Maid Brigade uses GPS tracking to verify employee hours and improve communication with staff.

Cleaning companies bank on their reputations for service. Their employees spend hours in their clients’ homes each week, often without supervision. Trust is critical.

Maid Brigade of Chicago is using GPS location data to help bolster the trust that both clients and supervisors have in the company’s staff of maids. Using the real-time location data, Maid Brigade’s supervisors can now confirm that employees arrive at their jobs on time, stay for the contracted amount of time, and follow their appointed schedules.

The Chicago operation is the largest Maid Brigade franchise in Illinois, with 22 full-time maids, two parttimers, and ten vehicles. According to Manager Tammy Dunbar, the company needed a better way to track employee hours and verify that the maids had arrived at the correct location and worked the required number of hours at each house. Scheduling and dispatching were also inefficient, since employees had to call their supervisors to check schedules and confirm any changes to their appointments.

“Our biggest problem was that we couldn’t find out where the maids were in real time without calling them on the phone,” Dunbar says. “We didn’t know if they were on schedule, if they got lost on the way to a home, if they took long lunches. There was no way to track them except for the manual logs they kept.”

For first-time cleaning assignments at new customer homes, the maids, for example, were to spend 1.5 hours at the residence. Supervisors wanted a way to confirm how long the maids were at each location and to have some visibility when cleaning assignments took longer than the time allotted. These types of cleanings are charged according to the actual time cleaning and not at a fixed rate, so this data directly affected billing.

“A tracking solution would help us find any issues with the maids and eliminate the problem of customers fibbing about the amount of time the maids were there to reduce their bill,” Dunbar says. “And if they got lost, we wanted a GPS solution that could help them find their way to the next house.”

The company evaluated several GPS solutions for its fleet-tracking problems, eventually selecting the NexTraq Fleet Tracking system. According to Dunbar, the company chose NexTraq because they are a preferred vendor for the national Maid Brigade franchise operation. “They were a vendor of the month for the Maid Brigade franchise,” Dunbar says. “They also had some innovative solutions as far as how we could use the tracking data in the business.”

NexTraq imported the company’s customer database so geofences could be set up around each location. Each vehicle was equipped with GPS tracking hardware and a Garmin personal navigation device inside the cab. The tracking software is Web-based, so office staff and the field supervisor can access the information from any computer.

GPS Training Proves Challenging
“The training was intensive,” Dunbar says. “The system does so many different things that it required a lot of training, because each of the office staff is using it a little differently. I still don’t feel like I know everything.”

The company uses the scheduling component of the solution, combined with input from supervisors, to create a schedule for the maids each day. As the maids arrive at each home, they note their status on the Garmin devices (en route, arrived, completed, etc.) and can exchange messages with supervisors.

The messaging solution has helped streamline communication with the maids and eliminated timeconsuming phone calls. “We send out a lot of quick messages, and we have a field supervisor here who translates them into Spanish for us,” Dunbar says. “Because of some of the language differences among our staff, the messaging system actually works better than using the phone. Some of our employees read English better than they speak it, so it makes communicating easier.”

The maids still have to fill out the paper route logs, but managers can now verify the data each day by using the GPS information. Once the route is completed, the route logs are compared to the tracking data, and then the data is input into the company’s MicroMaid back end business solution. (MicroMaid is a proprietary software developed by Maid Brigade.)

The company now has a record of how long the maids stayed at each home. “We know if they were there for the hour and a half,” Dunbar says. “We had trouble confirming what they wrote in their time logs before, because we have 22 maids coming in and out of the office, and we couldn’t follow up with all of them. The tracking solution has resolved that.”

Real-Time Visibility Uncovers Opportunities For Improved Efficiency
When the system was first deployed, supervisors discovered that several maids were taking long lunches, making extra stops during the day, and fudging the times on their route logs. “They would get the work completed and finish the route early, but their route log would still reflect a 5 o’clock stop time, which made it difficult to keep accurate records,” Dunbar says. “Now we know where everyone has been, and we’re more efficient at scheduling because we can see how long the stops are really taking.”

Once employees were made aware that their time was being monitored, they were no longer able to provide inaccurate information on their time sheets. “We just naturally started to see those behaviors drop off once we showed them that we were paying attention,” Dunbar says. “The maids love the system now. We showed them that we weren’t really changing anything; we just needed to be more accurate.”

Employee labor hours are now completely verifiable. Dunbar and the supervisors can see how long each maid spent at each home, and if clients have a question about the service, they can easily verify when the cleaning took place. “We occasionally have a customer claim that our maids were not at the residence for the amount of time contracted,” Dunbar says. “Now we can point to the system and show them that the vehicle was at the residence for the correct amount of time.”

The company is also saving on miles driven by using the route optimization function. “The maids are already driving quite a distance to some of the locations so we’re not really saving time, but we are saving miles by improving the routes,” Dunbar says. The company has been able to use the maintenance module in the solution to set up alerts when each vehicle is due for an oil change, and Dunbar says she plans to expand the use of that solution to schedule other regular maintenance and tune-ups for the fleet.

“The only complaint I have is that we don’t get alerts letting us know if the maids are behind or ahead of schedule, and we’d like a different indication when an invehicle message is coming through versus a route schedule update, but we’re talking to NexTraq about that,” Dunbar says. “Otherwise, this has really solved many of our problems.”

By Sarah Nicastro, publisher/editor in chief, Field Technologies

We recently interviewed Stacy Morin, manager of information systems at Great State Beverages for an upcoming case study in Field Technologies magazine. While talking with Morin, we asked her thoughts on the following question and thought you may find her response interesting:

Field Technologies: What were your top three considerations when selecting the tablet for your mobile solution? Why were these characteristics the most important criteria?

First, the devices have to be rugged; they have to be able to take a beating. They get tossed around, they are in and out of the trucks, and they get tossed into the passenger seat. They have to be able to withstand drops and temperature changes. So ruggedization was huge.

Second, battery life is another big factor, because you can’t always count on the guy having his car charger, or making sure you have an extra battery. That has been an outstanding feature of the rugged tablets; we haven’t had to replace any batteries.

Third, it had to be Windows based, because it needed to be compatible with our mobile software.

They also have a bigger screen than most of the other hand-held devices. If a salesman is going into an account, they can pull up a sell sheet, and it looks good. You aren’t trying to view it on a four-inch screen.

For this annual report, we conducted a survey of our audience to see what technologies are currently in use, what are on the roadmap for the near future, which features/functionality you feel are most important in some of the main field mobility categories, and what your take is on the current field mobility trends. This year, we had more than 700 of you take our survey (Big thanks to those who participated!) and here we share the results. We’ve also incorporated some realworld anecdotes and advice from your peers from companies that are currently using these various technologies and reaping the benefits. Look for their insight in the boxes at the bottom of each page — many of these companies have been featured in Field Technologies, so if you want to read their full story you can search them by company name at www.FieldTechnologiesOnline.com.) Before we dive into all of this great information, though, let me give you my take on the landscape for field mobility in 2014 based on the conversations I’m having with folks like you.

By Jill Friedman, Xplore Technologies

One of the biggest struggles for outdoor workers using mobile devices is being able to read their screen on days with sunshine.

The only way to avoid reflections or a display washing out is with a brighter display. Screens on tablets can be nearly impossible to read under intense sunlight, whether it’s from the sun outside or overhead lamps on the factory floor. Industrial users need to see their screen, data and visuals immediately, any downtime involved in squinting to make out a single graph could be burdensome.

Importance of NITs
A bright, sunlight-readable display also starts with having the right NITs level. NITs are the basic unit of luminance used to measure brightness. The higher the NIT count, the brighter the display.

But there’s a sweet spot of NITs for sunlight-readable displays. Standard displays on consumer tablets and mobile devices typically average around 200 to 300 NITs, and 500 NITs is considered to be sunlight readable. While some outdoor tablets range between 500 and 1,000 NITs, tablets with 1,300 NITs reach the optimal level of display brightness that make it easy to read for crews working outdoors in direct sunlight.

Such brightness is made possible by a powerful backlight. Simply put, there is no alternative to reaching this level of brightness without a solid backlight. But the strong backlight also needs balancing with other aspects, like low-light settings and energy management. For example, to counteract varied light settings, ambient light sensors built into the tablet recognize when a user is moving from a low-light setting to a high one, and adjusts the brightness accordingly.

Contrast Also Part of the Equation
While brightness makes the screen easier to read, there’s still another level to ensuring viewability: Contrast. And the brighter the screen, the great the contrast should be so users can clearly make out graphic images and data.

Contrast is measured as a ratio of the brightest color compared to the darkest black, and many mobile devices have ratios around 100:1. However, brightness-enhanced rugged tablets have a 600:1 contrast ratio, which means the brightest color is 600 times brighter than the darkest black.

Such rugged tablets with 600:1 ratios make it much easier for workers in glaring light to make out colors for bar graphs or mapping applications, data table borders and clearer images.

Enhanced LED Displays
One important note is that as the NIT count grows, the more energy is needed to power the backlight. To ensure optimum brightness and proper energy management and efficiency, LEDs are often used as the lighting source for the backlight.

Hailed for the energy-efficient qualities, LEDs can produce the brightness needed for viewing in direct sunlight without having to sacrifice anything, or consume excess amounts of energy. In fact, not only are they more efficient sources of lighting, but longer lasting, more reliable and less costly than conventional lighting sources. The wealth of positive attributes make LEDs the best choice for rugged tablets, and users will notice the benefits of them.

The tablet screen is always being looked at by industrial users, but is less so understood for all its complexities and elements. NITs may be a foreign concept and some might have no frame of reference for a good contrast ratio or energy savings, but these elements are crucial to sunlight-readable display. It’s all about balance – balancing higher brightness with better thermal management – and the combination of more NITs, better contrast and heightened energy savings create a formidable tablet display.

GPS fleet tracking software provides fleet managers with many tools to effectively improve fleet operations. These solutions can overload fleet managers with data in many different formats. Figuring out which features you need from those that you don’t, can be a complex procedure. Here are the top 5 fleet tracking software features that fleet managers should utilize to drive fleet efficiency and maximize return on investment.

Advanced Reports that Provide Actionable Data and Monitor Productivity

It is important to know that your employees are responsibly meeting their objectives and goals. Analyzing the efficiency of the fleet is vital to the overall performance and growth of your business. The data and information that can be retrieved through GPS Insight’s fleet tracking software provides powerful reports to measure fleet utilization, driver behavior, and dispatch efficiency. Fleet managers that utilize GPS Insight’s advanced reporting to monitor driver behaviour, analyse drive time, validate fuel usage to eliminate waste, and much more.

Download Here

Source: GPS Insight