GPS Tracking ROI

Although I’ve never been a hunter I come from a state which makes a big deal out of hunting and I support hunters and properly managed wildlife management programs. However, one form of hunting I think out to be avidly supported, nation-wide, with a year-round open season is wasters like these government ner-do-wells in California.

Hunting for state vehicles
By David M. Drucker Sacramento Bureau
SACRAMENTO — California’s fleet of state-owned vehicles swelled to 70,000 last year, but officials in an aggressive new asset-management push have so far been able to pinpoint only about 40,000….
(full article here)
http://www2.dailynews.com/news/ci_2922404

How would you like to be responsible for buying, and then losing track of 30,000 vehicles? Shocked? Appalled? Mystified? Unsure of your own abilities? Embarrassed by your betrayal of the public who had placed their trust in you?

Well, apparently, if you are like a large number of alleged government managers in California, you’d just say “hoo hum” and go play golf or something. Sad, indeed.

No one denies California is a huge state. Not long ago I believe I saw an article that said CA was the world’s sixth largest economy on it’s own, or some such awe-inspiring statistic. But really, folks, can anyone even begin to justify losing 30 thousand or more vehicles? But even knowing where they bought the vehicles? Not knowing who’s using them? This is a situation which just spins my blood pressure right off the scale.

And California is not unique! A few months ago Minnesota admitted they couldn’t account for over 7,000 vehicles. two months ago Colorado found that the state agency that was supposed to manage vehicles not only wasn’t managing them but was allowing other agencies to just buy as they wanted. Using an expensive computer system that the legislature bought them to track expenses resulted in “management data” that showed the state was paying from $0 to $300+ per oil change … that’s pinning it down, isn’t it? *sigh* Mississippi is out of control too, one State Senator (Biily Thames) is fighting an uphill battle to find out why Mississippi’s count of state employees has dropped measurably since the year 2000, yet the size of the government fleet has increased at least 800 vehicles … about 10%.

Where are these cars and trucks? And what are they doing for the governments who own them? It isn’t the total numbers that give one pause, it’s the fact that in state after state, no one knows. Is your state any better off? What about your county and your city? These are questions that really beg an answer.

As regular readers know, I deal in technology that can help manage vehicle fleets. But, sad to say, unless someone is willing to jump in and live up to their responsibilities, my technology and my competitor’s as well are virtually useless.

You can’t manage what you don’t acknowledge you need to manage … that’s the first step.

Read Article Here: http://tinyurl.com/ckwao

Mobile Asset Tracking, well what the heck is that? Probably more meanings than even I could blog about, but one of the important ones is tracking trailers and shipping containers.

There are significant reasons to do this, both in the realm of business and security … which, not surprisingly, overlap.

For years US and overseas transportation companies have spent large sums to track the prime movers … truck tractors and ships, primarily. The costs of this effort are almost universally judged to be more than worthwhile. The giants of the tracking industry, Qualcomm, Teletrac, etc. have healthy bottom lines and based on the products they sell and the services they provide probably have every right to those products.

But what’s missing? The part that moves the cargo and provides the profit, that’s what! For years I have wondered why this business is upside down. By themselves a fleet of truck tractors are a worthless liability. About the only thing you could do with them without trailers is use them as very cramped expensive taxis (not even legal under Federal regulations) or perhaps put a freezer atop the 5th wheel and let the drivers sell ice cream cones.

The only think that earns a trucking company’s income is the trailer on the back end. tracking of trailers is, after years, moving forward. There are technical challenges that differ from the tracking of the trucks themselves, but there are several technologies out that that work well. benefits include efficiency in movement (equaling profit), reduction of number of assets required and reduction in theft and “shrinkage” with some solutions.

So when will someone decide that containers are worth the same sort of visibility and control? The largest component of the problem does not seem to be cost … containers are an asset valuable enough to track (in many cases at the beginning and end of overseas shipments the containers are indeed the “trailers’ themselves. An additional big payoff benefit would seem to be security. Through initiatives such as operation safe cargo and other programs, the TSA and allied government agencies have made it even more cost effective to track containers than domestic trailers.

What do I perceive as the holdup then? The old failure to accept responsibility problem. Ajax Trucking knows they own their trucks and trailers and they’re all here in the US, so they know what makes sense for them to track. XYZ International Containers, however, has their assets scattered all over the world, and, in fact, may well not be a US company. Their business need to accept responsibility for each of their containers within the US is clearly ill-defined.

From a security standpoint, though, their need is even more well-defined. The possibility that Ajax trucking will pick up a dirty bomb or team of terrorists outside the US and ease them across our borders is pretty remote, but the possibility that one of XYZ’s containers will perform this same mission, intentionally, is significantly more real.

In most cases I am a pretty pragmatic, capitalistic guy. I’m against big government in general terms and specifically against big government projects when the private sector could perform them better. But in this case I think the need for government leadership is very clear.

The TSA has had money to help fund these initiatives for several years now. In many cases they haven’t even been able to spend the money. Sad. What we need is a senator who cares as much about national security as Hillary Clinton cares about the possibility of silly sex cartoons in a video game to just get the legislation rolling to make container tracking a requirement. Once someone decides that the responsibility must be accepted, the solutions will move from demonstration mode to reality and not only will the US be safer, but the business entities who are ‘forced’ to comply will benefit in a dozen hidden ways from the better business controls that ensue.

Seems relatively win-win to me, are there any leaders in the US?