service & maintenance
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Darren Weiss investigates ways in which geolocation technology can help equipment manufacturers boost their bottom line
S
ince the first GPS units hit the consumer markets in the late 1990s, people have been fascinated with the concept
that a tiny device in your car or your phone can sync to a satellite miles above the earth and determine your location within feet, all in the blink of an eye. In recent years, satellite tracking has gone a step further with geolocation, which uses GPS data to assess location and provides numerous dynamic capabilities. As is the case with most new
technologies, geolocation reached the consumer market fi rst. Location-based social services like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla rely on geolocation, and massive companies like Google and Facebook employ the technology for some of their services as well. But shouldn’t such an innovative
technology be used in more transformative ways than fi nding out the
Geolocation software allows for real time tracking and display of technician location, plus more efficient driving routes
best restaurant in the West End? Couldn’t it be used by companies to drastically change how their workforce operates? The answer is yes – and it already is.
driving service quality Like their brethren in nearly all service
industries, health club equipment service technicians have been stuck in the dark ages of technology for a long time, only recently dropping their clipboards, pens and Post-Its in favour of iPhones and tablets. But these new devices, with their state-of-the-art geolocation software, offer capabilities – delivering work orders on the go, real-time access to inventory, re-routing based on scheduling – that have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line and help improve efficiency and quality of service to their clients. Today, a number of health club
equipment manufacturers are actively using geolocation to optimise their entire service operation, from vehicle tracking and route guidance to real-time mobile communications and ordering spare parts on the fl y, and the results have been impressive. Precor, a fi tness equipment
manufacturer that sells its equipment all over the world, is a great example of a business that’s taking advantage of geolocation. Precor’s UK operation has a team of 17 mobile fi eld service engineers, based from their homes, to cover the UK and Ireland. Each technician has his/her own van full of parts, and those vans are fi tted with a vehicle tracking system that serves a number of purposes. When a service
54 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
call comes into the offi ce, the dispatcher can scan the system for the closest service van to the customer site and send it out, minimising the time between when the call comes in and when the technician arrives. The tracking system also provides
location awareness to give drivers updates on traffi c and weather delays, logs driving speeds to mitigate ineffi cient driving, and tracks drive time and stop time. Additionally, managers can extract historical analysis from the system to check for excessive technician overlap. Not all service calls are of equal
importance and some must be prioritised. If your biggest client calls saying 100 of your machines in 15 clubs are not working, chances are you’re going to focus more resources on them than on the small club with a single stationary bicycle out of order. Geolocation can
play a key role here as well. Instead of adding less critical support calls onto an already busy technician’s schedule, geolocation software can search for the nearest available technician to that tier-two call and route him to the customer location. The software can then alert the
Precor’s technicians are alerted of service calls via their PDAs
november/december 2011 © cybertrek 2011
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