We have a small logistics department, which delivers our products to customers, which come in a variety: some are within MM, and GMA, but a few ones are in the northern, and southern parts of the island. We have understanding customers, but there are a handful, who are demanding, especially with delivery schedule.
We also have a variety of personalities in our logistics department. Most are rule abiding employees, but some, as I heard from a source, bring their assigned truck to a place where they sell the truck’s diesel, or tires. I also recently had problems with delivery people coming back late due to one reason or another (e.g. truck ban), and thus having a suspiciously large overtime.
Problems with customers located at remote areas, customers blowing off their tops over delivery time, and belligerent delivery staff, are not new in the logistics business, so people have been making solutions. One of them is installing GPS trackers. While installing a GPS tracker is not a cure all, as it will not prevent pilferage as one owner of a trucking company advised us, installing one is at least a deterrent.
There are 2 types of GPS trackers. One is stand alone, in which you just buy a device, and whenever you SMS it with a message, it replies with a location. Reliable looking devices cost around P2700 up. The other is subscription based, in which you log on to a site with a map that tells you where the delivery vehicle is, in real time. However, this comes with a price of P900 to P1000 per month, which may or may not include the price of the GPS device, and its installation. Subscription based services offer other features like remote engine cut off, fuel monitoring, live feed, and voice communications.
Subscription based services, for me, are the gold standard in GPS tracking, but I thought that it was too pricey for an SME like ours, which does not carry high value items like food, grocery items, and new appliances. Trucking for multinationals won’t mind signing up for the service, because they usually carry high value goods, and this is just a small investment to protect the assets. And besides, their revenue more than covers the subscription fee. However, small companies like us must be careful in monitoring our expenses, because the profit we get from delivery of low value goods is so small that any additional expenses render a trip to just break even, or even a loss. Any expense must be calculated to bring real value.
So to partially solve our problems, the stand alone GPS tracker option seemed to be a good fit. However, during that time, I was starting my training in Android app development, and these issues became a spring board to develop our own GPS tracker (see http://crazyhappymonkey.blogspot.com/2015/07/gps-tracking-android-app-loc.html). Development took 2 months starting with my Android training in March, ending in May after all features were debugged. Development cost in the point of view of the company was zero, since I waived the extra, out of office work. The only expense was buying Android phones for each driver. We chose the Cherry Mobile Marble priced at P2500. Since the app’s deployment, it has proven to be reliable in terms of battery life, and GPS signal reception.
The app is real time tracking capable, but it will consume mobile data, which I was trying to avoid in the first place. I thought that given the new capability, we would be tracking the vehicle frequently, but that was not the case.
For our company, the reality is, use of GPS tracking is very limited. Budget for office staff is very scarce, so we live by having a single person carry out the functions of a department. And this is why, we cannot afford to have one dedicated person monitor the movements of our deliveries. So how do we use the app? At the end of each day, I have a person assigned to turn off the phones.
The following day, the guard on duty is instructed to turn on the phone of each truck about to leave. The app is set to run at boot up, so tracking starts as soon as the phone is booted on. The primary use of the app is in sending the latest vehicle location to irate, demanding customers. From our experience with using Loc, irate customers are faster to calm down when we forward to them Loc’s SMS reply, instead of just telling them where the vehicle currently is, and the ETA. I think customers are more inclined to believe GPS data, and thus judge the ETA, freeing us from making commitments.
There are times when we have to deliver to clients in remote areas. Logistical challenges arise when delivery vehicles malfunction on the road, more so when they are in far flung areas. Just last December, one of our vehicles had an injection pump malfunction on the way home from down south. The vehicle stopped along the national highway between towns, so landmarks were hard to determine (i.e. farm lands). We had to interrupt the Christmas party of the repair company, who obliged to send two of their mechanics to fix our vehicle on the condition that we send one of our staff to accompany them to the site. Unfortunately, our staff were already on vacation. Some trouble, and compensation were saved by using Loc instead to determine the vehicle’s location. It was accurate, so the mechanics were able to save time looking for the vehicle. We had to pay a considerable amount of overtime to the logistics staff, but it could have been worse if the mechanics had difficulty locating the site.
The last use of this app is for staff delinquency detection. I made an app (http://crazyhappymonkey.blogspot.com/2016/04/jen-location-data-visualizer.html) that, given the GPS tracking file, determines the places where the delivery trucks stayed more than a defined amount of time, which in our company is 5 minutes. So if the staff stayed in a location for more than 5 minutes, the app tags that place as a point of interest. So knowing the places where they stayed gives me a story about what the vehicle did for the day, to help me see if they made some unexpected stops. This is done everyday for each truck.
Loc works for us. We run on a shoestring budget, so we forgo sophisticated features found in other providers that we foresee won’t be heavily used anyway. We simply need to know where the vehicle is to report to a customer, find it for repairs, or for our peace of mind. Compared to subscription based trackers, Loc cannot compete feature wise, but then again, what Loc does is just what we need, so it gives the best value for the development effort, and the little money we spent.
