Service adds GPS to mobile apps mix

With satellite positioning GPS hardware becoming increasingly common in smartphones and enterprise PDAs, businesses have new opportunities to exploit this capability for purposes beyond route finding. Integrating GPS with existing mobile infrastructure could prove tricky, however, which is where one vendor aims to fill a gap in the market.

UK-based Aeromark unveiled in October its Optimatics platform, which combines satellite navigation with workflow management for field-based workers such as engineers. The software can also track workers to provide reports on journey times and the time taken to complete jobs, helping firms to spot problems and identify where improvements can be made.

Optimatics is a hosted application that takes inputs from a customer’s enterprise systems and other data, such as driver fuel expenses. Aeromark can also provide the Aerowork workflow tool for management of staff job schedules, and the Aerotrack vehicle tracking function, both of which feed data into Optimatics, plus a Mobile Forms tool for data gathering.

Roger Marks, managing director of Aeromark, said that although there are many telematics and workflow mobility tools available, few suppliers offer all these functions together.

“A vehicle tracking tool can tell you where your engineers went and when, but it’s difficult to cross-correlate this with data from the mobility application. That’s what Optimatics does,” Marks said. Customers can integrate a third-party workflow application if necessary.

A final tool, the web-based SmartDash console, provides a graphical overview of the information, enabling managers to see at a glance whether average journey times are increasing or decreasing, whether fuel consumption is up or down, and the average time taken by workers to complete a job.

“It gives you everything you need to make the correct management decisions,” said Marks.

Customers can roll out Optimatics quickly because it is hosted and delivered as an online service. Marks said that the software had been operated by pilot users for some months, and that customers found that getting their vehicles kitted out for the GPS receiver was the longest part of the process.

“This means it can be deployed in a matter of weeks, rather than as the end product of a year-long project,” Marks said.

Aeromark claims that its software soon pays for itself through efficiency gains. Its turn-by-turn navigation tool helps the driver find the quickest route to a customer site, which saves both time and fuel. In addition, Optimatics automatically logs the job start time from when the GPS fix shows the engineer has arrived on-site, rather than relying on them to log an accurate start time through their PDA. Some customers running the pilot projects have seen savings in the region of £300 per user per month, Marks claimed.

“By converging these multiple data sources, you make the information more accurate,” said Marks.

Optimatics is available now, with licensing costs from £30 to £75 per vehicle per month, depending upon the options customers choose.

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