Category Archives: LiGO

There are many types of telematics Hardware devices, cables, tablets, and sensors that exist in the market that all serve different purposes. Often certain vehicles require completely different specs to perform their duty. For example, a snowplow is going to require a much sturdier and durable device which has the ability to identify when a snowplows arm and plow is in the down position or not, whereas a delivery vehicle would most likely not.

There are two main categories of questions to determine when making the decision on which devices to equip.

• Equipment/ Vehicle Information

  • The model/make of the vehicle (a Prius and a Ford are inherently different so might require different devices).
  • The year of manufacture is also important (cars older than 1996 require different hardware)
  • Is the device going to need to be inside or outside of the cab?
  • Is power needed or not

• Functional Information

  • What is the goal? Do we just need to track or is more functionality needed?
  • How many inputs are needed (e.g., right broom)?
  • Will you be needing engine diagnostics?
  • Do you need to identify the driver using the vehicle?
  • Staff to install or not?

These questions help narrow down the needs of your fleet and can identify the types of devices to be used. Below is a list of the different types of devices which each serve different purposes.

Hardware varies in the complexity of installation, some are a simple plug and play while others may require more technical knowledge of how to properly integrate the devices with the respective vehicles.

For more information on the different devices and capabilities please feel free to request a demo in which we can go in depth about all the different hardware, you may also want to check out our recorded Webinar in which we also explore these devices and more.

Having trouble on deciding whether to make the switch to implementing telematics? Better Management = Smarter Government you need information and metrics to manage! LiGO enables operations managers and workers in the field to have up to date and useful information.

• Know where your resources are

At any point in time know where your valuable resources (vehicles and people) are.

“Trust but verify”.

• Mobile Resource history

Look at where a vehicle or crew traveled throughout a particular day, week or month.

• Fuel Savings – Idling, Speeding

Reduce fuel costs & “Go Green” by reducing driver idling time, speeding, fast acceleration, and more.  Savings and ROI can be derived in just days!

• Regulatory Compliance

Help meet NPDES MS4 Stormwater and other regulatory compliance requirements with accurate daily, monthly yearly record keeping and reporting.

• Route Optimization for Better Dispatching

Efficiently dispatching drivers on optimized routes will reduce fuel consumption, enhance productivity and reduce overtime.  LiGO will help you find the right resources that are the closest to the work site.

• Prevent Vehicle Abuse and Wear and Tear

Monitoring and reporting of aggressive driving combined with the use of in vehicle audible warnings feedback will reduce wear and tear on your fleet vehicle.

• Safety = Saving

The tracking of speeding and aggressive driving events can modify driver behavior. This reduces accidents and insurance rates as well as vehicle and driver down time.

• Stop Unauthorized Vehicle Use

Detail time and trip history reports will reduce drivers wasting time, unauthorized trip and stops. Report after hour’s vehicle usage and provide vehicle location for theft recovery.

• Schedule Vehicle Maintenance and Reminders

Prioritize vehicles for repair and maintenance based on live vehicle Odometer readings, fuel usage and engine hours. Schedule maintenance reminders for your entire fleet.

• Detect Engine Issues and Monitor Fault Codes

With engine fault code information (most vehicles), you can now stop engine issues before they become costly to manage and repair.

• Defend yourself against frivolous lawsuits

Cities and counties are easy targets for driving related lawsuits.  Can you prove where your vehicles have been and when?

• Insurance Discounts

Many insurance companies have telematics programs that offer a 15% to 40% discount for sharing your fleet’s driver behavior.

Some Important Notes about Automatic Route Optimization

The automatic optimization of Routes requires solving a notorious and complex problem in computer science called “The Travelling Salesman Problem”. Truly solving the problem and obtaining the guaranteed best route for a set of points on a map is an extremely time and resource consuming problem. It is even more complex on road networks where the distance between two points might be different depending on which direction you drive between them due to one way road systems.

For this reason, the automatic optimization feature uses an approach which performs an estimate and gets a result that is not necessarily the very best solution but should be a good one and should help give your fleet significant fuel savings over time when used for a workers daily set of jobs. If your route is optimized automatically by LiGO it will let you know how much time you saved when it is finished.

Below is an example of an optimized route in Boise – that reduced total drive time by 50% for interoffice mail delivery at the City, and an example of an auto generated route geofence that you can use for other reports.  This route optimization that had such an impact on Boise mail delivery took 5 seconds, and no GIS data processing.

Our take on route optimization is that there are two basic types

• GIS-based analytical optimization, similar to hydraulic modelling for water systems, that is complex, is done infrequently, and only as good as the underlying data.
• Day-to-Day optimization that creates “pretty good” routes, perhaps originally created from complex routing (number 1 above) and/or human experience, but is setup for easy to manage day-to-day operations.

LiGO uses data from 1) above if you have it, but is designed to support 2) above.  Please call to discuss if you have any questions – or need more information.

Using OSM (openstreetmap.org) data, LiGO® is able to generate useful results for optimizing travel through a set of points. At no extra cost, the route management functionality allows you to see the estimated distance and journey time of your planned routes and lets you automatically optimize with the “Optimize” feature or you can configure them manually with your local area knowledge. Within LiGO® you can import a pre-existing route from GIS or similar geospatial systems, you can create the route manually, or you can drive a route and auto create the route.  Routes can then be edited, deleted, and reassigned to workers.

How you can use this information

Reports can be created for total time in a route GeoFence, time stopped, time with “plow down”, or other onboard engine event within a route geofence. Other metrics such as time to job and time on job are auto calculated and turn by turn directions are provided via our free LiGO® Mobile app. Theses logistics will help you always be the most efficient manager possible, cutting time and costs at wherever necessary. This also opens avenues to improve customer relationships with more accurate info on the location and status of your crews in the field. 

Viewing Route Details

After configuring Route Optimization, your new and existing routes will now contain an extra field called Route Details. Here you can see the current length and estimated journey time of the route with the stops in the order that they currently stand. The map also contains a track drawn with directional arrows showing you the optimal route to take between each stop.

Optimizing Your Route

If you drag the stops around in the Route window to reorder them, the track on the map and the Route Details field will update in real time to show the newly calculated route. This is ideal when you have local knowledge of the area and want to use this specialist knowledge to tune your routes.

If you would like LiGO® to optimize your route automatically, you can click the “Optimize” button in the lower left hand side of the Route

In most cases, a mixture of the two approaches will yield the best results. Try an automatic optimization of the route to get off to a good start and then experiment with switching some stops around in areas that you know have complex road structures.

Often, the concept of going green is associated with more expensive and less productive ways of doing things. As it turns out, this is not always the case. Our LiGO telematics solution paves the way for you to transform your fleet operations into greener, more efficient ones. The combination of lower vehicle maintenance costs, improved fuel efficiency and overall improved productivity allow this to happen.

What do we mean by ‘Going Green’?

Simply put, going green means reducing the direct impact of our carbon footprint on the earth wherever possible. many of the functions that fleets perform have a direct or indirect impact on our environment. This could be the use of paper for reporting and logging functions, or the CO2 emissions released by most vehicles on the road. Eliminating waste where reasonably possible not only helps our earth and its inhabitants, it also improves operation productivity and reduces overhead costs.

How will ‘Going Green’ help you save on costs

Implementation of our LiGO telematics solution means that all vehicle logistics are available to you at all times. being alerted about long idle times, unnecessary trips, and harsh braking and accelerating enable you to do something about these issues. Stopping your fleet vehicles from using more fuel than needed will help reduce fuel costs, while the harsh driving alerts allow you to make whatever changes necessary to prevent the degradation of the vehicles, ultimately reducing maintenance costs. Additionally, being aware of harsh drivers among your crew will keep your employees and others using the roads much safer.

How will ‘Going Green’ help you save on time

One advantage of LiGO telematics is the ability to reduce paper waste by switching to digital. Switching to digital not only reduces amount of paper wasted but has also been shown to provide better data with less mistakes and inaccuracies. Reports can more easily be automated, checked of any mistakes, and shared by just a click of a button. Furthermore, the move to digital paper work is a trend now long in the making. The inevitability of digitized work places in most industries is commonly accepted as exactly that, inevitable.

To recap here are some of the main ways ‘Going Green’ can help you save

• Significant savings of fuel
• Low maintenance cost
• Streamlined operations reduced paper work
• Reduction in operation costs
• Lower insurance cost
• Increased life expectancy of vehicles and equipment

One of the biggest risks to fleet manager’s operations are negligent entrustment lawsuit’s. Negligent entrustment can be defined as when one party (the entrustor, typically in the position of manager) is held liable for negligence because they negligently provided another party (the entrusted) with a dangerous instrumentality, that caused injury to a third party. These situations are common and can lead to serious penalties.

There are many steps that can be taken towards preventing such circumstances. Preventative actions as simple as doing back ground checks on who you are hiring are a good start. Are you really surprised that the worker who totaled your transportation van had a long track record of on-road accidents, and a DUI on his record?

The truth is, sometimes no matter how thoroughly you do your research or take precautions to avoid these counter-productive situations accidents do and will happen. Here at MarshallGIS we have received feedback from fleet managers and other types of department heads who have been completely blind-sided by their most ‘trusted’ employees using fleets for personal gains or illegal activities putting the operations in danger. Telematics enable managers to pin point the cause of the problem whether the problem originated internally as in the example given above, or externally.

At MarshallGIS we offer all the tools required allow managers to the best of their ability to avoid any counter-productive activity. Through LiGO® and the software it features you, in whatever managing/planning position you occupy can be notified in real time of any activity that diverges from that of the norm. LiGO® telematics can act as an efficient counter-measure for operational safety for your crew.

Integration makes our product easy to implement while maximizing returns. One of the many functions of LiGO® ACCESS is its API functionality; our customers can keep the existing business systems with which staff are comfortable and familiar with, reducing training efforts and accelerating implementation. This means that the entirety of the telematics data collected by our software solutions can be interpreted, and then fed to a number of secondary systems for other purposes.

What are API’s how do they help?

API’s short for Application Programming Interface, is a characteristic of any software which allows it to connect different devices, and applications by allowing the transfer of data. It is what allows us to book a reservation at a hotel with just a few clicks on a device. It is the link between a command and results in times when the system in which you create the command, and the system in which the results derive from are separate. One analogy would compare an API to the pizza hut employee who takes your call places the order, and then sends the delivery driver in your direction. API’s effectively make communication between different applications possible whilst also enabling the use of the same data for different functions. The beauty of API’s is that the work they do is all behind the scenes, similar to code on a webpage; even though you can’t see it the code is constantly working to do whatever the input demands of it.

Integration features

LiGO® ACCESS web services, was first developed to enhance GeoKNX – a mature MarshallGIS product that pulls and pushes work orders and service requests to and from Lucity, Infor/Hansen and IBM/Maximo’s Enterprise Asset Management, and Work Management Systems (EAM/WMS) for over 100 customers and hundreds of thousands of service requests.  We now have this functionality for LiGO®, and have added Cityworks and Esri integration.

All modules are integrated together, but can be turned off or on based on permissions (uncheck modules if you don’t want them). MarshallGIS has extensive experience with integrating Mobile Work Order Management and Service Requests with location based systems such as ArcGIS including creates, updates and deletes.

Supported Modules

Esri GIS Integration

LiGO® provides for multiple interface options with Esri ArcGIS.  ArcGIS Server maps in LiGO®, live LiGO® vehicle feeds to your ArcGIS operations map, KML import/export, and CSV exports.

Cityworks Integration

MarshallGIS has been partnered with Cityworks for over 5 years and is committed to support Cityworks integration. API’s are designed to fluidly transition without breaks during a software version change.

No third party tools are needed to maintain integration.

We’ve also developed a work flows to push odometer readings from LiGO® into Cityworks and create a vehicle work order for activities such as vehicle inspections, oil changes and tire rotations base on miles and or time.

Garmin Integration

LiGO® can be optionally provisioned with Garmin’s for dispatch/jobs, routing and chat features, and even real time (based on traffic) estimated time of arrival.  This can be enabled simply by checking Garmin as an option. Garmin integration brings a lot of additional functionality – including turn by turn directions, proximity sensors, additional driver ID with NFC, camera, video, and chat.

Displays

To display live vehicles/crew locations from LiGO® on your Cityworks Operation map or any ArcGIS map (Desktop, Server, Online) there are two methods.  As always each have pros and cons.

1. LiGO® can use, but does not require, ArcGIS GeoEvent Processor to update a vehicle feature class on a user defined schedule. This method requires the user to have a Esri GEP license.
2. LiGO® can also send position updates to a user defined REST endpoint. The REST endpoint may be hosted at your location. If you prefer to simply publish a feature service with editing rights to the underlying vehicle feature class, LiGO® can host the REST endpoint and perform the transformation from the LiGO® output to JSON.

With LiGO® ACCESS API, Users can also populate data within Cityworks such as Work Orders or Service requests.

Vehicle-related thefts are up in the ranks of the most common property crimes in the US. It is estimated that on average across states an automotive theft occurs approximately every 43 seconds, with the average rate of recovery being 46 percent. Fleet vehicles often make attractive targets of criminal activities ranging from smash and grabs of valuable parts or outright theft. These factors alone should be enough for any responsible manager to take action in employing the methods available to prevent and deter criminal activity. In the case that its not, here are some case examples from this year alone.

In February a Montgomery County Md. Fleet employee was caught stealing equipment he was in charge of overseeing. The equipment was estimated up to a value of $13,000 which the manager had been selling in illegal markets. It was an anonymous tip that was followed up by police that lead to this discovery. Similarly, in march 2017 former fleet manager Robert Otterson and two body shop owners were charged and pleaded guilty to bid-rigging, theft, and conspiracy. Otterson approved 178 invoices for city vehicle repairs that resulted in unwarranted payments of $403,081.

At MarshallGIS we have received personal accounts of managers and supervisors uncovering illegal activities within their fleet operations thanks to our LiGO® software’s. Whether its real-time tracking that allows you to monitor the location of fleet vehicles, GeoFence alerts which notify you when your fleets are somewhere they shouldn’t be, or task alerts that let you know if something isn’t being done, you can stay one step ahead of mal-practice.

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Here at MarshallGIS, we are committed to pursuing the goal of keeping our planet green. We see a healthy environment as a fundamental factor for a healthy living and we employ this philosophy in all levels of operations from right here within our offices, to the service we offer and their implementations.

GIS technologies matched with our LiGO®, and GeoKnx® software gives managers and their fleet crews the immediate advantage of increasing their efficiency. This is achieved through optimizing routes, maintenance alerts, driver data and other factors that subsequently reduce fuel consumption, fuel emissions, and fleet time spent on the roads. Additionally, the digitization of documents and paperwork reduce the need for excess amounts of papers. Furthermore, they aid in presenting information visually in ways that might promote abstract solutions to problems in ways that isn’t always possible with long written reports or tabular data.

But back to the point, much of today’s sustainable solutions to our energy and climate problems could, and in some cases already do use these technologies. Montana is one of the many states currently using GIS to locate optimal plots of land on which to construct wind farms in its pursuit of green energy. There are other states and cities which have taken to using GIS to form a forest inventory of urban flora in the same way a biologist would catalog coyote populations in certain areas.

Most, if not all aspects of urban planning have much to gain from the advances in GIS technologies. They can help in ways that create infrastructure built with more foresight, and knowledge how it is going to affect our environment and the places in which we live. One step at a time we can move to a better way of living whether its reducing the carbon emissions of fleet vehicles, or acquiring information on where to best construct renewable energy source, the oversight that GIS technologies offer are indispensable.

I hate to cast an ugly shadow on employees, but knowing and controlling what happens when you, the manager, are not present can be taxing. The Geo-Fencing, and Point of Interest features of LiGO offer fleet managers and planners much needed control in oversight of operations. The two differ slightly in the way they are employed and in the way their analytical data can be read, interpreted, and implemented.

Through Geo-Fencing you may manually select areas in the shape of polygons over locations on a map, or even create Geo-fenced routes. You also have the option of importing these Geo-Fence areas from GIS systems directly enabling you to create more specialized maps. Another option would be to create routes as jobs occur; this can be done by collecting data from an optimal day’s work and saving it as the standard. Alerts, or notifications can be set up to be sent to managers to alert them to a number of different things. It can be set so that an alert is sent when a vehicle or worker has entered a Geo-Fence area, or when a vehicle or worker has left the area. the alerts can also be set to send if the vehicle/worker has spent over a certain amount of time, or under a certain amount of time in the selected Geo-Fence area. This means managers can ease up on stressing about when and where their workers are and focus on more pressing tasks.

Points of Interest (POI) are point based locations that you identify, and wish to track the amount of time spent at those locations.  POI’s could be building locations or fixed assets such as signs or hydrants.  POI’s can also be imported or manually defined, and will enable managers to quickly see when workers are on site or in transit, communicate accurate arrival information to customers, and generate productivity reports. Below is how the reporting might appear on a device.

Users may set the software to track certain events such as:

• “disconnecting” (Device tampering or “Disconnecting unit”)
• geo-fence violations (vehicles out-of-service-area)
• unauthorized use (“After business hours”)
• excessive speed
• excessive idling
• hard acceleration
• braking and collision
• specified mileage or hour alerts