DECEMBER 2017 | 27 |
Read online at www. proinstaller. co. uk |
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‘ Now that everyone has a smartphone with GPS, there is a lot of potential for low cost replacements
’ a mobile phone. For instance, parents can‘ ring-fence’ an area and get an alarm if their child wanders beyond the limits. It’ s also possible to establish your innocence of a crime if you can prove from tracking that you were nowhere near at the time. Facebook has recently added a feature that helps in the case of a terrorist attack or other disaster like a fire or earthquake. There’ s good as well as bad.
The case against
Apart from not wanting to be caught doing something that we shouldn’ t, the case against tracking individuals pretty much comes down to the loss of privacy. Extreme privacy advocates argue that all personal information should be protected, particularly as an authoritarian government could abuse it. There is a more pragmatic view that suggests that there should be certain controls on personal information but that an authoritarian government would rapidly remove protections once it was in power anyway. Just look at Russia.
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Business benefits
Tracking vans and lorries has been around for some years but it has always been very expensive. Now that everyone has a smartphone with GPS, there is a lot of potential for low cost replacements.
Software from my company, Powered Now, enables companies to deploy solutions that let individuals within the business to be tracked. Of course, permission has to be given first and we are not the only people able to supply this type of technology.
There are many ways that it can be used to simplify administration, eliminate paperwork and improve efficiency.
One way to cut down drastically on administration effort is by automatically booking people into
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and out of jobs based on their arrival and departure from the job. While things like lunch breaks and trips to the builder’ s merchants must be considered, this offers the opportunity to do precise timebased billing( or tracking actual cost when the job is fixed price) based on precise numbers without the hassle of timesheets. That’ s because time and location stamping can provide an error-free record all with no manual intervention.
When the real-time location of staff is known, this greatly increases the efficiency of responding to emergencies and call-outs. There is no need to ring round. The nearest people and the time that will be taken to respond can be determined electronically.
With a system that shows all jobs on a map, it is just a small
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step further to be able to minimise driving between jobs. Driving time is dead time so this can help to improve profitability.
The last obvious benefit is making sure that staff and vehicles are acting responsibly wherever they are. The mere fact that colleagues know that they are being tracked is most likely to eliminate poor behaviour. As is well known, the certainty of being caught is the biggest deterrent of all.
About the author Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Powered Now. Powered Now’ s mobile app aims to take the pain out of paperwork for installers, electricians, builders and other trade businesses.
www. powerednow. com
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