dollar and cents cost to crime. But there often seems so little that we can actually quantify. Doing the right thing is the thing to do and going good deeds is high on everyone’s list of “wanna dos”, but a bean counter can’t assign value to good deeds.

Well, let’s out on our bean counter hat and see is we can’t do some real world math here. First of all, we don’t know how to assign a value to the human cost of crime. The suffering of a rape victim, the problems the children of an incarcerated criminal face while growing up, the fear that sweeps over the store clerk when the crook points the gun at her .. these are horrible, tragic things, but since we are pretending to be verified bean counters we must assign them all a dollars and cents cost of zero.

Now, for every crime there is a perpetrator. Our law enforcement system (a very expensive service of society, by the way) has the task of preventing (when possible) the commission of crime, and when a crime does occur, apprehending the criminal. From there the criminal enters the justice system and likely as not will be incarcerated, or place don supervised parole, if found guilty.

There is probably no one reading this message who hasn’t, at some point in their life, had the urge to commit a crime. What stopped us? Well, moral teachings, conscience, but (come clean now), the thought that we might get arrested and go to jail. Goodness knows how many assinine supervisors are alive or how many diamond rings are still in the jewelry store showcase because of the fear of incarceration. But obviously, this fear isn’t enough, because hundreds of thousands of crimes still get committed each year and one has to assume that the vast majority of the perpetrators knew about the police and the legal system.

Actually, many of those perpetrators were just poker players. depending on the crime and the area you commit it, the chances of actually getting caught can be relatively small. Too large for you and I perhaps, but for a high stakes player, not all that bad. So it’s pretty clear we need something extra in addition to the present system to stare potential crooks in the eye and make them weight the odds more closely.

When a violator is convicted and sent to prison he or she obviously won’t be committing any more crimes from the inside, but remember that bean counter hat? It costs about $30,000 a year, on average, to incarcerate a prisoner. Put a thousand crooks behind bars and you’re looking at 30 million bucks, per year, to keep them from committing another crime.

Obviously, we don’t try to lock up every offender, for life. We couldn’t afford to. So we let them out on supervised parole. This costs money too, but a lot less. The problem has always been, it’s impractical to have parole office/parolee contact more frequently than every week or so, at best, and a hell of a lot of crime can happen in a week. So, more crime gets committed and more parolee’s get yanked back into the prison system, at $30k per year.

Enter GPS tracking. For about $3200 a year an offender can be monitored 24×7. Right away we are looking at a nearly 10 to 1 cost savings. With a properly administered system the terms of release can be set up in any appropriate way. An offender can be allowed out on “house arrest”, only being given permission to leave his residence for work and other authorized tasks, s/he can be allowed to go anywhere excepting ares prohibited by the terms of the release programs, hours of the day, days of the week, literally any restriction desired can be designed in at no extra cost.

If a 10 to 1 savings isn’t enough, remember that the offender can be made to pay any or all of the cost of the system. Monetary fines are typical of many sentences, there’s absolutely no reason that the fine could not be assessed to cover the cost of the surveillance. So we could be looking at nearly a 100% savings. Bean counters should actually be rubbing their hands in glee.

Lastly, consider one other phenomenon not directly calculable on a spreadsheet. In my experience using GPS tracking to monitor truck fleets, business vehicles and teenage drivers, it’s easily shown that the fact that the subjects are being monitored has a direct bearing on their tendency to make the right choices. Once drivers know that all their speeding will be shown, or that non-use of their seatbelt will be directly monitored, their behavior changes, predictably, so that they commit offenses at a much, much lower rate. It’s easy to see how widespread use of GPS tracking will cause a very large percentage of offenders to calculate the odds differently so that their “poker equation” works out much closer to a normal person’s. Thus the human cost of crime, which we agreed at the beginning is huge, but not readily expressed in arithmetic terms will be substantially lower. This is another great gain to society and it comes along as a free bonus to the actual arithmetic cost savings.

So, if you’re involved in the criminal punishment/crime prevention business … or you vote for people who are, next time you hear the old “we have no money” refrain you now know that whole excuse is false and non-thinking. let;s think like a “bean counter” and make our world a safer, better place to live and save a fortune while we’re doing it.

I’m not too sure about some people’s feelings, but I personally think the TSA mavens are missing the point completely. While we debate about how big nail clipper scissors may be we let thousands of shipments like this one travel the nations highways unmonitored.

The story above is from Canad, but it’s 100% applicable to the US. It also had a happy ending due to the fact that the trucking company owner had invested in a GPS tracking system.

But, since this shipment did not carry explosives, it would have been perfectly legal for these armored (and able to be armed) military vehicles to travel with no one watching. For years now the TSA has been mulling over the idea of tracking hazardous and potentially hazardous cargo in the US, yet no a single viable effort has been made to do actually _do_ anything about it.

Most of the TSA’s work has consisted of conferences where industry execs moan about the idea being “too hard:”, or meetings with tracking company leasers who spend the time arguing how their technology is the only viable one … and not a damn thing gets done.

In the meantime the TSA spins it’s wheels with re-wickering the rules on what can be hand carried onto airplanes … ignoring unmonitored containers of cargo on the same flights, or even armored missile launchers.

This might be an excellent time to write your representatives and tell them that the Michael Brown style of TSA leadership is now run it’s course. If we don’t monitor armored vehicle shipments then what on earth _should_ we be monitoring? And I’m talking a government-operated GPS master tracking facility that would actually keep tabs on these dangerous devices, not a simple reliance on the good will and public-spirited efforts of individual truck owners. Anyone else out there concerned?

I’m busy with the multi-part teen GPS series of posts but I came across this item which seemed a bit too good to pass up.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a teen or a tottering old man as I am, there’s little doubt that fatigue plays a significant part in the risk factor.

One thing many managers and business owners overlook when thinking of GPS fleet monitoring is the manager’s role in fatigue-related accidents.

In egregious cases some business owners have been fined or even jailed for hiding the fact that their drivers have been exceeding the hours of service rules.

But even if there’s no direct liability, simple business sense (an humanity) dictates that on the road fatigue is something a business owner needs to keep on his radar screen.

For businesses with local delivery fleets the driving rules are significantly different. In some cases drivers can put in 16 hour days … and often can’t work that long again for a period of time. Do you know the rules?

More importantly, can you document what your drivers have been doing? If there’s a fatal wreck and one of your drivers is charged with being the cause, how would you go about proving his or her hours of service .. you might need to go back two weeks or more?

Something to think about when you are wrestling with the GPS/non GPS cost benefit analysis asnd calculating your ROI period.

Measuring what you manage might turn out to be cheaper than you think.

Here’s a nice little news item to brighten a Monday morning. A trucking fleet owner has one of his trucks captured by an unmanned speed camera at 247 km/h … that’s about 159 mph for the Metrically challenged.

The fine and subsequent insurance problems could have put a real dent in his November profits and the driver .. he probably would have been lucky to get away without jail time.

the ace in the hole was an on board GPS tracker that showed the truck was doing on 80 clicks .. about 50 mph.

You’ll notice the weasel wording about how the court wouldn’t have accepted the proof from the owner unless the device had been calibrated, yada yada yada, but guess what? The charge went away. years before I was in the GPS business I used to calibrate radar speed guns and was often called upon as an expert witness. Even in cases of obvious malfunctions of equipment, courts almost never acknowledge them. They just dismiss the case or find another excuse to let the driver off.

Many GeoTab customers have had the same kind of experience. The use of these speed cameras is rampant in England and other former British colonies and the horror stories about their inaccuracy abound. A simple on board device that tracks speed to GPS accuracy (within a 10th of a mile per hour) can often mean the difference between profit and loss for a month.

Perhaps it’s only coincidence that my flagship GeoTab product originated in South Africa … tracking diamond carriers and gold ore trucks?

My last post regarding making progress on integrated E911 … putting cell phone locations on maps for emergency response has led to a thought for the day. The world is full of highly talented programmers, Always endeavoring to “show off” their “stuff”. There are great tools available, such as Google earth that are free, or very cheap to use.

When a community decides to implement E911 response they need two main things, A feed from the phone provider giving the coordinates (lat/long, UTM, etc.) of the calling phones and a map to display the location on.

A thought for those working on the next tweak to some arcane command in Linux, yet another free content management system or still one more plug in for Firefox … what about a simple interface to put the phone location data into a KML file and a network interface to Google Earth?

Seems like all the info needed is readily available on line and putting just one location on G-E can even be done manually with a click of the mouse.

Sounds like an interesting project to me.

Vehicle technology could be used to nab unregistered cars and to collect tolls and taxes based on when and where motorists drive.

Roads could soon start paying for themselves, as vehicle technology companies roll out new systems that could charge higher tolls during rush hour, allow lone drivers to pay for carpool lanes, or automatically send out vehicle fines, experts said Wednesday.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

  “People really want more of this to keep traffic moving,” said Jonathan Dinh, marketing and program support specialist at Scientific Technologies………..

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