Looking for info installing GPS in a small fleet

Mike Litoris

Firstly I know little or nothing about sat navs/gps and dont know where to start. I need any info/advise/help and maybe links to retailers/suppliers.

I've been tasked with gathering info on this. We have a fleet of 23 large rigid trucks that deliver throughout ireland and are considering installing sat navs/gps units to help locate customers.

The main requirements would be...
a) Each unit will have up to 100 customers spread across the week.

b) Unit need to be chargeable from the truck and not reliant on charging batteries.

Again, any help greatly appreaciated.

biko

Most detachable GPS (if not all) will come with a cigarette lighter socket charger.
Garmin and Tomtom would be the two major sellers.
I have used both and find both to be very user friendly and easy to attach/remove to windscreen.

What's the budget per unit?

Some reviews here http://reviews.cnet.com/car-gps-systems

trad

Try these

http://marge.mrm.ie/

I had a chat with them about an upcoming project and they were very helpful, let me have a good root around their system and it seems fairly reasonable. Has a few features the drivers mightn't like but management will. Oh and it's Irish made.

cormie

Very surprised that a fleet of 23 trucks are without GPS :eek:

The will make the drivers lives a lot easier and should vastly improve job completion times.

Pretty much any GPS units out there will fit your description, however, features you should be looking for are custom POI (Points of Interest) available with the likes of Business and Industrial parks as I guess your trucks will be visiting a lot of these. Also, an option to route for a Truck in order to avoid low bridges and the likes which by default it may route through thinking it's a car being driven.

As it's a Rigid, I imagine it will be keeping to main route deliveries and wont be venturing into new estates and the likes too often so again, I'm sure most will be up to date enough to satisfy.

Let me recommend elara.ie, they are an online store but based near Park West and I'm sure you could get a good deal with good customer service too. Garmin now offer an "updates for life" scheme I think, which would be handy if you have 23 units to update frequently.

Also, if the trucks go to the UK or the continent, be sure to get full EU maps and a traffic receiver would be very handy too at avoiding delays on the M1 in England and it may re-route to a different motorway for example.

Elara.ie have a live chat feature and should be able to assist to narrow it down to a unit or 2.

cormie

trad wrote: »

Try these

http://marge.mrm.ie/

I had a chat with them about an upcoming project and they were very helpful, let me have a good root around their system and it seems fairly reasonable. Has a few features the drivers mightn't like but management will. Oh and it's Irish made.

Does this provide each vehicle with a GPS unit to navigate to places, or just a GPS tracker so they can be tracked in the office to ensure they are sticking to their schedule?

trad

Maybe it's sat nav you are looking for. Satelite Navigation versus Global Positioning System.

Their system allow you to track the vehicle and it's activities. Surely your drivers know where they are going?

You would want to be careful with sat nav and commercial vehicles. It can bring artics under low bridges, 3 tonne weight restrictions etc so be careful to specify what type of vehicles you use on any tender you offer for sat nav.

Elara: Kin

It really depends on what you want in the system, a simple satnav would need coordinates input manually and might be tedious but will be the simplest and cheapest option.

Some of the couriers we use have a system onboard so the locations can be sent to the driver on the go and the system can be controlled from a central office. Much better implementation but not cheap or easy to deploy.

With 23 trucks I can only assume you are looking at the second option, we can't help you with that unforunately.

Alun

Here's a company I came across recently while searching where to buy a normal satnav. They appear to do fleet management / tracking solutions too ...

http://www.transpoco.ie/

Mike Litoris

Thanks all for the info. Sorry about the confusion, it is just Sat Navs that we need.

Do they normally come with Software? Basically we have lat longs for all our customers. Could a routes customers with their lat longs be inputted through the software into the Sat Nav? Can they be grouped by day?

Again, thanks for the help.

djscubasteve

Just a suggestion... Talk to your company's mobile phone network. See if you can get hooked up with nokia smartphones that have gps i.e. N95, N96, N86, 5800. There's Garmin, TomTom etc. applications available for them. If you're entitled to free upgrades it would save you a few quid on buying gps units.

I've the N95 8gb running Garmin Mobile XT for 1.5 years & couldn't find a fault with it...

P.S. If you do go down the Garmin route, P.M. me & I can help you 'acquire' the map files etc.