Where was my truck ?
Verification of Vehicle Operation
A customer called the other day who owns a large HVAC company. One of the reasons he purchased our real-time vehicle tracking system is because he wanted to improve driver safety. He also uses a "How’s My Driving"service that relies on the public to call an 800# to report reckless driving. When one of those calls comes in he usually gets the truck number, tag number, location of event, and what the complaint is. The business owner gives his drivers the benefit of doubt when one of these calls is reported. However, the reason why he called me today was to find out if there is an easy way to "see" where a particular truck was because one of the "How’s My Driving" calls came in between 8 and 9am that day to report it was speeding through a school zone.
I told my customer that we can easily "see" where the truck was during a specific time on any day within the past 90 days. I explained there are two ways to get to the information we need. And, that’s by design. We make many features and functions accessible in a number of different ways in order to minimize keystrokes and ultimately make the program easier and more intuitive. Okay, the information we need is the unit detail for the day in question. One way to get the needed information is to locate the unit on the Fleet Map, mouse over it and click the link for Unit Map View. This gets us all of the GPS location information for that calendar day. Another way to get this information is by identifying the unit in the left-hand column of the Fleet Map and then clicking on the green arrow.
Now that we have the unit detail, also called "Breadcrumb Trail" displayed on the map we can zero in on the time we want to analyze. To do this, we go to the bottom of the screen where the playback controller is located to manually or automatically playback the route that the vehicle took for the day. The manual control is a sliding horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the map. Using this, my customer can zero in to the exact spot where the vehicle was reported to have sped through the school zone. Unfortunately for the driver, our real-time vehicle tracking system confirmed what had been reported. He was speeding through the school zone.
