Jan/Feb 2004

MI International

Our impression

Does tracking by mobile phone work? How accurate is it? On page 15 we look in detail at the similarities and differences between this approach and "traditional" tracking by GPS; but to get more of a hands-on impression of GSM tracking, m.logistics has been using a trial version of MI International's mapAmobile system.

The mapAmobile application works by identifying the location of a mobile phone or GSM modem, which can be operating on any of the four UK networks - O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone (Virgin Mobile is expected to be added shortly). Employees must have their mobiles switched on, but there is no need for them to respond to a location request.

 

Once a request is made, a message is sent to the server with details of the mobile's position, including usually a road name and postcode, date, time and accuracy. Given that lack of accuracy can be a drawback of GSM location compared with GPS, this is useful information.

The location data can be viewed on the mapAmobile-hosted Web site, or sent via a WAP or by SMS text message to authorised users.

The major attraction of GSM tracking is the price. For a fleet of between 11 and 100 vehicles, mapAmobile charges an annual licence fee of £35 per handset. Location requests then cost between 13p and 15p for a Web search or between 18p and 20p for an SMS search.

Of course, this is all fine, but if GSM tracking is to be a viable rival to GPS tracking, what most business also need is management tools and information. Recognising this, mapAmobile has developed Corporate Edition, a server-based mobile worker management application.

This delivers significant customer service benefits such as the ability to locate a group of phones quickly. To facilitate this, all you need to do is to allocate an individual phone to a specific group that you define, such as "sales" or "engineering". You can also search for all phones within a specific region to identify quickly which vehicle is closest to a specific postcode.

You can program the application to provide periodic location fixes and request notification when a driver moves into or away from a particular postcode, gets close to a destination or is delayed (useful if there are any hold-ups that customers may need to be advised of).

Corporate Edition also includes other management functions including standard reports on daily, weekly or monthly usage; maps showing the locations of individuals or groups of users; lists of SMS messages sent; and credit balance.

So how did the system perform in practice? Well, we're here to tell you that it works. With limited time at our disposal, and with only the opportunity to track one mobile in detail, we couldn't really draw sweeping conclusions from our trial; but there was our man, out and about in the world, appearing on a map in more or less the position where he was supposed to be. We were also able to track several mapAmobile staff successfully.

Admittedly, we couldn't always pin the location down to an exact street, but the system doesn't set out to offer this in all circumstances. For the most part, we feel there are plenty of applications where it would have told us as much as we actually needed to know. Setup was relatively painless, accessing the system was easy, and all in all it was a convincing demonstration.

Our verdict

Companies who can see benefits in locating or tracking mobile workers, but who have been reluctant to invest in costly GPS-based tracking systems, may find that mapAmobile is a cheap way of dipping their toes in the water. While it's true that accuracy is not as good as with GPS nationwide, that may not matter for many operations. In urban areas performance may actually be better, especially where it is difficult to receive GPS signals.

We especially liked mapAmobile's easy-to-navigate Web site, and the ability to tailor the way we tracked the phones and received the location data to suit our own requirements.

System Requirements

mapAmobile is a fully hosted system, so all you need is an Internet browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5 and above or Netscape versions 6 and above) and standard GSM mobile phones and/or modems.

Security

There have been some concerns over the "big brother" aspects of tracking by mobile phone. mapAmobile has done its best to address these. Each user-organisation has unique company account codes, username and password. The employee must give prior consent and can request to see a list of people authorised to track them. Tracking is limited to agreed working hours.