Creative ways to get the most of your GPS tracking data

I believe one of the biggest problem plaguing GPS implementations in the past, and currently, has been "what do I do with all of this data?" Additionally, in order to enhance its usefulness to your business, it should be used for strategic decisions such as whether to close down or build up certain routes, areas of business, etc.

Back when GPS tracking was getting its start, vehicles would report in every 60 minutes, maybe every 15.

These days, 2 minute updates are the norm, and a mid-sized, active fleet can easily accumulate 25,000 points of data per day.

The right reports, used in the right way, and with the right mapping, is ABSOLUTELY necessary to get anything useful out of this valuable data.

Finding a GPS tracking system which allows you to actually make sense of this data is crucial, or your ROI (Return On Investment) won't be nearly as large. GPS Tracking yields a positive ROI in just about every implementation, but can be MUCH larger when the data and reports are used and acted upon properly.

Thankfully many GPS products out there have reports which help you drill down to the most important aspects of what you need to see for your particular situation and industry.

Here are a few ways we at GPS Insight (GPSI for short, or "Gypsy") help you gain the insight you need to make important adjustments and business decisions based on this tremendous amount of data.

Getting a quick overview of your fleet's activity for the day is a 2 click activity -- choose yesterday, click "History Map" and a multi-colored plot of all your vehicles is shown:



This Arizona delivery company has 75 vehicles whose activity is shown below at the "200 mile" view -- the user can actually play this day's data as a movie to very realistically see the vehicles as they "drive" throughout Arizona as an animation (see our Demos for this type of thing at www.gpsinsight.com :



Instantly zooming down by double-clicking shows much more detail, and we can drill into a certain time with the "time slider" at the top to see where all the vehicles are at 11:59 AM.



Then we can drill down to what seems to be the farthest route, and instantly see which vehicle that is and isolate it for ease of viewing:

Now we can drill WAY down to the furthest point along the route and get a feel for whether or not it makes sense to send our driver that far out (or perhaps to start branching out beyond that point):



This looks like it's the middle of nowhere. Do we want to spend the labor time and gas to service this customer any longer? Or should we market to the neighbors to make it worth our while driving all that way?

Let's use a favorite Web Tool of mine to determine the type of neighborhood that is, in terms of price per home and/or square foot:

Zillow.com has a lot of good data, so we can navigate to that particular neighborhood using Zillow and see that the 3 nearest homes to our delivery are all very expensive ones, in the $650-$925k range, and that the least expensive one is a whopping $350 per square foot! This may be a good neighborhood for expanding into and spending some advertising on, since we're already there, making a delivery anyway, once a day.

Here is the Zillow screen where we see this information:

Let's run a custom report on this particular vehicle in this particular area to see how frequently it goes there. We can draw a VERY precise polygon landmark over the neighborhood and then run a landmark report to see the dates, times, and stop times for this area.

As you can see, there are a lot of creative ways we can drill down into our data to answer not just "where are my vehicles" type questions, but also "how should I adjust my business" type questions.

Running a 30 day report on just that truck and just that particular neighborhood takes 3 clicks and a few seconds and shows that the vehicle has been there only 4 times over the past 30 days, but most days recently and for most visits, between 2 and 8 minutes. We can pull this data into Excel and use it for further business analysis at this point [more useful for large reports, not this sample one].

How you, the business owner, interpret this data is up to you -- obviously there are a number of business and economic factors. But using GPS Insight to track, report upon, and ultimately help you make these business decisions is something you should benefit from regardless of your industry.

We have a large number of capabilities, reports, maps, and custom enhancements you can use to gain insight into your company's fleet and driver activity. This blog is mainly used to show practical examples of how you can benefit by using our product (and GPS Tracking in general, assuming you have a good provider which gives you these types of reports and maps).

Please feel free to call or email us for more information on how we will work to help your business and your industry in general.

Thanks,
Rob.