Geofences are a great feature of the Smartrak map. By drawing virtual fences (geofences) around areas, you're able to manage when vehicles, assets or personnel have crossed the fence boundary and receive notifications, should they be needed as well.
By looking at Geofence applications within your own organisation, you can utilise improved visibility and reporting metrics to provide a more streamlined and automated process for management of the comings and goings of fleet and assets and the reporting of such.
The following are some of the uses you might have for setting up a geofence:
Setting up your depot or main office is a great way to get an understanding of the movements of your fleet. Geofences can work for both vehicles and personnel so that you know when either an individual is on site, or a fleet vehicle is there.
Using this can help assist with calculations around fleet utilisation, especially if you run pool vehicles. By having a historical record of all the vehicles, you can review peak utilisation across a period (minimum number of vehicles are in the depot/office). Using this peak utilisation data, you may see inefficiencies in your fleet, from having too many vehicles, or not enough, or maybe even not enough of a type, for example, four wheel drives or utes, and may highlight the need to re-allocate resources from one team to another.
Knowing when vehicles have arrived at a work site and how long they were there can be leveraged in many ways. You can attribute the cost of resources allocated to a job, and the number of hours of value-adding utilisation an asset is providing i.e. is there a generator sitting on site unused for the duration of the job that could have been allocated elsewhere? You can also use geofences around sites to keep up to date on day-to-day coordination by receiving automated notifications when vehicles are leaving sites. This can be useful for deliveries and logistic purposes by estimating arrival times.
Do you have areas that are out of bounds or restricted to vehicles or personnel? Placing a geofence around these areas assists with alerting administrators when someone strays into regions that are restricted.
These restricted areas may be high-risk areas such as mining sites, or they may be areas that are restricted to vehicles due to environmental impact such as water reservoirs. By implementing restricted areas you can monitor and ensure that your staff are abiding by workplace policy and environmental obligations
Are you an organisation that needs to keep track of when you last had someone visit a location? Maybe you're checking on the condition of amenities or wanting to keep track of when the lawn was last mowed at a sporting ground or park.
By placing a geofence around a park, you can keep track of vehicles and assets that have entered these geofences. Having your mower as a tracked asset in the Smartrak map will allow it to trigger an event when it enters a geofenced park or region. By keeping track of when the geofence was last entered/exited by your mowers, you can quickly tell the last time the lawn was maintained, helping ensure you're maintaining a schedule and monitoring these tasks in a more automated manner.
Using geofences coupled with our proof of activity report provides further insights surrounding the use of vehicles within geofences. For example, with the above mower, you could record the amount of time a secondary input (mower blades) has been operating, thereby looking into utilisation within regions. Other examples would be sprayer units and recording the regions in which they are being used, this can ensure oversight that restricted or protected zones aren't being sprayed in.
Temporary disaster/danger zoning can be a great way to ensure your staff a kept out of harm's way. In the event of bushfires, flooding or earthquakes there may be regions that are too dangerous to enter. By placing Geofences surrounding these areas, you can monitor traffic who may unknowingly enter these regions, receive notifications and if needed direct staff away from these danger zones.
