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water Business HOW IS YOUR GPS TRACKING? GPS can be ubiquitous. It can be used in cars, drones, mobile phones, site machinery and even people. If it moves and has value, then it’s possible to use GPS technology to track it. GPS works by providing information on exact asset location and is used commercially to track the movement of a vehicle or person. The benefits of using a GPS tracking system are wideranging, with examples such as: • Monitoring the route and progress of vehicles; • Trapping asset location to ensure maximum utilisation; • Reporting on hours and distance travelled of plant and equipment; • Assessing the basic day-to-day activities of an employee work schedule; • Tracking high-valued assets in transit including temperature, impact and light; • Linking vehicle, driver and incident data for speeding fines or accident replays;
• Providing compliance information like fatigue, maintenance and mass management;
later date to provide evidential information. It can also be used for business planning or to manage inefficient business practices.
• Improving quality measurement information.
One emerging use for vehicle-based devices is to use GPS systems to help provide evidence of vehicle use through pin code or ID tags, trapping drivers to asset use. This is especially important with recent policy changes relating to the ramping up of fines of up to $15,000 where companies haven’t been able to allocate the driver to speeding fines. Other assets can also be tracked using weather-resistant NFC tags and barcodes with the GPS coordinates being tied to the location where the items were scanned.
From a commercial perspective, GPS devices can be used by companies in the water industry to record the position of vehicles and trip data. Using mobile technologies and cloud-based systems, GPS information is easily sent to a centralised database via a dedicated device or within a mobile application on modern smartphones. The use of smartphones has provided a cost-effective and convenient way to manage a remote workforce, with many improved outcomes over straight tracking devices. Irrespective of the type of GPS system deployed, the power is in the fact that they are real-time, automatically sending location information and other key data like G-force, speed and engine information to a central point. It’s capable of dissecting and displaying the data in a worthwhile manner and can be extremely powerful by alerting the business of incidents as they happen, or providing data that can be mined to use at a
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Smartphones have also changed the landscape to allow the tracking and task management of people, such as field workers or project teams. The power of this style of managing staff is that you can do much more than just track. In fact, through intelligent forms and phone sensors you can trap everything you could imagine (and more) including the location. This approach sees a separation in thinking, moving away from cookie crumb tracking to "key moment" tracking where human interaction is measured through common
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august 2015 water