I was reading this article earlier today about how a stolen ambulance was recovered using the vehicle’s GPS transponder. Obviously, this is just one more benefit to tracking your vehicle fleet with GPS-based solutions. It may even be possible that insurance companies will factor the presence of GPS tracking systems into your company’s insurance policy, which could result in discounts to damage coverage since vehicles should be easier to recover if lost or stolen. Likewise, if a vehicle is lost or stolen it can be recovered in less time and with less impact to your fleet capacity. Eventually we will see more and more equipment tracked in real time with GPS.
Study: Fleets Using GPS More Than Ever
A recent study by C.J. Driscoll and Associates shows that fleet vehicles, construction equipment, and mobile workers account for about 3.6 million GPS devices in use in the United States. This number is expected to increase to about 6.5 million by the year 2012 as more businesses realize the benefits of GPS fleet tracking in terms of fuel savings, asset tracking, and overall efficiency. We expect these trends to continue until all commercial vehicle fleets adopt GPS fleet management as central to their logistic efforts.
Using GPS Fleet Systems in the Developing World
One of the issues with the accelerated economic growth of the developing world is the reliability of road and mapping data. In many places like Dubai and China construction is taking place at such a rapid pace that municipal authorities cannot assign addresses fast enough to meet demand. Likewise, in other places like India, existing mapping data is simply unreliable. This is where GPS can be ideal as GPS uses your specific position and geographic coordinates, which makes it immune to problems that plague traditional mapping systems that use street names and other arbitrary assignments of position.
In places like Nagpur, India, city officials are meeting such challenges by installing fleet management systems in their ambulances and emergency vehicles in order to best respond to emergencies and disasters:
Dr Pradhan said that whenever anybody calls 102, the control room can track the ambulance nearest to the spot and direct it to the place. “OCHRI has installed the device on all its six ambulances as well as those of other private hospitals,” he said.
Dr Noorul Amin, senior medical officer and in-charge of Emergency Medical Services at OCHRI, said that GPS technology uses radio waves to calculate the distance between vehi Dr Pradhan said these ambulances would have one hospital staff capable of providing first aid at the spot itself. He also underlined the need for providing all life-saving medicines in them. He said the project was brainchild of NMC commissioner Aseem Gupta.
Fleet management using GPS is an ideal way to quickly respond and deploy your assets to react to crisis quickly. This is a trend we expect to continue.
American Airlines Invests in GPS Fleet Tracking
Many companies are starting to see the benefits of tracking their fleets with GPS-based solutions in terms of fuel cost savings and more efficient route planning. With GPS, you can constantly optimize your routes, which will add directly to the bottom line over time through more efficient use of resources. American Airlines recently reported an investment of $400 million to upgrade its entire fleet with GPS navigation systems to operate more efficiently:
“I think we are going to save several thousand pounds of fuel on this one flight,” he said.
And that could mean more cost savings for American, which spent $9 billion on jet fuel in 2008, if it is allowed more trans-Atlantic flights that use the new technology. The carrier has said it wants to save 120 million gallons of fuel and reduce carbon emissions by 2.5 billion pounds this year.
Flight 63 will use an optimized route determined by GPS, not a route predetermined by air traffic controllers. GPS lets controllers track a plane all the way across the Atlantic, even when it’s out of radar range, unlike the Air France plane that disappeared from radar last week. GPS would help maintain appropriate separation among planes.
In addition to the cost savings and reduced environmental impact, GPS will help avoid tragedies like the disappearance of the Air France flight over the Atlantic.