GPS Tracking ROI

My anti-GPS privacy advocate readers will undoubtedly get all worked up over this one.  A few jealous boyfriends or unsure fathers and husbands may start thinking about buying Christmas gifts from the manufacture, and some may not be pleased with the idea of making GPS tracking sexy.  But here at GPS Tracking ROI we leave no stone unturned (or hem un-lifted) to bring you the straight story on profitable and innovative uses for GPS tracking.

I guess this post should just consist of one of those pictures that speak for themselves.  But you know me, never one with nothing to say ;-).

Several years back there was a semi-elaborate scam about a supposed Japanese manufacture called “Panchira” (panchira, by the way is Japanese slang for “show your panties) which was producing a line of GPS locatable lingerie.  Turns out the hoax was originally perpetrated by a fellow who just wanted to get more traffic to his web site.  he did.

I wrote a follow-on to that piece almost a year ago, entitled “tracking her panties for fun and profit”.

When I saw a news item this morning I immediately thought, “is this April First”?  When I double cheeked the calendar and then the rest of the details it looks like this is a “for real” development this time.

I’m still unsure if this can really be made workable with the size, antenna requirements and power budgets of today’s devices, but I’m no engineer and who am I to throw cold water on innovation.

A loose translation of the Portuguese tagline under the model is, “Capable of finding me”, an indeed, thousands already have.  Who says GPS Tracking can’t be beautiful as well as practical?

Is this a news item that could have been written about your state, county, school district or company?

“We lost track of 1,300 sex offenders,” the actress says. “We know they’re out there. But, thanks to Governor Gregoire, we have no idea where.”

That’s the message to voters delivered in television ads and a few hundred thousand mailers on behalf of Chris Gregoire’s opponent, former state Sen. Dino Rossi… Read more abut the losses you will incur if you don’t take advantage of GPS tracking.

Everyone thinks of GPS tracking from the aspect of providing up-to-date locations and conditons of on-the-road assets.  This, is of course a primary benefit.  I wrote just a day or two ago about a propective client of mine who could have actaull made money with GPS tracking in just one transaction with a simple reant-a-car operation.

But GPS tracking cna do a whole lot more.

• I’ve written frequently on how GPS tracking of parolee’s and sex offenders can pay of big time in both human and monetary terms.
• I’ve pointed out as well that many states and counties don’t even know how many vehciles they have, much less where they are at any given moment.
• And now we find that an otherwise progressive state like Washington can’t even account for 1600 of it’s sex offenders … which it already has pent a fortune on, putting them into a so-called system of tracking that the law requires.

How plain does this have to be made?  i am not tlaking politics here.  I don’t vote in Eashington, I know nothing about the candiadtes and I frankly could not care less on a political standpoint.

But for an elected governor and his staff to actually lose (as confirmed by his own State Police) more than a thousand felons is just … well I’m at a oss for a word that coveys more in the way of wrong doing than malfease.

If you are responsible to know the “how many and where” of any asset, then you are actully losing a fortune by not taking advantage of the rapid ROI of GPS tracking. You could even get run out of office.

I’m continuing my series based on this recent report, focused mainly on New Zealand and Australia but with world-wide applicability to my readers.  The sensational aspect of the report alleges GPS tracking of employees was at least in part to blame for the regrettable suicide of an Australian communications technician … which is where the title came from … but the report also explains how many employers are suing GPS tracing for improved ROI, customer service and even employee safety.  I’ll present some facts, and you can be the judge.  If you haven’t already done so I highly recommend you read the whole GPS Tracking Drives Employees Over the Edge article, as it is well written and brings up many areas of concern.  here are a couple more areas of concern and my opinion, based on real-world experience.

… the level of detail provided by GoFinder’s reports was unnecessary in normal work contexts.

“A missing car can be located without having it self-report continually or even regularly - it just needs to respond when asked,”…

I sincerely hope that the folks who hold these ideas never find themselves upside down in a ditch.  I know, I know, this can never happen to you but a hundred thousand or so drivers world-wide each year find out that in the blink of an eye they suddenly have become the “other guy” … the one who always has the accident.  In order to be of any real safety value, the GPS tracking must now the vehicle’s location as often as possible.

One of my first government customers had a fleet of over 2,100 vehicles which drove more than 2 million miles per year, often on unimproved roads in remote locations.  Equipping the fleet with GPS tracking had been discussed for a number of years until the fateful year when the client suffered three separate fatal accidents involving employees coupled with 13, yes thirteen separate roll-over accidents.  Gravel roads, winter blizzard conditions, high winds and driver immaturity were all likely factors.

So the client sprang for and installed a fleet-wide proof of concept test … we installed 300 GPS tracking units on vehicles which the client had identified as his highest risk assets.  On the first day that we had any units installed … with full knowledge of the drivers, by the way … the client joined me in the control room where we had the vehicle’s “on screed”.  His first comment?  “Why do they all seem to be going so fast”?

Well they “seemed” to be going so fast was because they were going so fast.  The drivers, over the years, had adopted a unit behavior climate where regulations of the ‘boss’ were translated into the thought of ‘suggestions’ to the drivers.  In the first month, by actual measurement, fleet-wide average speed went down 20 miles per hour … yes, that much.  I know you think your drivers aren’t this bad … but neither did this man.

The third day the concept test was running a driver hopped in his vehicle for his first trip of the day, gunned it out of it’s gravel parking space, twisted the wheel on a patch of mixed ice and gravel and … yup, you guessed, Wham! upside down in the ditch that bordered the parking area.  Of course the antenna for the GPS unit was mounted on the roof.  After finding out about the accident via a telephone call from the site, the client arrived in the control room again visibly upset that the accident had not been reported by the GPS.  After a cup of coffee and a few minutes conversation the client began to understand why a radio-based device was likely to be rather less than dependable with a 4,000 pound SUV resting atop it in the bottom of a drainage ditch.

What might have happened to the driver had the client followed the somewhat unrealistic suggestion of not tracking the vehicles as they drove and only determining their GPS position when they were obviously overdue?  How long would you like to be under a truck in a ditch before someone sent you help?

“Vehicle over-use can be controlled through periodic checks of mileage against travel plans and travel reports.”

Sorry, but this one is patent nonsense.  read just a few of my experiences in this line here and here.  I can make mileage records show anything you want them to show if it is my intention to deceive you.  In addition, another client did some analysis of his labor hours and found out one of his top office assistants spent a minimum of four hours per week on resolving discrepancies between mileage reports turned in by drivers and actual odometer readings made by mechanics when the vehicle’s came in for routine maintenance.  How much profit is there to your business in reconciling mileage report discrepancies?  Not much I would recon.  Why not use a system which automatically reports and put those office assistants and skilled mechanics to work at their highest and best value tasks to help your bottom line?

The owner of a Sydney car rental dealership, who also wished to remain anonymous, said he installed the tracking devices mainly because he charges by the kilometre and some customers abused this by disconnecting the speedometer.

Is anything involving your business profit and loss directly applicable to readings off the odometer?  You think that only an infinitesimal percentage of customers would cheat you this blatantly?  Well, keep believing it … perhaps wishing will make it so.  There are a thousand and one ways a customer can cheat you on mileage … or a customer can abandon the vehicle and leave you the task of finding it.  How much net loss on the rental will you have then?

A prospective client in Colorado rented a car to a customer who drove it to Louisiana (in violation of the rental contract, by the way).  While driving around in Baton Rouge the car overheated.  The customer drove the car to a local repair shop, locked it up and flew home saying nothing to anyone.  The client, who had not yet opted to have any units installed, might never have found the car until about 7 days after the car’s return was overdue the owner of the service establishment had a locksmith come and open the car and tracked down my client’s address and phone number via the rental papers.  Did the owner of the repair shop call just to be a good guy?  Nope.  he called to inform my soon-to-be client that there was already an outstanding bill of $100 a day for unauthorized parking as well as $75 dollars for the locksmith plus phone charges.  Grrr.

After paying an employee to fly to Louisiana, pay the bills, discover and rectify the cooling problem … 4 days total to get home, my client tracked down and located the original renter and suit in small claims court.  The judge’s decision?  The renter must pay the client for the original rental fee, the client must absorb the rest of the costs since he had clearly furnished a defective vehicle.  Ouch.

Still think it’s smart to ‘save’ the money a GPS tracking system on your rental fleet would cost?  Heck, if the repair shop owner hadn’t gone out of his way to collect for his ‘parking fees’ the car might still be in Baton Rouge.

At last.  One immense and important step along the highway that virtually every single GPS tracking manufacturer has been ignoring, and nearly every customer has been asking for:

Best Buy launching cellular modem-equipped GPS units

by Donald Melanson, posted Oct 3rd 2008 at 3:11PM

Best Buy sure looks to be aiming high with its first Insignia-branded GPS units, which will apparently not only pack all the expected run-of-the-mill specs but two-way, Dash-like communication as well. That desirable feature will be included on both the 4.3-inch NS-CNV20 and 3.5-inch NS-CNV10 models, each of which make use of that cellular connectivity to provide real-time traffic information and access to Google Local Search, among other things, all of which will be free for the first year (no word on pricing after that). In addition to a larger screen, the $499 NS-CNV20 will also give you some built-in Bluetooth, but if that’s more than you need, you can save a $100 and opt for the $399 NS-CNV10. Look for both to go on sale October 19th. .. Tip of the Bloh Hat to Engadget, read their full article on GPS navigation with a two-way comm link to enable tracking here.

Geotab. Fleetboss, Qualcomm, @Road, Network Car, the rest of you out there … you8 haven’t been listening, perhaps, since a picture is alleged to be wrth a thousand words, you can ‘hear’ this.

Next time you hear your police telling you why there are reasons his patrol cars shouldn’t have GPS tracking, just think of this guy:

A global positioning device showed suspended Tazewell County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeff Bass spent hours at his home, businesses and parked behind a barn while on duty, according to testimony Friday in the third day of his disciplinary hearing…

Lower said Bass "signed on" for duty via police radio at 5:58 a.m. but didn’t leave (home) in his patrol car until 8:50 a.m.

This is a problem we here at SatViz see in a huge percentage of both our business and our public service GPS tracking installation.  Employees who "just don’t get going".  Usually it’s not quite as egregious as this example, but think of this … fifteen minutes a day.  Common, Dave, it’s only 15 minutes" some have said to me.  "Fine," is my response.  "Fifteen minutes a day is more than a week and half per work year … so you’re saying that even a guy who started work yesterday should get a week and a half vacation"?

Deputies are allowed to take patrol cars home but must be in uniform ready to begin their shift from inside it….After leaving his house nearly three hours later than he was supposed to, Bass drove to the Hopedale Medical Complex, where his wife was employed at the time, and then to Springfield, where he stopped at a cafe.

From there, Lower said, Bass drove to his accountant’s office in Peoria….

Perhaps figuring out how to hide some of his ill-gotten (or at least unworked for gains) for the taxman?

Lower also described numerous other instances when Bass should have been patrolling a particular district inside Tazewell County but wasn’t.

Sheriff Bob Huston’s attorney Thomas McGuire had Lower describe what the device recorded for six days in Sept. 2005.

Lower said Bass spent hours at his home, went to his mother’s house, his dry cleaning business and restaurant, the Peoria Civic Center and other places….

Not long ago I had a client whom I was helping to iron out some irregularities.  He had one employee who was pretty much a model employee in every way … including how he drove his company truck … except for one nagging thing.  Every Saturday … which was a time and half day for pay purposes, this guy would stop  for two hours or more at what my manager friend thought was a retail store customer.  I suggested we use Google Maps to look closer at the guy’s exact location.  Hmmm.  It wasn’t quite that retail store my client had thought.  It was on the street behind the store, and looking up the employee’s file, guess what?  The address he stopped at, every single Saturday afternoon … at time and a half?  It was his mom’s house.  Dutiful son.

He also said Bass spent hours parked behind a barn at an abandoned farm house on 14th Street, "on numerous occasions." …

Rest of the article is here: GPS tracking use in the real world .  If you want to know a bit more of my own real-world experiences with "cooping" (the police slang term for what this guy was doing out behind the barn) you can read this article.  Who Watches Who Watches? And when you are done looking around here, do me one favor?  Do something!

Here’s a nice news item that just crossed my desk this am.  The state of South Carolina is smart,way, way smarter than most of the other 50.  Hats off to Don Tudor of the Department of Education and the rest of the South Carolina Budget and Management team.

Budgeting is not seeing how little you can spend.  Proper budgeting is studying and then executing smart ways to provide service, even better service than today and spend less to do so.  "We don’t have the money" is a continual mantra chant of thousands and thousands of officials in Mr. Tudor’s capacity.  They really need to look at the long term budgetary effects, not how much is in the checking account today.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina is looking to save money by spending roughly $4 million on GPS units that can track every move made by the state’s school buses and road construction vehicles.

The state expects to award a contract this week for 12,250 GPS tracking devices, with just more than half outfitting the state’s fleet of public school buses and the rest put on Department of Transportation vehicles, from backhoes to roadside safety trucks. Nine companies submitted bids, according to the state Budget and Control Board.

Cities and school districts around the country are using the technology to cut waste and abuse. New York City is outfitting a still-undetermined number of its school buses through a pilot program this year. But as the nation’s only state to own and maintain a statewide school bus fleet, South Carolina may be the first state to install GPS units on all of its school buses.

Beyond tracking vehicles, the GPS units will transmit when drivers speed, excessively idle and accelerate, which transportation officials want to eliminate.

"We can tell the driver to stop," said Don Tudor, the state Education Department’s transportation director.

If the devices cut fuel use by just a couple of gallons of gas daily per bus, they’ll pay for themselves within a year. (my emphasis.  In more than 5 years selling and implementing these systems I have yet to find one that didn’t pay for itself in 6 months) On average, each school bus travels 16,000 miles a year, he said.

"The numbers are really, really simple. It’s amazing how quickly it pays for itself, on top of all the safety benefits," Tudor said.

The units capture every time a school bus opens its doors, flashes lights and puts out its stop sign, so local bus shop officials can check if drivers are properly stopping for students and railroad tracks. If a bus breaks down, officials can pinpoint the closest bus, Tudor said.

"And if a parent calls in and says, ‘The bus didn’t come this morning,’ we’ll know in a millisecond whether the bus was there or not," he said.

The units will go into roughly two-thirds of DOT’s fleet, said John White, the agency’s director of supply and equipment.

He’s looking to save fuel and prevent engine wear and tear with the system’s instant notification of engine problems. The units also will come in handy during emergencies, such as hurricanes and ice storms, he said.

Across the country, much of the savings from GPS tracking units has come from stopping employees from using their government-issued vehicles to loaf or run private errands.

Last year, the Long Island town of Islip, N.Y., put the devices on 635 vehicles, from street sweepers to tax assessors’ and engineering vehicles. Employees kept to their route during the work day, and those who drove their vehicle home stopped using it for personal travel, said Stephen Lapham, the town’s commissioner of public works.

In three months, the town saved nearly 14,000 gallons of gas.

"In essence, you’re getting a full day’s work for a full day’s pay," Lapham said. Source article of South Carolina’s smart contracting efforts here.

Here’s a couple things South Carolina is doing right:

• Use a state-wide, regulated competitive bidding process.  Don’t by piecemeal from this bidder and that bidder.  Not only will you save money in the buying process, you’ll gain huge economies of scale by not having to deal with disparate systems.
• Equip your highest value vehicles first.  School busses not only carry our most precious cargo, they drive a lot of miles in all kinds of weather and they are a prime target for idling abuse which is one of the easiest wastes to eliminate.  You can only reduce fuel costs from traveled miles by a percentage, but idling elimination goes 100% to the bottom line.
• By looking across a state’s entire fleet you will come across savings that aren’t even related directly to GPS tracking.  Every fleet I have ever worked with has under-utilized vehicles.  You’ll be surprised how many agency heads will report,"Oh no sense in putting GPS on that vehicle, we hardly ever use it".  Bingo.  Get rid of that vehicle and save 100% of it’s expense, no GPS racking equipment needed.
• Use GPS fleet management to eliminate every single use of a pencil or keyboard that you can.  A hidden cost of fleet management is paying people to enter data … every hour of this waste saved goes to the bottom line, and also saves hours correcting data entry errors.

Great work, South Carolina, best of luck to you and to the bidders.  Wish I was one of them, this looks like a contract that will be satisfying and profitable at the same time, and there’s nothing wrong with making the customer smile.

Aren’t supervisors supposed to be aquatinted with what’s going on in management?

GPS Busts City Official

Chicago’s superintendent of sewers took a break from his workday and hit the links, but his whereabouts were traced through a cell phone, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. Winston Cole has been placed on administrative leave with pay after he was tracked to a suburban golf course when he was supposed to be on the clock at the Water Management Department’s South District headquarters. When GPS-equipped cell phones were distributed to city employees and tracking devices were installed on city trucks, the stated goal was to increase employee productivity. Sounds like it’s working.

I could go on for days on this one.  One of my first clients was county government.  They bought a few vehicle units for a test and proof of concept.  They installed them With the Knowledge of the Employees (something I always recommend) on the county-owned cars of several supervisors.  What do you think happened the very first week of operation?  Yep!  One of the supervisory officials (who, remember, knew this was on the car) went to a golf course for an afternoon — while on the taxpayer’s’ clock!  Amazing.

Another client was in the alcoholic beverage distribution industry.  Obviously, they are even more interested in the prevention of drunk driving and substance abuse of employees than many other industries.

I sent a letter to the company president offering to make presentation to him on the advantages his company could realize by using GPS tracking for his company vehicles and he took my up on an offer to track one or more of his trucks as a trial.  He took me up on the offer.

The vehicle he chose was a pickup that was assigned to one of his key supervisors.  In this case he didn’t inform the employee and we installed the unit in a covert manner.  In fairness, the president did hold a meeting the same week we installed the test unit to emphasize the company policies on drinking and driving and proper use of company vehicles.  Should have been a clue, no?

Well the first week’s data showed that the night of the day of the safety meeting the ‘tracked’ supervisor went to a bar after work and traveled to three other bars where he spent his time … perhaps drinking only soft drinks? … until 4 am and then apparently took a nap in the bar parking lot (the bar he was at closed at 4 am) and then reported to work at 6 am the following day.  All those hours at various bars, tow hours maximum of sleep and then back to work on busy streets in a company vehicle!  Just how stupid was this guy?

You should not assume the worst about your employees.  The vast majority are hardworking, dedicated and truthful.  But the number of ‘bad apples’ out there certainly has amazed me … GPS Tracking is one of the better, faster, cheaper ways to separate the whet from the chaff.