GPS Tracking ROI

Well what did Dave find to complain about here? Looks like good news, and it is. But no wonder it is taking so long to properly integrate GPS into our public safety infrastructure.

based on the fugues in the article they are spending more than $8,000 each to ‘upgrade the cars’ computer systems’, including GPS tracking. Now, don’t get me wrong, you can’t put a decent in car computer system in a police vehicle for “a buck 92″, but folks this is outright ridiculous.

Go find the most rugged tablet PC you can find, ad a Wi Fi card and a GPS card and a Wi Fi hot spot on the town’s water tower and you are in business. Of course, Motorola won’t make a profit of $6,000 per car, but then this isn’t an anti-Motorola blob, is it?

The advantage of the dispatcher being able to see which car is closest as mentioned in the article does make a big improvement in operations and safety. I consulted for an ambulance service in a western state that was able to take several ambulances and crews off line because of dispatcher insight gained by GPS tracking … and if you don’t think _that_ was a saving, better think again… about $300k per ‘bus’ when you factor in all the costs .. talk about ROI for the GPS system.

The other hidden benefit Haverstraw is going to see with these units is a tremendous decrease on the channel chatter over their scarce and expensive voice radio channels. In one analysis I was involved in here in the Spring we found more than 80% of the voice messages flowing in the system were of three types: What’s your 20, my 20 is exchanges and officer safety calls… the dispatcher had to set a timer after the end of each call to an officer and if that officer had not been heard from in 4 minutes the dispatcher had to send out a voice query that the officer responded to with an “I’m OK” code word. The third and most prevalent waste of bandwidth? The four digit representation of time added at the end of every call … so the officers would have the time when the received the call to put in their log books, Add up all these words that would not be needed with a GPS system and the load on the voice channel goes way, way down.

If you’re involved with voice dispatch and you’re feeling a pinch, look into a non-traditional way to get more use from the same channels… maybe you don’t need all those base stations and other gee-gaws Motorola wanted to sell you.