You may already use GPS tracking in your fleet or for your lone workers, but if you are not utilising all the tools you have, you may be missing out on the real value.

Unless you are a security monitoring company, you won't have time to sit and monitor what your fleet is doing every moment of the day. However, with a geofence solution, you don't have to.

What is a geofence?

Simply put, a geofence is virtual fence or border around a predefined geographic area.

How is geofencing used?

Geofencing is an extremely flexible tool. By being a little creative, geofencing can be used for a number of purposes (vehicles and personnel).

• Create a geofence around key properties or areas of interest - e.g., set up a geofence around a warehouse, depot, or client site to track when vehicles enter or leave.
• Check-in/out - e.g., drivers/people automatically log check-in when arriving at a customer site and check-out when leaving, simplifying timesheet tracking.
• Identify points of interest or key locations on a map - e.g., highlight fuel stations, high-risk construction zones, or delivery hubs to optimise routing and planning.
• Monitoring vehicle and staff movements - e.g., track service vehicles visiting multiple client sites throughout the day to ensure compliance with scheduled routes.
• Automatically report on vehicle or staff movements in these areas - e.g., receive daily or weekly reports on how long a vehicle spends at each depot or client location for operational insights.
• Monitor and maintain safe speeding limits by identifying high-risk areas that enforce restricted speeding zones - e.g., flag any speeding events in school zones, hospital areas, or construction sites.
• Have access to a log of events for any resource that travels in or out of a geofence - e.g., generate a historical record of vehicle entries/exits at a critical facility for security or audit purposes.

What is the ideal size for a geofenced area?

The benefit of a having a platform that allows unlimited geofences on a map is you are not limited or restricted by size, you can ring-fence a property, building, Street, Suburb, Town, City, Region or Island. You can set up specific areas of risk or caution for alerts or simply sites of interest for reporting. An ideal size is, therefore, use-case specific and linked to the intended outcomes you wish to achieve

Time on site

Knowing when a vehicle has arrived at a work site and how long it was there can be leveraged in many ways. You can attribute the cost of resources allocated to a job, the number of hours of value-adding utilisation an asset is providing i.e. is there a digger 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.

Fleet utilisation

If you run pool vehicles, using your geofence allows you to review peak utilisation across a period (i.e. minimum number of vehicles are in the Head Office or Satellite site). Using this peak utilisation data, you may see inefficiencies or overcapitalisation in your fleet, from having too many vehicles, or not enough, or maybe even not enough of a type. For example, too many/few four-wheel drives or Utes, may highlight the need to re-allocate resources from one team to another.

Scheduled visits

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, your last client visit, or wanting to keep track of when the lawn was last mowed at a sporting ground or park.

By placing a geofence around a building, reserve or park, you can keep track of current and historical data of vehicles and assets that have entered these geofences. For example, tracking a mower will cause 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.

Proof of activity

Using a geofence, coupled with proof of activity reporting can provide further insights surrounding the use of vehicles within geofences. For example, with a mower you could record the amount of time a secondary input (mower blades) has been operating, thereby looking into utilisation within locations. Another example would be sprayer units and recording the locations in which they are being used; this can ensure oversight that restricted or protected zones aren't being sprayed in.

How can a geofence work for your health and safety?

By drawing virtual zones around sites, work areas and secure areas, a vehicle or a person can trigger alerts or warnings that can be sent to an operator or a group of staff.

Restricted or caution areas

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 and also gives you the ability to automatically report on vehicle or staff movements in these areas.

• The district nurse of a local in-home care organisation would like to be alerted when one of their staff enters an identified high-risk patient zone, and a follow up when they exit safety.
• The operations manager of a mining site may want to be alerted if any vehicles enter an area identified as out of bounds or Restricted in the mining location.

Disaster zoning

Temporary disaster/danger zoning can be a great way to ensure your staff are 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 around these areas, you can monitor traffic that unknowingly enters these regions, receive notifications and if needed direct staff away from these danger zones.

• The Health and Safety Manager of a roading firm would like a text message (SMS) when a staff member enters an area of known risks, such as a known slip area along the Kaikoura roading. They would also like this to be reported upon, on a weekly basis for their Health and Safety Ledger.

Lone workers

As above, under 'Time on Site', a geofence set-up can be used to Check-in or Check out a lone worker. A team supervisor or Safety Officer may wish to be alerted daily when a lone worker has arrived at a remote location or has left the site to come home at the end of a shift. This simple but effective use of a geofence can become a crucial part of your real-world use for a geofence in a health and safety solution.

Geofences can quickly become a central and crucial tool in managing your daily operations and also helping with your organisational risk management and reporting.

Find out more about how Smartrak can help you with geofencing or other features.