By Tim Hunt, CEO of Quick Request Technology

A company recently reported to me that through an internal audit they discovered that they had overpaid their mobile workforce $440,000 in the last 2 years.

Their problem was they had no way to validate that their workers were on the job site when they clocked in and clocked out. They feared that their losses may have been even greater. It was only through some secondary data that they were able to discover this loss.

This was not only a problem for them, but for their clients. They had promised a level of service that was not being provided, which put their contracts in jeopardy. They wanted a solution.

 

3 Ways to Validate Workforce Time and Location Using GPS

When it comes to mobile workforce management software few solutions have the flexibility of Quick Request in validating that a worker was at a jobsite when they clocked in.  Fortunately Quick Request provides companies with a free mobile time clock application that also handles all of these GEO tracking validation principles at no cost.

  1. Live GEO Tracking

Live Tracking is handled 2 ways.  Real-time tracking that produces a complete history of everywhere a person is in real time and Live GEO Tracking where the individuals GEO coordinates are captured from the mobile device at the time of an event creating a kind of breadcrumbs of where they were when they did something or reported something with their phone.

Real-Time tracking is exact and provides a manager with more data then any other approach.  It is also costly in terms of battery life on a mobile device and storage on the servers.

I like to ride a bicycle on trails and use MapMyRide.  It is an app that will track my speed, pace, route and everything I do in real time.  The draw back of using this approach to track a mobile worker is that it will use up even the best mobile phone’s battery life in under 2 hours.  The only time Real-Time tracking works is if the users’ phone is plugged into a power source while they are being tracked.  On my bike I have a solar panel I carry that I plug my phone into so I can ride more than 2 hours on a ride.  Mobile workers moving around are not always able to plug their phone into a power source as they move.

Live GEO Tracking records the GEO coordinates when a user triggers an event with their phone, like clocking in or clocking out, or reporting a problem, or a job ticket completed.  The live tracking will capture the GEO coordinates and send it with the event data, so you have a record of where the employee was when they reported.  Because it only accesses the GPS satellites when needed instead of constantly the battery life of the phone is not depleted and you notice almost no difference in battery life.

  1. Report Outside GEO Fence to a Supervisor

With Quick Request users can set up a GEO location for a jobsite and establish a boundary around those coordinates.  We call this a GEO fence.  It is like putting a point on a map and drawing a circle around that point as some distance form that point, like 1,000 feet or meters.  Now anything within 1,000 meters of those GEO coordinates is considered inside the fence and anything outside 1,000 meters is outside the fence.

The distance from the center point is flexible and you can change it for different locations. You only need to set the distance far enough to avoid a false negative report where someone is actually on site and the GPS says they are not.

This can happen because even though the government allowed for more accurate GEO coordinates in the civilian market the number of active satellites at any one time for any one location varies throughout the day.  If your phone is accessing 11 satellites you may be accurate down to 5 meters.  If it can only access three, you could be off by a few hundred meters.  Also each phone seems to vary on how it captures the satellite data, which could create a false negative report.  Being deep within a building’s architecture can also give inaccurate GPS data.

Quick Request employs the GEO fence approach to tell a supervisor in real time if an employee recorded an event like clocking in but was not within the GEO fence boundaries of where they were supposed to be.  Quick Request will send an immediate message to the supervisor with a link to a map letting them know where the employee really is.  This only happens if the employee tries to report something with their phone and they are not within the GEO fence boundaries.

I had a client that called me up one day to ask how accurate was the GPS on these phones.  I asked him why. He said he had just got a report that an employee that was supposed to be in the library bathroom servicing it was tagged as being in Golden Gate Park several miles away.  I told him they are not usually that far off and asked if he would go to the library and check if the employee was there and if he wasn’t give him a call.  He did and found out he was in the park with his girl friend, but was trying to record that he was doing his job.  That employee didn’t repeat that mistake again.

  1. GEO Blocking

GEO Blocking takes a different approach to reporting to a supervisor that an employee is outside the GEO fence where he is supposed to be working. GEO Blocking is only available in applications like Quick Request where the software interface is customized on the fly to only show an employee what they need to see at any given location.

Because Quick Request employs Service Sensing Technology it eliminates from the phone software interface anything that is irrelevant to the location or the employee’s job role.  Maintenance people only see maintenance issues and janitorial staff only sees janitorial issues.

Using this same adaptive user interface approach if a user is not within the GEO fence the system can be set to block them from using the software to report on their job until they are on site.  The phone will just tell them they are not within the boundaries of where this work is to be performed so they have to go to that site before they can report.

Likewise with GEO Blocking the GEO fence needs to be big enough to not block a user if they are on site, but not so large they can work off site.  Usually 1,000 meters or 1/2 a mile is sufficient.

 

 

The Hard Truth About GEO Tracking

First, you should only capture a person’s GEO coordinates with their permission.  The software will ask the user if it is OK to use their position before reporting and if they say no it won’t capture their position.  The question to ask is if an employee says no, why doesn’t he want his supervisor to know whether he was at the job site or not.

When we first deployed Quick Request a few years ago our clients told us the system is dividing their workforce into 2 categories.  Those who are accountable and like the system because they have evidence to prove they did the job and those who don’t want their supervisor to know where they are or what they do while on their job.

Today most of those clients have a workforce of the former and the latter have moved on to work for their competitors.

If you would like to use the Quick Request mobile workforce time clock feature for free, click on the button below.