GPS Repositions for Business

Computerworld - It's not uncommon to see politicians giving voters a snow job. But in this case, an elected official was done in by one. Several feet of snow buried the city of Chicago in January 1979, shutting down much of its transportation. Jane Byrne, then a little-known politician, successfully used the city's failure to clear the streets as a campaign issue, unseating a two-term mayor.

It's not surprising, then, that when the city began installing Global Positioning System equipment three years ago to track vehicles, snow plows were among the first to be equipped. With GPS, city officials can see where the plows are, what streets have been cleared and whether the plows are following assigned routes correctly.

Today, Chicago tracks 1,200 mobile assets, and another 4,000 are scheduled for next year. The technology facilitates improved service levels, heightened security, greater efficiency and faster responses to situations such as potholes and sewage problems.

"Not only can we look at real-time dispatch," says Molly Mangan, the city's deputy CIO, "but we can analyze where our vehicles are, how long they were idling there waiting for materials and how we might make our existing routes more efficient."

For Sears Holdings Corp. in Hoffman Estates, Ill., location is a key element in managing its 11,000 appliance service trucks nationwide, says Steve Jones, national routing manager for Sears' product repair service. Recently, the company implemented a system called the Sears Smart Toolbox, with applications co-developed by Sears and Redlands, Calif.-based Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. (ESRI). Each truck is equipped with a ruggedized laptop from Itronix Corp. that uses GPS along with cellular, satellite and Wi-Fi connections. Technicians download daily work orders to their laptops, along with service documentation. The navigation system gives verbal turn-by-turn directions from one work site to the next. It also reports the vehicle locations to the back-end ESRI ArcGIS system and the jointly developed Computer Aided Routing System so that workloads can be adjusted and technicians rerouted during the day.

The navigation system has cut driving times by 15% to 30% and has boosted the number of customers each technician visits from 8 to 8.5 per day, according Jones.

"Technicians don't have to look at maps, don't have to call the customers for directions and don't get lost," says Dave Lewis, ESRI's project manager for the Sears installation. "When you are talking about 11,000 technicians, even if you save them 10 minutes a day, it is a huge ROI."

New Applications

Once limited to military navigation, GPS hardware has blossomed into a $15 billion-a-year commercial business that will reach $22 billion in the next two years, according to ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y. While much of that is tied up in consumer goods like cars, PDAs, cell phones and handheld navigation units, the technology is mature and is finding increasing use in business applications.