To access the reports:

1. Login to MS Track Web and go to the Reports tab.
2. In the ‘select report detail’ section select the name of the report you want and then check the ‘Report by Driver’ option.
3. Now select the drivers you want and press ‘Run’.

Amongst these new driver reports are the following:

Speed Report
This report will allow you to see all of the speeding transgressions that have occurred with your drivers. This shows each location where they were exceeding the speed limit.

Daily Activity Report
This report allows you to determine the total amount of driving done by a driver irrespective of the vehicles that they have driven. The daily activity report is based on ignition on and off.

Daily Movement Report
This details travel start to stop specifically based on movement and not ignition.
Very useful for ensuring that your drivers are not ex-ceeding working time directives when they are driving multiple vehicles in your fleet.

Trip Report
This report has a breakdown of trips and vehicles each driver was driving.
All of these reports have the ability to be exported to MS Excel. This gives you further options to use the data as you see fit.

The following video demonstrates how this can be used:

Improved fleet utilization

The GPS tracking system is not designed to stop drivers from nipping in for a paper or stopping for a coffee on route. It will rather provide fair and accurate record of your work pattern to help the company manage the fleet more efficiently.

Security

Vehicle tracking systems also act as a security device and greatly improve the chances of your vehicle being recovered if it is stolen.

Health and Safety

The new working time directives and related safety at work legislation make employers liable for accidents if a vehicle is not maintained properly. The tracking system can enhance the safety of employees by allowing employers to monitor driving hours and apply working and driving time directives.

Even work distribution

Vehicle tracking systems can help managers and supervisors distribute work more fairly. GPS tracking can answer questions such as who is the closest to a particular job or site.

Efficient route planning

Vehicle tracking systems may help staff plan the best route from a vehicles current location to a site thus assisting the driver. More recently with mapping now including traffic patterns management and supervisory staff can assist with early warning of potential traffic delays and suggest alternate routes.

Instant vehicle location

This is handy in a variety of circumstances, and even more so if broken down. Control room staff are able to instantly determine where the breakdown is and are able to direct recovery companies more accurately.

Proof of service

All too often a customer may query the legitimacy of invoicing or work done. By being able to accurately determine historical locations of vehicles management staff are able to use the vehicles history as a form of
proof of delivery. This can be presented to the customer without the involvement of the driver of the vehicle.

Accurate billing

Tracking systems allow employers to use tracking systems to determine accurately the duration of time a vehicle would have spent at a particular location and hence assist with more accurate billing of the work done at a site. This naturally will lead to less customer queries of invoicing and a more efficient process in collection of monies owing for work done.

Driving standards

Companies that carry the “How’s my driving” stickers often complain that he scheme is unfair and subject to general public perception of good or bad driving. A vehicle tracking system can allow an employer to refer to historical tracking records to determine an unbiased and fair clarification on any complaints about driving standards.

In past articles we have looked at how our tracking software and solutions have been instrumental in detecting and catching criminals. Well now it seems that the criminals have copped onto the benefits of tracking technology.

A recent article in the Houston Chronicle highlighted the fact that organised crime gangs, in particular drug traffickers, are using GPS vehicle tracking for automobile tracking to track cars that are involved in transporting illicit goods.

“There is no honour among thieves and even less trust,” said Jeffrey Scott, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “This kind of tracking device is a way for bad guys who don’t trust each other being able to work together.”

Drug enforcement agents are finding examples of drug shipments are being tracked from Latin America all the way to their destinations in the United States.

The criminals are catching on to the benefits of GPS vehicle tracking and are using some of the advanced features that have benefited our clients over the past years. These include the ability of the criminals to set up alerts, for example when drivers deviate from a predetermined route, then a text message is sent to the drug boss.

The article mentions one case where a driver was caught with a vehicle load of drugs and he tried to bargain with the law enforcement agents and help them catch the rest of the gang. However things didn’t work out for him as his gang mates were forewarned as they had been able to see that the vehicle had been stopped too close to a police station. This put an end to his hopes of double crossing his fellow criminals.

It goes without saying that Mobil-i would never knowingly supply criminals with their tracking solutions, and this is one segment of the market that we are not interested in pursuing!

If you need advice on how to solve your tracking requirement get in touch with GLT – our cooperative, partnering approach, backed by thorough product knowledge, could save you hours of costly research and development.

We are now delighted to be supporting the CalAmp range of Fleet & Tracking devices, which we firmly believe to be unparalleled in this Industry in their range of capabilities, applications and interfaces.

We can also help you with your Personal Tracking / Lone Worker applications with our new SOLUS GPS mobile phone device.

The client is a large multinational Engineering company that employs over 100 people in Ireland and hundreds more worldwide. They became a client of Mobil Information Systems in 2008 and have now been using the system for about 3 years.

During that time the client has seen some good success derived from using our system. The main benefit has been that they have been able to maintain the same 2008 turnover whilst at the same time reducing their engineer and dispatcher headcount by about a quarter from over 45 people to just over 30 people.

This is quite a considerable achievement and in raw number terms represents a payroll saving in the region of €400,000 per year from an investment of €18,000 a year in our system. This is before you factor in savings on equipment, telephone charges and vehicle costs.

These cost savings have been achievable by streamlining the dispatch process. Dispatchers can now see exactly where each driver is and use this information to schedule jobs much more efficiently and adjust based on real time events. In the past this was all done manually with dispatchers having to call each engineer and get an update on their location. This was extremely ineffective.

MS Track Pro, which this company use, was a clear choice as the company is very strict on web access for employees and therefore wanted a client server desktop option.

This client is now planning to build on this success and derive more cost savings by implementing our new cost savings module. Using this they believe that they can considerably reduce fuel costs in particular by monitoring which vehicles and which drivers are less fuel efficient compared with the rest of the fleet and taking corrective action.

Local management of this Engineering company recently recounted that the auditors at head office couldn’t understand how the Irish operation was able to increase gross margins so significantly without any change to top line turnover. We are delighted that MS Track is their secret weapon and look forward to helping them drive further cost savings in the future.

The software will support Android versions 2.2 onwards so will run on a wide range of Android devices including tablets and smart phones.

This will allow all of our customers who are using smart phones with the Google Android operating system to track their fleets from their mobile devices. This complements our existing suite of software for mobile devices.

Here are some preview screen shots:

In the past we were unable to offer any solution that did not involve the use of our back-end system and therefore always attracted an ongoing service charge.

However we are now able to offer an inexpensive unit that can be tracked from your handset. A typical example of this type of requirement would be a construction company that has cars, vans, trucks (Fleet tracking) and site equipment (Asset tracking) that does not move regularly but is at risk of theft. In general assets we currently track include, site machinery, tractors, and any stationary equipment that is not moved on a regular basis.

The device we are currently able to supply allows a customer to track any powered equipment by polling the unit with a text message from their handset. In turn the tracking unit returns a text message that in-cludes a link to a Google map therefore allowing you easily locate the vehicle on a map.

While the initial set up does not include monthly service charges and can continue to operate as such for ever, customers can avail of an upgrade to facilitate tracking of the asset units from MS Track Web at a very low monthly cost.

This is typically attractive to those with many assets that want the convenience of tracking multiple assets easily. Please contact our sales department learn more about this low cost solution that does not involve monthly recurring costs and to arrange a live demonstration.

You can learn more and watch a short video demonstration at our dedicated website
www.budgetgpstracking.com

This is going to be their new Windows 8 operating system which is going to allow similar touch screen functionality that we already have come to know using devices like the iPhone and various Android devices.

With this in mind we thought we would offer you an insight as to our current and future strategy as to how we will be supporting not only Windows 8, but some of the other variants of operating systems found on mobile phone devices today.

How this affects you as one of our customers will totally depend on your own choice to be an early adopter of these new computers and mobile phones.

We are anticipating that future releases of Windows and other mobile phone platforms is going to have a major affect on our products and accordingly we are already gearing ourselves to accommodate these changes in our products for the next year.

We are already nearing completion of development of our Android application which will make our mobile based software compatible on almost all smart phone devices. Currently this offers basic track and trace functionality across all devices, but future releases will facilitate, history, replays and basic reporting functionality.

As these platforms become more freely available at very low end user cost, we encourage our customers to adopt these technologies as it allows for complete mobility without the compromise of information.

Furthermore adopting new operating systems on your PC equipment allows for the deployment of latest software and features offered by a variety of software vendors, including ourselves and assists enormously in offering support on products and updates. This naturally improves your experience when using your computer and all the software installed on it.

We mentioned in a previous blog post that we had developed a stand alone cost tracking module. This has proved popular with some early adopters in allowing them to measure costs associated with their fleets.

We are now taking this to the next level and developing this as a new module that will be available inside MS Track Web. This will provide you with a fully comprehensive cost tracking and analysis module that you can access from any web browser wherever you are.

Using this module you can choose to manually enter or import cost data such as diesel amounts and costs at each fill up.

Some of the things that the module will facilitate include fuel usage analysis through a fuel usage report. It will also allow analysis and reporting of all other vehicle costs including Insurance, leasing, servicing and wages. The module is very flexible and will allow you to add whatever cost categories you like and these will then automatically be added to your reports.

You will also be able to export your reports to Excel so you can run your own pivot tables or do things like graph fuel costs over time. We hope that this will assist our clients to do things like be able to spot trends in areas that their fleets are costing money.