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Big brother or just good business


The fact of the matter is that you really have no idea where your field workers are if you don't have some form of connection between their location and your operation.  It seems that many folks can wrap their heads around the idea of GPS and how it makes sense for business, both from the field and office perspectives. When properly positioned logic will prevail, that is, if there is an underlying foundation of trust. Things can get really jacked up if a plan for GPS in trucks or on the technicians person, is discussed and implemented without a broad understanding of the business purpose. If we believe that people want to do the right thing then for the most part this should be a nonissue, with the exception of those individuals that are doing things outside of the lines of prudent behavior. So the fundamental reason why GPS tracking fails, or causes turmoil within a business, has really nothing to do with the tracking or the technology! You need to sit down and ask yourself, and hopefully involve others within your organization, why is it important for you to have GPS.  From a pure client value perspective the fact is I would like to know where the field worker is located so I may better satisfy the requests of my clients. Ultimately the ability to route our workers based on their current location, and the workload in the queue, we should be able to leverage our resources more efficiently, bring greater value to the customer, and drop some additional dollars to our bottom line.



When I ponder what the best technology is to apply to any situation I find myself always looking out the outcome first, and then working back from that point to choose the right technology. If you consider this objective "reduce my response time by 10%", then your approach may be twofold; reduce your response time from your current location to the requester's location, and minimize the windshield time for your field technician. In order to achieve these approaches where should the GPS be placed? Years ago people would have said hands-down GPS is on the truck, however with the current proliferation of mobile devices and their ability to provide GPS data, it seems as if the mobile device would be the logical choice. How often have you seen your field workers without their mobile device? If you agree with this logic than a mobile device should be the tool of choice.  Whether you end up choosing a truck or mobile device, advanced dispatch routing or queue-based logic, in order to be successful with the deployment of GPS in any capacity you need to first start with building trust. 


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Next post:  ways to lose a maintenance contract

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