iTRAK News - February 2009

Customer Spotlight – Overhead Door Company of Brunswick

In the spring of 2008, it was clear that the faltering economy would hit the construction industry hard, so management at Overhead Door Company of Brunswick took decisive action. They cancelled all 'non-essential' services, including the iTRAK GPS fleet management service they had been using since 2005. "Within three months, we realized that we couldn't really run our business without iTRAK," said Susan Walker, the company's Vice President. "We called iTRAK and immediately reinstated the service."

The Overheard Door Corporation was founded in 1921 by C.G. Johnson, who invented the upward lifting garage door and the electric garage door opener. The Texas-based enterprise is the leading manufacturer of integrated door and operator systems for commercial, industrial and residential applications. Overhead Door Company of Brunswick is one of 400 locally owned and operated distributors of the company's products. OHD Brunswick operates a fleet of 8 trucks, serving a wide range of customers throughout the state of Georgia.

When management made the decision to cut back services, they intended to return to the 'old way' of doing things in many cases. They understood that the cutbacks would likely mean more work for everyone, but didn't realize that in some cases the 'old way' just wasn't good enough any more. With iTRAK Fleet Manager, Walker and her customer service team had been managing the activities of their fleet to deliver the highest level of customer support while minimizing operating costs.

"The first time a customer called and asked when his technician would be arriving, and we couldn't give a good answer, we began to second guess our decision to cancel the iTRAK service," said Walker. "Then we started to notice that without knowing where every truck was located, we couldn't easily re-route drivers to handle jobs that came up suddenly. It didn't take us long to figure out that the cost of $1.00 per day for tracking was insignificant compared to our loss of efficiency."

Once they reinstated their iTRAK Fleet Manager account, Walker set her sights on finding new ways to squeeze even more efficiency out of their fleet operations. "We plan to audit every on-site job to make sure we aren't losing any billable hours, now that we know how long installers and service technicians spend at every job site. That not only helps keep the invoices accurate, but makes sure we are quoting jobs correctly."

The next target is to minimize daily operating costs. Walker believes she can trim fuel and maintenance costs 10-15%, just by tracking driver's hours, routes, and daily trips. "After three years, we really took iTRAK Fleet Manager for granted," admitted Walker. "It wasn't until we took it away that everyone realized how valuable it was. Now that we have iTRAK again, we're prepared to face the economic challenges that lie ahead."

Product Highlight – 'Fleet Squirrel' from Future Quest Wireless

One of the most powerful benefits of using iTRAK Fleet Manager™ is the ability to expand its capabilities to meet your specific needs. As cited in past issues of iTRAK News, many companies use the iTRAK Application Programming Interface (API) to access their data on our servers, and use that data to feed their dispatch or logistics applications. iTRAK Corporation’s Canadian distributor, Future Quest Wireless, Inc., has just launched "Fleet Squirrel," a management tool specifically designed to complement your existing iTRAK vehicle tracking solution.

Fleet Squirrel is a completely self-contained software program that communicates behind the scenes with the central iTRAK Fleet Manager server. Here are just a few of the features included in the Fleet Squirrel application.

• Archive your own data locally; maintain as much history as you like.
• Analyze fleet activity after the fact, off-line.
• Produce reports by vehicle, driver, vehicle type or sub-fleet. (For example, a driver report will show all his/her activity in multiple vehicles).
• Customize functionality to include live display, historical trails, and fleet status.
• Add landmarks quickly and easily with mouse clicks.
• Track and report on driver-to-vehicle assignments.

Store Your Vehicle Location Data Locally
On a programmed interval, Fleet Squirrel automatically downloads the fleet location data for your fleet(s) directly into its own integrated Microsoft SQL database. In this respect, you may think of Fleet Squirrel as an archive tool. The GPSManager Controller runs as a Windows system service in the background to ensure that your data is downloaded, even if the Fleet Squirrel application is not running. Settings can be selected as: weekly, daily, hourly or even on a real-time basis, depending on your requirements.

Off-line and Off-network Capability
As Fleet Squirrel puts your data onto your own PC, there is no need to have an Internet connection to produce reports. As the reports do not have to be generated over the Internet, they are compiled quickly. Any report can be printed in an attractive format or converted to a pdf, Excel, Word, or Crystal Reports format with a mouse click. Or if you want to enable certain employees to produce reports without providing them Internet access… With Fleet Squirrel, it's simple!

Track Driver-Vehicle Assignments
As the program is able to keep track of driver-vehicle assignments, you may generate any report by driver. Even if a driver has been using several different vehicles, you may generate seamless reports under any of the categories you like, such as stops, landmarks, speeding, etc. Fleet Squirrel also allows you to segregate your fleet into sub-fleets and vehicle types. For example, you could have Northeast, South and West sub-fleets, with each region divided into long-haul and courier vehicle types. Reports can be generated for any combination of sub fleet or vehicle type. For example, you could generate a stop report for the South courier vehicles or the West long-haul vehicles.

Graphical History Playback
Fleet Squirrel extends the iTRAK Fleet Manager's exceptional multivehicle historical playback capabilities with color-coded historical trails for any time and date range, for any combination of driver, vehicle, vehicle type or sub fleet. Each vehicle can be assigned a unique breadcrumb trail color. Highlight any point on a trail to see the vehicle's location, speed, heading, driver name, and I/O status.

Play-by-Play History Viewer
Accurately analyze a specific driver's or vehicle's movements with the Play-by-Play Position History tool, which uses tape recorder style functions for user simplicity. Follow a vehicle's position history for any time and date range, as the playback takes you through its movements step by step, moving the map automatically. Pause, resume, rewind and fast forward or change the play-by-play speed and map zoom level to suit your needs. Vehicle icon colors change to indicate vehicle status throughout the playback. Instantly identify by icon color whether the vehicle is stopped, slow-moving, fast-moving or out of coverage.

Fleet Squirrel is only available to users of iTRAK Fleet Manager, and is sold separately by Future Quest Wireless, Inc. For more information and/or pricing, contact Future Quest at 1-250-769-4209 or email Gord Walsh at gwalsh@futurequest.biz.

Did You Know? – Facts about iTRAK

Sometimes even the most experienced users of software applications learn new things. For example, did you know that in Microsoft Word, holding the Ctrl key and hitting the Enter key will insert a page break?

Here are some things you might not know about iTRAK Fleet Manager. We hope you will find them useful!

1. The first version of iTRAK Fleet Manager was called 'NavView.' Launched in 2001, it was designed to run in Windows 95. The current release of iTRAK Fleet Manager is Version 5.00.03b3. You never have to download and update new versions, as they are automatically loaded when you log into iTRAK Fleet Manager from your browser.
2. All iTRAK mobile devices use GPS receivers that can 'see' up to 12 satellites simultaneously. As long as the device has data from at least 4 satellites, it can calculate latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, direction, and time of day. Most of the time, position accuracy will be better than 10 feet.
3. When it was founded in 1995, our company was originally called Data Burst Technologies, Inc. After our customers continually referred to us as 'the iTRAK people,' we changed our name to iTRAK Corporation in February 2007.
4. iTRAK is the only system using 'delivery confirmation' between the ITRAK Fleet Manager application and the iTRAK device to ensure that no data is lost from vehicle to server.
5. We have been tracking on GPS-enabled handsets with our iTRAKjava™ application since 2002.
6. The iTRAK 'Network Operations Center' (NOC) is located at the Company's corporate headquarters at 800 Research Drive in Woodland Park, Colorado, just north of Pike’s Peak. The coordinates of our facilities are Latitude +039.01433°, Longitude
   -105.06445°, and Altitude 8,469 feet.
7. You can activate additional iTRAK Fleet Manager users without additional cost—up to the number of vehicle you are tracking. Make sure everyone who needs to access the fleet data has his/her own account.
8. Some people prefer to use keyboard commands instead of mouse clicks. Use the minus key [-] to zoom the current map out by a factor of 2. Use the plus key [+] to zoom the current map in by a factor of 2. Send an email to admin.support@itrak.com for a list of all keyboard shortcuts.
9. Live technical support on all iTRAK products and services is available from 6:00 AM to 5:00 PM Mountain Time. On-call technicians are available 24/7 for urgent issues. For technical support call 1-719-686-8202 or toll free 1-866-224-8725.
10. There are more than 25 million commercial vehicles in the United States. Almost 4 million of those are in fleets of less than 100 vehicles. Not all of them are being tracked by iTRAK Fleet Manager yet.

[If you have any questions about the above facts, or need additional facts, let us know by emailing general.info@itrak.com.]

Who's Who at iTRAK...

Admin Support – This dedicated group based at our headquarters handles a large number of different tasks, including new order processing and acceptance, questions relating to existing orders, new user set-up, fleet and unit changes, billing, and all other administrative issues. Call the admin staff at 1-866-694-8725 or email them at admin.support@itrak.com.

Technical Support – Rich Geving and his team will make sure you derive the maximum benefit from your iTRAK system. They can help with installation questions, answer technical questions, and help performance issues. Live hours are 6:00 AM - 5:00 PM Mountain Time, with on-call technicians available after hours. Call 1-866-224-8725 or email technical.support@itrak.com.

Sales Team – Based in regional offices throughout the U.S., our team of Regional Sales Managers stands ready to set up product demonstrations, provide current pricing, help calculate return on investment to justify your iTRAK purchase, and organize post-sales training. You can reach the sales team by calling 1-866-694-8725, or emailing itrak.sales@itrak.com

Past Issues of iTRAK News

Check out topics that may interest you from past issues of iTRAK News!

If you have comments, suggestions, or would like to submit a story for publication, we would love to hear from you. Email the iTRAK editorial team at: itraknews@itrak.com.