We are not a fleet tracking company in the generic sense: we don’t have or promote any of the black-boxes on the market with a GPS/OBDII connectors. Calamp, Geotab, BSM Wireless, Webtech, etc.. are not competing with our products.
What we do
- we use smart phones/tablets/phablets to promote software products
- we can connect via Bluetooth or wifi locally to sensors or boxes in order to apply a business process logic
- our applications are not web applications for mobile but only native. The reason will be explained in another post, the short answer is performance and flexibility.
- most of our mobile applications have thick components: database layer, access to back-ends or cloud, save/restore operations on Google drive, service bus communication, ORM frameworks, analytics included
- there is a communication back-end which enables a portal to analyze, slice & dice mobile data; the management has the ability to gather data from all mobile devices and view, analyze and report it (on a web site – like this )
Our view for fleet management
Our view is the current GPS tracking companies are leaving the main actor of their supervision (driver) in the dark. All data is hauled to a server, analyzed, and the score-cards are not generated in real-time. Yes, there are buzzers, lights and different distractions to alarm the driver she broke one of the business rules.
For more complicated scenarios, GPS boxes cannot deliver:
- One example is the idling violations. The counter for idling starts after a pre-determined period (30 seconds) and the driver has no clue he’s in the warning zone.
- Another example is to apply rules to several data points (GPS, time, sensors) at the beginning of each day: you have to reprogram the box over the air.
- real-time view of the driver’s score card
The versatility of mobile applications consists in the power and maturity of the underlying platform (Android, iOs). At this moment the mobile phones have more power than 6-7 years old PCs.
Summary
Our strength is in collecting data and developing software on mobile (native development) with added flexibility to integrate wireless sensors (NFC, bluetooth, wifi).