With winter quickly approaching many in the US prepare for the festive season. Christmas and Thanksgiving are some of the good things that go hand in hand with the winter season. For many fleet operations, however, it isn’t all festivity and jolliness.

In the public sector, fleets are required to be prepared and ready for service 24/7.  Large populations rely heavily on an effective snow removal, and road management fleet to ensure that their daily routine goes by unimpeded.

MarshallGIS has had many successful projects that implemented LiGO®, our very own GPS Automatic vehicle location (AVL) to monitor many aspects of winter fleet operation. Our expertise in systems and controller integration puts us a cut above the competition. When it comes to acquiring special vehicle data, look no further.

LiGO® is equipped with many tools to help the user achieve the benefits. LiGO® can provide, live “real-time” views of your vehicles and the current location of one or all vehicles in the fleet. Expanded vehicle data includes current address, current speed, the direction of travel, time stopped (if applicable) and verification of last data transmission. With LiGO® the easy to use query tool makes it very simple to do an “on-demand” query to request the immediate location of a vehicle.

LiGO® system also provides the ability to connect to an onboard device, sensor, system or controller.
Examples include:

• Power Take-Off (PTO) Tracking
• Sweeper
• Plow position
• Spreader/Spreader controller
• Thermometer
• Sprayer
• Paint Stripper

LiGO® is compatible with most industry-standard controllers for vehicles like snow plows. our experienced developers have produced numerous custom solutions for customers with specific requirements. Real-time photo updates, or connecting to controller outputs and displaying this information in a usable format.

For fleet managers in harsh winter bearing States, the seasonal festivity is juxtaposed by what it means for vehicles. Mechanical breakdowns, high repair costs, and upticks in vehicle accidents an unfortunate, but fairly preventable reality.

Harsh weather conditions due to high winds, freezing temperatures, slippery roads take a toll on any vehicle. Fleet vehicles which are on the road for longer periods of times than average, require additional oversight, and maintenance. Preparing your fleet vehicles for winter and its importance cannot be understated.

Below are just a few tips to get you started:

• Understanding and utilizing correct fuel: Seasonally enhanced fuel in colder environments can save fuel-economy from deteriorating. Managers also have the option of using special additives to increase power and fuel economy. We recommend that the choice of additive be heavily researched.
• Checking vehicle lights: Something as simple as a dysfunctional blinker could cause easily avoidable damages. This is especially true in the winter seasons when the roads are slicker than usual.
• Keeping appropriate water and fluid levels: Engine coolant does not age well replacing old coolant with fresh antifreeze added is a must. Water can sometimes freeze in fuel storage tanks and filtration systems. This can cause extensive fuel system damage to fuel pumps and injectors.
• Tire pressure must be checked every few weeks: Ensuring tires are pumped and the thread is at least the AA recommended 3mm for winter driving. Driving on underinflated tires can also cause unwarranted wear. Driving on overinflated tires can reduce grip and increase the risk of damage from road debris and potholes.
• Battery Maintenance: A very common winter breakdown issue, as cold weather can affect the chemical reactions that aid in holding a charge.

Above is a fraction of the preventative fleet maintenance steps managers should take to ensure their fleets are operational during winter. We recommend fleet owners and managers perform extensive research on keeping vehicles operative in the winter seasons.

Telematics goes beyond being a useful tool for Fleet managers. The data gathered by LiGO®, offers an opportunity for cities to offer the general population information that facilitates their lives. A city that has more informed residents is a city with happier residents.

Public facing data allows residents of a certain area to know when roadwork, snow removal, accidents, and other major road events that affect the usual flow of activity.  These events often affect traffic, public transportation times, and overall availability of public utilities.

The City of Lincoln is just one example of many MarshallGIS customers using LiGO® software to gather and display data publicly. The City has chosen to gather street sweeping vehicle routes. The data is displayed on a public ESRI map allowing for residents of the area to know where, and when streets are being swept.

Sensors, networks, and engagement all add to real-time urban informatics. These metrics are one of the characteristics of a smart city. Through LiGO® we provide our customers the opportunity to advance their organizations and cities technologically. Furthermore, the data gives their local residents the opportunity to be more connected.

Anyone can put dots on a map, what makes MarshallGIS unique is our ability to collect internal and external vehicle data. We translate “remotely sensed” data into useful metrics that managers can use in their day to day tasks. With early LiGO® development, technicians at MarshallGIS realized that the enormous value-add with telematics is to track and report any sensor in or near a vehicle. Moreover we realized a need for contextualizing this data with other geographic data.

Combining sensor data with geographic data – we can answer complex problems that our customers face. In New York DOT the manager asked if we could identify where all the salt was used, on roads by jurisdiction. Also, the operators were dumping salt back into inventory at the end of a run, back at the shop. By connecting to their different controllers we tracked all salt used, by jurisdiction. We then use a GeoFence at the shop to add back the salt dumped at the location — back into inventory!

Snow plows are just the beginning! Lawn mowers, emergency vehicles, garbage trucks, street cleaners… the list goes on and on. Combining sensors with other geospatial data opens a whole new world.

Portal Invitations

[CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE]

Once Logged in you should see your username in the top right hand corner of the page, this means that you are logged in.

Navigating the Portal

The navigation ribbon at the top of every web page is your guide to different areas of the Portal. Each tab on the ribbon will redirect you to a certain page

Performing Searches

Several Pages on the Portal have search bars. When searching from the ‘Knowledge Base’ page and ‘My Support Page’ the portal will begin to search its libraries for related articles that may resolve the issue or question you had. Note: the home page search bar does not have this functionality but you may still use it to search the Portal.

Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is the source for most information, articles, and documentation. This will likely be the most used feature of the Customer Service Self Help Portal and we encourage you to have a look at it and poke around, you may find something new that you didn’t know before!

My Support

For whenever the Knowledge base is unable to answer your questions, users may turn to the My Support page which also features a smart search functionality. In addition to the smart search, through My Support users are able to log cases directly to MarshallGIS which are handled in a prompt manner.

To log a new case simply click on the ‘Open a New Case’ button in the lower right hand side of the page.

For quicker response times, it’s helpful that users fill in the new case form with as much detail as possible.

Cases can be tracked on the My Support page you can filter the view of your cases by open cases, resolved cases, or all cases.

Forums

Forums are used for general discussion, and update information. Users can discuss amongst themselves and MarshallGIS staff about certain issues, suggestions, likes, dislikes etc. This is also the place where many of the LiGO updates will be posted. We highly recommend that users subscribe to the LiGO updates Forum Thread as so they can be notified of all LiGO update Information. To subscribe to a Forum thread simply click on the forum name:

Next click on the Forum Thread that you wish to receive notifications about (A thread simply means a running discussion related to the Forum topic).

Once in the Thread you have the option to subscribe or unsubscribe to Threads using the button on the upper right hand side of the page:

YouTube Channel

This tab will redirect you to our MarshallGIS YouTube channel where you can find a series of instructional videos as well as GeoKNX, and LiGO feature demos and webinars.

Contact Us

This tab gives you the opportunity to reach out to MarshallGIS directly, simply fill in the form as completely as possible and we will try get back to you promptly.

For any questions regarding the Portal feel free to contact me directly at support@marshallgis.com

It’s no secret that in the last couple of years Data and our ability to handle, disseminate, and organize it has become a key topic. This can be said of our political, social, and technological areas of our day to day lives. For the purpose of this article however, I would like to focus on how Data in the automotive sphere of industrial life, more specifically; how the emergence of InsureTech in the world of IoT has taken strides that may change many things about how we drive, manage drivers, and handle legal issues involving driving.

Photo by Mark Cruz on Unsplash

In spite of significant progress made in the InsureTech world, much is yet to be debated and eventually implemented in regards to how telematics are used by insurers. In a recent conference “Next Gen Analytics and IoT: Powering InsureTech” organized by the Center for Executive Education at St. Johns University in New York City; many standing questions were brought up about the unique relationship that Telematics, and Insurance companies should have. These are questions that arise from the almost inevitable collision course they are on. These questions were intended to ensure that the eventual collision of insurance and telematics industries happens in the most streamlined, fair, and effective way possible.

The questions revolved around three main issues. To begin with, privacy; with regards to how much information is disposable for policyholders with regards to the personal data being collected telematically and whether or not they understand how their respective insurers are using this data. Moreover, Pricing standards; this issue focuses on how these insurance companies are using data collected to leverage prices and/or settle claims. Lastly, also relating to price models; how insurers might use telematics predictive data to set policy plans and how these can be justified or explained. These are valid questions that will most certainly need answers sooner than later due to the merging of these two industries happening rather quickly.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

MarshallGIS telematics software solution LiGO® has been a key factor in a number of our customer’s settlement claims and have been key elements in police investigations into accident reconstruction situations which have later been used as proof for insurance companies. We sense that more of this is to come in the near future, and so should law enforcement and insurance companies alike. Asides from the grey areas yet to be defined by both there are strong arguments that support the fact that real-time tracking and other telematics features is really the only fair way for insures to set policies, as it offers a level of transparency and reliability previously unheard-of. Conferences like the one organized by St. Johns University in New York and the numerous other InsureTech events that are happening around the country are key in hashing out these guidelines to create a market that not only promotes safety but also has the potential of enabling insurers and insured individuals to save money.

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