GPS Tracking ROI

This morning I came across this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygEwoufSyss

(Tip of the blog derby to Brian at The Consumerist ) for the link to the vid.

Now if you don’t have time to visit the video, I’ll play spoiler and tell you what it’s all about. A fellow observed an AT&T maintenance truck coming to the alley behind his home day after day. Curious to see what the AT&T technicians were fixing he observed more closely and found they employees were fixing Lunch. Now I have no idea if these fellows were on the clock or how far they drove each day to get to the locations where they were videoed, but at the very least they appear to have been stealing from private property and abusing their equipment … that is, using the expensive bucket lift on the truck for non-work purposes, nit to mention running the truck’s engine to supply the hydraulic power for the lift, polluting the atmosphere and wasting company fuel and, not incidentally with such a big company involved, exposing their employer to one hell of a list of liability risks .. all for the sake of a few oranges.

Now for those enamored with the sense of ‘employee empowerment” and other highly liberal thoughts, my apologies. I used to think much the same way as you until I had the experience of having to run a business and make the figures on the bottom line black instead of red … now I think about how many AT&T service trucks like this there are on the road and I wonder how many of these larcenous lunches have gone unrecorded. Do you have trucks on the road? What are you afraid to know?

The title of this post is November 4 but it’s being written on the 24th of January. That means, of course, there’s a story behind it. You expected one, did you not?

In a few previous posts we’ve been talking about the labor and frequency congestion costs of using two-way radio or cell phone calls to enable a dispatcher to keep track of a fleet’s various locations via a more or less continuous stream of “What’s your 20″ (where are you now?) calls.

Not only do these calls eat up time and bandwidth, they are frequently completely useless. If the driver is lost he has no idea, but will probably say something to keep the dispatcher happy, and if the driver doesn’t want the dispatcher to know where s/he is (like perhaps the clowns in the video), then there isn’t a snowball’s chance that management will ever know if the driver lies or “slightly exaggerates” his or her location.

For some years I worked as a civilian technician for the USAF at KWRI (McGuire AFB). I was there when we upgraded our fleet of C-141 StarLifters (RIP old friend). One of the major upgrades consisted of installing a sophisticated Inertial Navigation System (INS) and because I was one of the first trained on this system I became a defacto expert. Midnight shift (2330 ’til 0730 local) was the most important to the airlift wing leadership because that’s when a majority of our daily missions departed, and the wing commander was rated (or fired) depending on how many departures met the schedule. So, I got to work mids.

To keep the departures on schedule the avionics maintenance squadron used what’s called a flighline expeditor scheme, which involved a senior NCO and a step van (bread truck) like this one, only blue:

equipped with racks along the inside carried an assortment of all the standard LRU (Line Replaceable Units) know to cause delays on preflight. Since the INS system was new to both pilots and maintainers it caused a lot of dispatch issues. The ‘design scheme’ for maintenance issues was that the air crew would call in a problem to a job control center and job control would call the specific technicians for the problem, and also call the “honcho” in the expediter truck to go to the affected aircraft and stand by in case LRUs or senior supervision assistance was required. If this sounds like it took time, especially with all the voice radio calls involved, you’re right. What smart expediters (always known by their radio call November 4) would not wait for a call but would drive their little mobile warehouse to each departing aircraft, in turn as the crews did their preflights. That way if a fault developed the replacements were that much closer to the place they might be needed. If there were many aircraft departing November 4 would often call for some high-demand technicians to ride with him (In those days it was always him) and be ready at the wing tip of each departing bird. Since I never liked to do much bench work on mids anyway … always being interrupted for priority flight line calls, I’d often be happy to ride along with whomever was November 4 for that night. just to follow the action on the flight line and catch a nap from time to time.

OK, this is long enough for one post, for sure. I’ll continue the trip down memory lane and confirm why those voice radio calls are useless in the next post. Meantime? Keep a close eye on your oranges.