In optimizing the use of their resources, they’re also shortening the reign of autonomy that each driver has. Employees may view efficiency tracking as an assessment of the degree to which they’re staying on task, making stops that aren’t considered part of necessary business operations, and generally wasting company time and resources. Naturally devices that tracking behaviours of employees will make them uneasy, even if they were not misusing company resources.

The purpose of GPS tracking isn’t to make sure employees are doing their jobs. If a manager cannot assume that an unattended employee is doing what they were paid to do, there already exists a serious flaw in the business relationship. Vehicle tracking is meant to assist fleet managers and drivers in coordinating their efforts in meeting business needs.

But is also provides many benefits to the drivers. They are no longer responsible for making judgement calls on the maintenance needs of any particular vehicle, and will never again be blamed for mechanical failures. Better organization can shave hours off of long routes, saving workers from working into the night. Extended work hours come at an inflated cost to workers, who are placed in harm’s way by drowsiness. Employees are more accurately compensated for their time. Tracking will ensure the driver be paid for the amount of their time actually spent, whether stuck in traffic or making good time. No longer will employees be compensated only for the time the trip should have taken and have the difference assumed to be time the driver elected to waste.

Vehicle tracking is used to help predict and plan the cost needs of the business more acutely. Before GPS tracking, the amount of fuel or time any transportation would require to get from point A to point B was held as a wide variable. A large number of unpredictable factors could greatly impact the upper limit of time and fuel needed, such as mechanical problems, poor weather conditions, traffic congestion. They could, of course, calculate the minimum costs, but these were only applicable if everything went smoothly. Business managers around the world know that an inability to anticipate and adapt and respond promptly to changing circumstances is major factor in determining which business will be successful and which will not keep up.

The financial return from any investment must be reinvested in the company’s future. If a venture eats too far into its profit margins, it also loses the solidity of its footing and experiences a diminished ability to invest. This means that each loss also deprives the company of opportunities to regain their footing. Vehicle tracking allows managers to orchestrate their business operations with a clearer image of the challenges that are on their horizons. This allows them to budget their expenses and plan accordingly. They can respond as conservatively as needed, without being so conservative as to avoid reinvestment in order to keep an amount aside for use in the event of unforeseen emergencies.

These companies cannot just “drive less” the way individual car owners can. They cannot take the subway for some of their trips instead. It just is not practical. Large fleet owners, facing these increased gas prices, need to find ways to lower their costs to stay afloat and keep profits as high as possible in order to make up the deficit created by transport costs.  

Of course, conscientious drivers already know that a good deal of money can be saved by driving more moderately; that is, staying at even speeds, using cruise control and reducing speeds. Increasing speed requires more gas than maintaining it, and braking wastes the power that was used to gain the momentum.
 
Many fleet operators have turned to GPS tracking systems, which can both help track more efficient routes, bypass time that might be wasted idling in traffic, and keep tabs on the fuel efficiency of the vehicle. This allows operators to remove and repair any vehicles that aren’t running at peak efficiency. Having slightly deflated tires or using an incorrect type of engine oil can increase the amount of money a company expends to get a vehicle to its destination. Without GPS fleet tracking, a shipping company would have a great deal of difficulty determining where the loss is taking place. The continued monitoring allows the company to identify whether the problem is with the machine or the human operator, and apply corrective measures before the loss accumulates.  

Tracking controllers have the oversight to find the current location of any particular shipping car to keep both the company and the individual consumer informed. Controllers are trained to anticipate shipping problems, such as traffic problems, construction interference, and weather. These delays can cause a company to lose hours of shipping time, force them to pay employees for time that didn’t result in profit, a decrease efficiency. It can also lose the company customers, both at the level of business partners and individual customers. GPS fleet tracking is currently the most effective combative measure that a company can take to mediate this kind of relatively unpredictable interference. Companies can see interference with a shipment’s path long before the intersection takes place. Alternative routes are continuously reviewed and reassessed to ensure that the most cost-effective option is in use.

As well, the tracking company can monitor any detours from the plotted route, notifying the main controller the very moment anything deviates from schedule. This way, corrections can be made promptly, preventing further loss of capital and time. Companies that make use of shipping fleets will be glad to hear that installation costs can be mediated by the cost savings to vehicle insurance and the decreased likelihood that their vehicles will be stolen, or that their cargo will be stolen.

The models of GPS enabled devices that are currently available on the market don’t just offer the standard map, contrary to many people’s expectations. After the initial debut of GPS, additional features and different arrangements of core functions – designed to satisfy specific markets – have rushed the stage. Search directories cataloged important landmarks for travellers, like hotels, banks, airports, and hospitals. As the usefulness of GPS became apparent to the public, more details were added to the maps, like listings for local businesses and shops that are kept current with periodic updates. Early versions didn’t plan for these updates, and while it didn’t create a problem for locating relatively permanent destinations like airports and hospitals, over time, changes to road infrastructure made the discrepancy between the maps and the city layouts a navigation for many users.

Incredibly, these updates are now available worldwide, and not just in major cities. Some GPS manufacturers use maps that are user-generated, registering even rarely used roads from just one use. Vehicle manufacturers were quick to recognise and adapt to the consumer demand for navigation software, and have made adjustments so that a GPS can be directly built into the dash board of a large number of popular vehicle models.

Maps are clearly designed to be used by pirates on top of massive wooden tables, weighted down with little brass ships. They’re too big to be used inside a car. With GPS, drivers will never have to squint at the teeny lines, trying to figure out their own position, let alone exactly where on the map to find their destination. How is anyone supposed to find a bank if a whole mountain range is a 5mm tall triangle? Even if you have a copilot handling the map, the information needed isn’t available. Even GPSs that were made 10 years ago are completely obsolete because infrastructure and the locations of businesses have changed so drastically. Contemporary models are connected to the internet, serviced with construction detours and catalogs of businesses, and are continuously fed updates.

Drivers won’t have to spend time peering through the dark for street signs and dark turn-offs. It gives you ample notice with incremental warnings. The screen gives a lit and digitalized preview of what to look for. These warnings serve as a buffer against the effects of low visibility caused by inclement weather. The problem of keeping an eye out for the exit ramps on multilane highways is also greatly reduced. Highways are the playing ground of fleets of massive transport trucks, which drivers in smaller cars certainly can’t see over. Drivers let the GPS device act as their eyes.

Curiously, many times there is nothing to be taken away from geocaches. Some simply offer congratulation, words of wisdom, or a stamp and pad to sign their names along the names of other successful geocachers. This is another great example of the innovative uses for technology that combat the stigma attached to electronic games. Torn knees and muddy shoes go a long way to dispelling the many complaints about how the use of technology has contributed to the national obesity problem by taking physical human effort out of the equation.

Up until very recently, geocachers were a very small and select group because GPS devices had to be purchased for this specific purpose. Now, with the growing popularity of the smartphone, GPS is handily in the pockets of a huge number of citizens. In addition, applications designed specifically for the geocaching have been introduced for the iPhone and Android. There are currently over a million geocaches hidden worldwide.

But some companies feel that this is a stagnant path to follow. They instead see successful technology -that is, the most adept at meeting needs-, rather than a greater economic success, as their goal. At first glance, this seems like a poor choice for a for-profit company, but it must be admitted that because it isn’t a matter of cost, they are much better at meeting consumer needs, and thus inadvertently control a larger market share.

Some companies, like Google, produce open-source software which freely disributes its blueprints, so that people can adapt it, and write code for it to support application and preform tasks for which it wasn’t originally designed, In effect, this saves the industry billions of dollars in development costs that they would have to pay to these freelance programmers.

Google created a single version of Android and made its source code publicly available. They’ve also open-sourced a compliance test, which functions as a guardrail so that users who choose to personalize and modify their smartphone’s operating system don’t run into problems running the base set of Android’s applications. Variations offer a different set of core applications and different hardware design (hardware layout, hands-free etc), and create different profiles to meet the varying markets needs such as tracking of delivery fleets, shipping, police coordination, and personal GPS. With so many options, natural selection has become a driving force in the evolution of technology. We no longer need to wait around for the original manufacturer to patch a bug.

When people think about GPS tracking, they think of it as just a portable version of Google Maps, but don’t really understand how it works. GPS acts as personal locating device, which finds your position relative to satellites and stationary transmitters (or “land satellites”), and overlays it on a map that has received the same treatment.

The line between automotive and personal GPS is rapidly fading as the popularity of the smartphone surges. Newer vehicles have GPS built into them, but for a lot of people, the choice between a brand new car, or a multipurpose device that can follow you off-road, appears to have been an easy one. This is especially important in cases of kidnapping because abductors will quickly abandon a stolen vehicle to prevent license plates from drawing attention from police. GPS could locate the vehicle, but not its owner. The smartphone will also have record of its current or last known position, and call and browser history. This can shed light on suspects, since many abductees are taken by people they have been acquainted with.

The internet has greatly increased the speed at which information makes its way through the channels, and this is keystone. Police hold that if missing individuals have not been recovered in the first 48 hours, the chances of finding them drop by 50%. Photos now spread like wildfire. Android has released their free Missing app, a program that notifies smartphone users when a person is missing in their area. The program provides photos of the missing person, descriptions of the suspect and vehicle, contact information for the authorities, and an option to submit a tip. In effect, smartphone GPS is turning ordinary citizens into an urban search and rescue team.

However, today most car lots, both new and used, have jumped on the GPS vehicle tracking band wagon and have begun employing these systems to help offset the costs associated with repossession. For car dealerships that finance cars, a comprehensive GPS vehicle tracking system can save them a lot of money in the long run.

If a person is delinquent on their payment and the dealership has made the decision to take back possession of the car, not having a tracking system will mean having to spend money hiring a professional “repo man” to hunt down the car. This can take a long time and in some cases the car is never recovered.

Sadly, there are still a lot of car dealerships who do not want to pay the initial cost of setting up fleet management or GPS systems on their cars, and it seems they are being penny wise and dollar foolish when it comes right down to it.

If a person stops making payments when there is still a large sum of money owed on a vehicle then this could wind up being a total loss of that car for the financer. For this reason it seems logical to think that most companies that are in the business of leasing cars would want the added protection offered by a GPS tracking system.

Essentially, this helps cut out the middle man and makes recovering the vehicle much easier. Obviously knowing where the car is located is going to save a lot of time, and therefore a good deal of money as it is most certainly half the battle.