Tips on choosing the best vehicle tracking provider for your needs

There are many vehicle tracking service providers infiltrating the Ghanaian market and all will claim to be the best. The truth is there are no ‘best’ vehicles tracking equipment suppliers, but there will be a supplier whose products and services best meet your specific requirements, are reliable, well established, and offer good you support and control at the right price.

This means that one needs to know what to look out for in a tracking system and what factors need to consider whilst making a tracking decision. Please, DO NOT assume that all tracking systems are the same and so you just choose based on price. Below are some factors that you need to consider before making a decision.

Features – the tracking system needs to be able to do what you require of it. If all you want to do is see what time your employees arrive at a job site in the morning you have a very basic requirement that many tracking systems can fulfill. You don’t need the top-end system with 101 functions and 30 second position update rate etc. Conversely, tracking systems can incorporate mobile data solutions that include job dispatch, messaging, driver identification, satellite navigation and a host of other functions that if you find necessary may be of benefit to your business when integrated with your tracking system. It is important therefore to qualify and quantify each benefit these features bring you and prove to yourself and others in your business that there would be a return on each of these benefits and that they are not just a ‘nice to have’.

Reliability – it is more difficult that one would expect to deliver a continuous tracking service day-in day-out. Some tracking systems are inherently unreliable, for a variety of reasons. The best way for you to establish whether a product is reliable is to speak to existing customers, but the catch is that the customer list that a sales rep will give you will only be the happy ones. We therefore strongly urge potential customers to just get a few units to start with and prove that it is reliable themselves. If a sales representative pushes too hard for you to sign up your whole fleet, and starts to offer significant discounts for you to do so, you should be concerned that they don’t have faith that you will want to expand the technology across your fleet once you’ve tested it.

Customer support – technology is never perfect and vehicle tracking is no different. You will have problems with some of your units over time, which is to be expected, but you need to know that you have the support there when needed. A good way to check that someone answers the phone when you need assistance is to phone your prospective tracking companies technical support line several times before deciding to sign up. There are numerous tracking companies that put all of their resources into selling or offer a lower price by cutting costs on the support side of the business and often you won’t know this until after you have entered into a lease. Nothing is more annoying than having someone take your money and then not be interested in helping you when it goes wrong.

Hidden Costs – there are a number of potential hidden costs with a tracking system, such as:-

1. Installation fees 
2. Monthly subscription fees 
3. Annual software license fees 
4. Separate mobile carrier fees for GPRS data transfer 
5. Polling Fees (when you want to discover where a vehicle is right now) 
6. Callout fees for repairs even if under warranty 
7. De-install/Re-install fees when you want to move the hardware from one vehicle to another 
8. Software update fees 
9. Additional software user fees

Demonstration Login – a tracking company should have a live demonstration fleet with which to show you the product and its features. They should also be able to leave you with the login details so you can play with it once the annoying sales rep has gone. Log onto it as often as you can and make sure there are no issues and put pressure on the system by selecting a lot of vehicles at once and running a report over months at a time. Many systems are unstable and will crash if you do this. If they won’t leave you with a login then they probably don’t have a great deal of confidence in their system.

Explaining Common Tracking terms and jargon

Real-time vehicle tracking – this means that you can see where you vehicles are right now. This tracking will also include historical tracking which stores all of your data for a set period of time. How you access this data will vary between tracking companies – the best systems will be stable enough for you to run a report immediately while other systems will require that you be emailed the report.

Update rate – this is the frequency at which the vehicle location and information is sent to the host server via the cell phone network. Vehicle location and information will usually be updated automatically when an event takes place that the vehicle is monitoring, such as ignition ON/OFF or doors OPEN/CLOSED. Unless you are analyzing routes very closely you shouldn’t need high update rates, as most of the information used is at the locations where the vehicle is turned on and off. If you need to know where a vehicle is right now you can always poll the vehicle (see Current Position below).

Current Position – this function allows you to find the vehicle location immediately by clicking a button. Use this if you don’t want to wait for the next timed update. The most common use for this function is when directing drivers to a destination from your computer and need to closely monitor their progress.

Customer Sites/POI (Points of Interest) – with most tracking systems you can enter your own site information either as a radius around a post code or as a drawn boundary. When a vehicle is within the area the location information shows the site name instead of the GPS position (longitude and latitude reports). This makes it easier for the user to see what places the vehicle has been to and also allows you to run reports on how often and for how long a vehicle has been to that site.

Geofencing – this is similar to a Customer Site/POI but is designed to create an action when the vehicle moves in or out of a designated area. There may be certain areas that if your employees were entering or exiting you would like to be alerted, or have an email sent to you. If you pay your employees from when they leave home you can put a geofences around their postcode and run reports for the week on when they left and arrived home each day. This is great for cross-checking their timesheets. Other companies use it to alert customers automatically via email that one of their vehicles has just arrived on site or moved out of site. 

Summary

It is an exciting time for fleet owners as they realize the advantages of GPS/GSM vehicle tracking; and we here at E-Solutions Ghana Limited promise to keep our eyes on new technologies and to meet all your tracking needs as we focus on providing the most beneficial GPS/GSM tracking systems in the industry.

Thousands of small to medium sized business owners are already helping their fleets and employees become more productive.