GPS Tracking ROI

Every single business that has one or more vehicles on the road can profit from GPS Tracking.  That’s just an open and shut case.  There’s 760 more articles on this site that give you the reasons, and alot more evidence on line and off that offer’s solid proof.

But some businesses can also profit from using an air miles radius map.  You can learn more about these specialized profit-making maps on our sister site.  you can also see:

There are a number of reasons you might need an air mile radius map to keep your business legal, more efficient, or both.  A primary reason for many clients are the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) rules regarding driver hours of service rules.  I’ve written about them before and I’ll likely write more, but here’s a very useful site I found that explains a lot more than I’ll ever know:

Trucking Compliance, LLC™ is a small business helping small trucking companies to startup, grow, and stay legal. Nothing fancy. Just an easy, direct way for people to start their own trucking or motorcoach businesses.

OUR MISSION is to help you Get Your Federal OPERATING AUTHORITY, establish and maintain required DOCUMENTATION, PASS Federal Inspections, and KEEP MORE of the MONEY that YOU EARN.

Richard Dowdell is the founder and brains behind this site which is what we “Web guru” guys call a “very tightly niched” business.  90% or more of the traffic online just ebbs and flows from site to site, reading little and absorbing less, looking for the next free ring tone or whatever else the trend of the day is … but included in the either 10% are the people making American work.

A huge percentage of the ‘work’ involves wheels in one way or another, and if there are wheels involved there’s an excellent chance state or federal government is involved.  You know what that means.  paperwork on top of paperwork …. and after you have it all complete, you really don’t know if you even used the right forms for sure.

That’s Trucking Compliance’s “narrow” but important niche … keeping vehicles on the road legally so that commerce can flow.  I’m not even in the transportation business directly and I already have learned from Richard’s site … you will too.

One name for the particular sub-nbiche of trucking that can make good use of air miles radius maps in often defined as short haul operations … as opposed to the more common lomg haul category of trucking.  But for sure, both “niches” can certainly improve their bottom line wiht GPS tracking.

Some months ago I made a series of posts about managing you business vehicles using special purpose air mile radius maps.  Here’s one of the introductory air mile radius maps articles, and another that has had quite a few ‘reads’ and search ‘hits’.

I’ve been offering this service as a freebie for my readers and frankly, I’m delighted by the response … but the service has become so popular I have to do something to bring it under control … I spent several hours today alone researching, generating and mailing out requested maps, and I have to get some other, profit-producing work done as well. 

So regretfully, I’m announcing that from this date forward I’m going to have to ask a small charge to defray my costs for this service.  I’ll still be happy to make a radius map for anyone who wants one, but I’m going to ask you to email me via my contact for, or leave a request for the map(s) you want in the comments section and I will respond back with some clarification questions and a cost proposal for the work you need done.  It won’t be any sort of astronomical charge, but reluctantly I feel the time has come to start putting this on a professional basis … it’s just grown too popular and time consuming for me to handle on a no-cost basis.  I hope you’ll understand.  Thanks.

February 18, 2008

Street Number Issues on GPS Maps

The Boston Globe published an article yesterday that highlighted an issue that may be the next one to solve for GPS makers and their map suppliers; Street Number inaccuracies. Typically, the map maker will take a look at a street, see that house numbers go from 1 - 200 and then evenly distribute those numbers along the length. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If you use a GPS, you’ve probably already noticed when searching for a specific business address or house number, and the GPS tells you that you’ve arrived, and you actually have another 200 yards (or more) to go to actually get there, you know what I am talking about. … read the rest of the GPS Lodge article here

It’s really amazing how many times this issue has not come up in the years I have been specifying, implementing and selling GPS tracking services. It’s big, and it’s being virtually ignored by the big players in mapping.

Note, please, just so you are smarter than the average newspaper reporter, that this is not an issue with GPS at all. GPS receivers … the small handheld’s you use for hiking trips, the dashboard navigation units that this article is focused on, or the commercial-grade vehicle tracking systems I mostly write about all have nothing whatsoever to do with street address. The combination of the GPS Space Segment (the satellites in orbit around the globe) and the User Segment … the receiver you are using, does one thing and does it well. Working together the satellites and the receiver calculate your position on the surface of the globe in standardized GPS latitude and longitude coordinates.

From that point on, non-GPS providers and systems take over. Most likely your receiver has a digital map inside, provided by one of a number of big names in the mapping business. It may also have a software routing and driving directions program … the tool that generates the little ‘turn right now’ voice that helps you find your way.

I make the distinction for an important reason … improvements, modification, adjuncts to the GPS system have noting to do with the problem … and the problem is hardly being touched.

In North America we are used to a semi-rational system of street numbers. usually numbers start at a certain end of each street and proceed down the street in rational order, even on one side, odd on the other. But there is no standard at all. One political entity may decide to run their numbers increasing from north to south, while the next town may run their numbers in the opposite order. Some towns dictate that numbers jump by five or ten per building, leaving room to add more addresses in the future. Other decree that every street intersection start a new group of numbers, so #78 may be the house on one corner of a cross street and the house on the opposite side of the cross street may be #200.

It’s a mess and I don’t see any sort of unifying effort to make it better. I have personally lost business and sales over the problem and I’m sure others have as well. It’s an issue, it’s a real-world issue that costs business billions per year, it’s not getting any better and it is not a GPS issue.

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.

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

I’ve used the premise many times that one of the bona fide paybacks (ROI) of using GPS tracking on your business vehicles is being able to know that you’re complying with the US FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) regulations. The ones regarding HOS (Hours Of Service) for drivers are particularly complex … and thus easy to run afoul of … and enforcement agencies, including State Police are usually well-trained in those laws and quite interested in enforcing them, both from a legal/moral and a financial standpoint. Catch an individual private driver speeding and the state earns a few bucks from the ticket, catch a trucking company in major violations and huge amounts can flow into the sate coffers.

Every one of the 50 states has their own rulers in addition to the Federal rules and you, the business owner is responsible for compliance. I can’t possibly dig them all out for you but the easy part of the task is that the state rules can’t be more lenient than the Federal regs and in most cases are very much a copy.

First you have to understand who is subject to the Motor carrier rules. It is not just the big over-the-road trucker. Those guys are the ones almost all of us think of when Hours Of Service and logbook (RODS — Records Of Duty Status) get mentioned but they are far from the only folks subject to compliance and possible penalties.

(more…)