Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Rob4077
Rob4077Flag for Australia

asked on

Configuration suggestions

I am after some suggestions as to whether it is feasible to know where the mobile phones of our staff are at any particular moment and where they have been in the past so I can replace the expensive rental on GPS trackers in the cars.

BACKGROUND
* I work with a small electrical firm where each vehicle has a GPS tracking system that is soon to run out of rental contract.
* Staff are all equipped with an iPhone and a Galaxy TabA (can be hotspotted to iPhone)
* Office staff need to know where staff are at any particular time in order to efficiently assign urgent jobs
* Office staff also need to occasionally look to see where a vehicle was on a particular day
* I have no idea what an iPhone can do as far as reporting current position or historical tracking but I believe it can do it so some degree
* Using the iPhone for too much tracking can put a real drain on the battery so what are the options?
* The Tab A has GPS functionality but it's communication options are limited to WiFi
* I may be able to use TASKER on the Galaxy tab to log its position at regular intervals and email it to the office when connected to WiFi

Any suggestions would be appreciated
Avatar of Jackie Man
Jackie Man
Flag of Hong Kong image

It is not good idea to rely solely on your staff to use GPS of their mobile devices as users will purposely or accidentally disable the GPS. If you insist to use the GPS of the mobile devices, you still need to pay for a subscription for vehicle fleet monitoring.

How much is the rental on renewal term?
Avatar of Rob4077

ASKER

Thanks for your comments, Jackie.

Is it possible to stop them from turning the GPS off on an iPhone? I don't think they would do it deliberately. Our reason for knowing where they  are, is to make the job more efficient, it's not to measure their performance, nor is it to keep them honest. Our vehicle tracking rental costs $1148 per month. Since we already pay for their phone use, we would immediately save the full rental if we can achieve what we need.

If I understand it correctly we can create a common account on all our iPhones which will enable us to see where they are on a monitor in the office. That solves 90% of our problem. Occasionally we need to look back and see where they were some day in the past but I thought we may be able to achieve that with a GPS logger app of some sort. If iPhone doesn't have GPS logger then maybe I can find one for the Android tablet and get it to send the historical data to us when it connects to WiFi.

Does that make sense as a feasible solution?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Eoin OSullivan
Eoin OSullivan
Flag of Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
What is the cost per vehicle per month?

If your cost is less than $7 per vehicle per month, there is no cost savings to make a switch to the Android based solution below.

https://www.mycartracks.com/pricing
Avatar of Rob4077

ASKER

Eoin, thanks for the suggestions. I will look at them tomorrow. I am surprised that you can't stop a user from turning off GPS tracking. I thought one of the strengths of an iPhone was that you could easily lock the user from doing most things unless they know the password. Still I don't think it will be a problem.

Jackie. It is costing about $148.50 per month per vehicle for the GPS devices, covers rent on the unit, communications and huge amounts of functionality, most of which we don't use.
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
You can only stop the users to turn off GPS if all your iPhones are supervised via MDM and lost mode has been enabled.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202804
Avatar of Rob4077

ASKER

Hi Jackie, thanks for your clarification about MDM. Much as I would love to implement it, that's not a practical option since it appears to require significant organisational overhead and we're just a small firm. So I will have to be content in the knowledge that they can turn it off, and they will have to be satisfied knowing that if they do, they will have a please explain to answer. It looks like the apps suggested by Eoin will do the job and save us about $140 per month per device.

I have a backup in that I will load another GPS logger in the Android tablet they all use. Even though it will only transfer the data when connected to WiFi, that should still get the information to us if really required.

Thanks to both for your assistance.
Because I am going to use Eoin's solution I will accept that as answer but will share points because Jackie put a lot of effort into answering. I hope that's ok