I make it a practice never to delve very much into politics here on retired Pay the blog primarily for Seniors and Retirees Making Money Online.  And I am not going to break that rule today.  But I am going to give a brief shoutout to something that always seems to be very political in nature, America’s labor unions.

Some of you out there are currently union members or retired on union-backed pensions so I don’t need to fear too many brickbats from your direction.

Others are like me, I was only a union member for a short time in one job that I held and have not had too much dealings with unions, pro or con during my career.

Others are rabid anti-union advocates, blaming all manner of ills from the Wall Street business failures to the exporting of jobs overseas to the Civil War on trade unions.

Well this isn’t an open call for a debate, I’m not going to change anyone’s views in one blog post, surely, and I wouldn’t want to anyway.

But I will say that I recognize how many of the benefits I enjoyed while I was working and those that I continue to enjoy now as the fruits of the labor movement.  Even those of you in non-union jobs should give a moment to contemplate where your work hours, your annual paid vacations, merit promotion systems, maternity leave, EEOC office and so many other benefits we take for granted as Americans came from.  They were all founded in the work, dedication and sacrifice of union members and they have now become so much the norm that few even realize that fact.

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Proof that there is money in service and GPS tracking can bring it to the bottom line.

OK, Quick, don;t look up at the top of the page … what’s the title of this blog?  GPS ROI, right?  I’ve written a lot of times how much money you can bring to the bottom line by treating your necessary service work not as an ‘evil" that must be minimized but as a bona fide business asset that can give you a real rate of return (ROI) on your investment.  here’s a nice piece from a major UK company who has found their profit proof:

Masternaut has won a five year GBP 1million contract with Barloworld Handling to provide web-based vehicle tracking for 550 service vehicles. Barloworld is the largest independent distributor of fork lift trucks in the world and manages a fleet of over 30,000 fork lifts for customers in the UK alone. With fork lifts critical to many manufacturing, warehousing and other industrial operations, the company offers round-the-clock maintenance services through 23 regional support centres.
Masternaut is being fitted to Barloworld’s entire UK service fleet in order to boost customer service and improve efficiency. With live tracking over the web, despatchers are able to immediately assign the nearest engineer according to skills required and improve planning so that routes and schedules are optimised. Full Lift Truck Service Profit article here.

I have to admit I was a little mystified by the headline on this one.  I don’t think the contract is about installing GPS tracking on 30,000 lift trucks (forklifts), I think it is about the efficiencies and thus profits gained by Barloworld handling equipping their 500-odd field service engineers with GPS tracking on the service vehicles.  Savings?  You betcha:

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Free money.  If you service or repair at customer locations this could very well be free or found money.

Are You Late in Completing Service Work-Orders?

A recent Aberdeen survey revealed that companies do not complete nearly 21% of work orders on-time. Lack of insight into near and long term service workload and resource (people, parts) capacity resulting from poor planning and forecasting
is to blame for the sub-optimal service performance.

Please take a 10-minute survey to:

• Benchmark financial and operational service
  metrics relative to peers; and

• Compare how your service organization’s
  business processes stack up against those
  of best-in-class companies

• Learn what your peers are doing to reduce technician overtime and fulfill service commitments on time

The Aberdeen group provides one heck of a lot of good information to business owners and marketers.  One of the things I find especially fascinating is how hard they hit the service side of industry.  that’s because they, as I have found by personal experience, find that most businesses spend a ton of money, often losing big to fulfill service commitments which could actually be a big profit center if managed correctly.  The report is free, I am sure you’ll more than get you money’s worth.

And for my institutional, school and government readers?  Not so fast, you need to read the report too.  How much do you spend in tasks involving employees going out to sties to fix things, install things, adjust things?  (School system White Fleets come immediately to mind) Just because you’re not a profit-making entity doesn’t mean you should be reducing costs and using scare money in better places … while:

Improving customer service!

As always, I welcome comments, disagreement is encouraged, and you can also email me direct at: davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me on 1-719-423-8872. If you liked this article, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you get all my news and views.

GPS Tracking Business

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 .

photo credit: FALHakaFalLin

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.

As my old friend Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith was famous for saying, “I love it when a plan comes together.”  This morning I spent a lot of time exploring the site of a company that basically does it all for customized GPS tracking that will exactly match up with your business needs.  The company is GPS Gate and I was so surprised to see a Google ad for them when this page opened.  great minds think alike, I guess

For years I have suffered both as a client and a solution provider from the exclusive proprietary-ness of almost all GPS equipment and service providers.  Here we have a free, world-wide totally ‘open sourced’ utility … the GPS itself, and open source specifications, such and the NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association) for typing off-the-shelf or custom-built components using the GPS together, and yet for years manufacturers have conspired to try to make access to the basic ‘guts’ of the system difficult or even impossible.

GPS gate is a company dedicated to selling software and hardware that not only works within the GPS but also works with other manufacturer’s equipment and software so that the user, and the customer GPS service provider comes out the winner.

We need more companies like this in order to move GPS tracking from the backwaters of the technocrats into the forefront of business management and increased business profit through GPS Tracking

I saw this interesting device/system on www.gpsobsessed.com  (Recommended daily reading)

NuM8 child-locating GPS wrist watch

Remember the child-locating NuM8 digital wrist watch that debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year? It’s now available for purchase in the United Kingdom from Lok8u, the maker of the watch.  The NuM8 secures to a child’s wrist, triggering an SMS alert to a parent’s cell phone if forcibly removed or if the child moves outside of a predefined zone … read the whole Child Locator article here.

My point here is why such a device is taking so long to really make market penetration in the US?

I submit a big part of the reason is that the wireless companies still can not figure out how to seemly market, price, deliver and troubleshoot their digital data offerings. 

It takes so long to get items approved for the network, it takes so long to navigate through the labyrinth of conflicting pricing plans.

And the wireless companies are still firmly in the grip of the “voice guys” who act as if they were waiting for this foolish “data phenom” to go away and leave them to their ancient world.

Especially with the economy facing the challenges that is currently does, I say baa, humbug, you guys are in business in spite of your efforts rather than because of them. 

Make it simple, make it cheap, get a lot of customers.

Yet another GPS Tracking activity that has an ROI for the people who are helped, but doubtful some others will see the GPS advantage.

Here’s another thing the anti-GPS rights demanders can use in their fight to return us to the dark ages.  I’m sure these homeless people’s rights are being violated in some way or another.

Memo to self … if in danger of becoming homeless, be sure to save a few cents back to buy some aluminum foil to put over my head so that I’ll be safe.

Volunteers begin count of Baltimore’s homeless

Census using GPS is meant to help agencies that serve the most needy

Gus G. Sentiments | gus.sentementes@baltsun.com

January 22, 2009

More than 100 volunteers, including experts and students from two Baltimore universities, embark today on a census that will use survey techniques and global positioning technology to count and track the city’s homeless population.
Organizers said yesterday that they planned to start collecting information beginning at 1 a.m. today, visiting spots in a 50-block area in the central city where homeless people are known to sleep. A later shift of volunteers will visit soup kitchens, day shelters and other places in the city where homeless people congregate during daylight hours, officials said.
Volunteers will mark locations where homeless people are found and return at a later date to record the spots using global positioning system devices.
The goal is to create a map of homeless activity that’s useful for the city and nonprofit agencies that provide services to homeless people, officials said.

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These guys should have just ordered a radius map from Air Miles map to find out how far these places were from schools and parks before they spent state money illegally.

By John Simerman
Contra Costa Times

Posted: 01/17/2009 04:35:06 PM PST

State corrections officials spent nearly $22 million last year on apartments and motel rooms for hundreds of paroled sex offenders, paying more than $2,000 a month for some parolees and housing others in locations apparently prohibited under Jessica’s Law, according to a MediaNews analysis of bank drafts issued by parole agents and addresses from the Megan’s Law sex offender database.

The housing assistance, which has run for more than two years for some parolees, highlights a dilemma state officials face trying to enforce a voter-approved ban on sex offenders living within 2,000 feet of a school or a park where kids "regularly gather." They must either find scarce housing and pay to put them up, or deal with a steeper rise in sex offenders who become homeless and lose the stability that experts call crucial to preventing recidivism.

A top state corrections official acknowledged that parole agents have sometimes spent state funds to house sex offenders in areas that officials later learned were illegal. He was unaware of some local examples MediaNews found using state data and a GPS handset:

In El Cerrito, a parole office has spent as much as $300 a week for sex offenders to live at the Budget Inn on San Pablo Avenue. The motel is within 700 feet of Mendocino Park, a neighborhood playground where small children swing, scramble through play structures and ride tricycles. A corrections spokesman said parole officials realized a few months ago that the motel violated Jessica’s Law and now they only pay for sex offenders to live there who are not subject to the 2,000 law…

We can make maps of almost any radius for most any location in the US or Canada.  If one of our standard offerings from our “Order a Map” page isn’t what you need, just send us a note via our “Contact” page or call us at 719-966-4295 and we’ll work with you on your special needs for Radius maps, in air miles, statute miles, meters, yards, feet, you name it we’ll map it.