LiveViewGPS Review: Is it the Right Fleet Management System for You?

Founded in 2007 in Valencia, California, LiveViewGPS is a small company with big ambitions. The company provides GPS tracking services and systems to individuals, law enforcement, and business, and promises users can “Track Anyone Or Anything – Vehicle Tracking, People, Or Property, Anywhere On The Planet.”

While the company has courted controversy with its Mobile Phone Locate service that tracks cellular phones without any installed apps, it’s also gained respect among fleet operators for its easy-to-use fleet management tools.

Product Features At a Glance

LiveViewGPS emphasizes ease of use for its hardware, while its software is cloud-based with nearly 99.9% server uptime. Its fleet management app is available for iPhone, Android and other mobile devices. Billing is month-to-month with no contracts.

LiveViewGPS Products:

LiveViewGPS offers four trackers for varying budget and application needs. The VLS 300 Realtime GPS Tracker ($239.00, monthly plans starting at $19.95) updates at intervals between one and five minutes. Three other trackers offer updates every ten seconds, with apps available on both iPhone and Android:

• G5 Live GPS Vehicle Tracker ($239.00, $29.95/month)
• RTV5 Live GPS Vehicle Tracker ($239.00, $29.95/month)
• RTV20 Garmi Capable ($249.00, various monthly plans available)

The Live Trac software can be monitored from any iPhone, iPad, or Android, Blackberry, or Kindle. It’s bundled with SpeedGauge, giving fleet managers violation reporting based on posted speed limits.

Back office reporting is robust and feature-rich, offering reports that save money by eliminating hidden expenses, monitoring vehicle operation, and leveraging driver behavior data. LiveViewGPS also offers Powered Asset Tracking that provides engine hours, PTO activity, unauthorized usage, and theft recovery, as well as an Asset Tracker Trailer.

Benefits

By allowing business owners and fleet managers to monitor excessive idle times, moonlighting, and ineffective routing, LiveViewGPS increases profitability and cuts fuel costs. Reporting on speeding and unsafe driving keeps drivers safer, while time sheet reporting keeps them honest. Asset tracking cuts theft and liability risks, driving insurance costs down. Businesses reduce both known and hidden costs, improve customer service, and maintain employee integrity.

Case Studies

EcoWater

At a glance, it wouldn’t seem to be difficult to track a fleet that consists of only four vehicles. But if your company operates those vehicles over a large area — much of which has no cellular coverage — it’s clear that fleet management is more of a challenge than it appears on the surface. For one Ecowater distributor, that was exactly the nature of the challenge he faced; his service area stretched from Sacramento to Bakersfield, and from Pismo Beach to the Sierra Nevadas.

Keeping tabs on four vehicles in an area that size is not unlike finding four needles in a rather substantial haystack. Needless to say, it was equally difficult keeping customers posted about service calls, especially when drivers were often out of cellular range or occupied on a call. In an effort to bring some transparency to the process, EcoWater got in touch.

Given the choice between LiveViewGPS’s advanced Live Trac system and its more affordable VLS system, the client chose the latter, explaining that he “didn’t need bells and whistles,” just “a good, reliable GPS solution that did exactly what I wanted.” LiveViewGPS and the VLS-300 delivered.

Now, the fleet is monitored continually, so the owner always knows if a service call is running too long or if a driver needs to be rerouted. The company also saves roughly $500 per month on fuel, which is impressive for a fleet of such small size; employees’ gas use dropped, since techs were using their fuel cards to fill the company’s vehicles and not their own.

The GPS system also lessened liability issues and insurance premiums. EcoWater was also able to squelch a Better Business Bureau complaint when it was able to prove that a client’s claim that a driver had only spent five minutes on a service call was false. Perhaps best of all from a customer’s point of view, they know when to expect a technician to show up.

Alliance Dairy Service

Time is money. That goes double when a company has to discard product that has spoiled in storage. Worse still, a failure at a single point in the chain doesn’t only affect the supplier; it can be just as disastrous to their clients, who rely on product that’s delivered fresh and on-time.

Caldwell, Idaho’s Alliance Dairy Service is one company that dairies rely on for vital refrigeration maintenance and repair. Their nine-vehicle fleet operates in an area that covers a substantial part of Idaho and eastern Oregon. When an emergency call comes in, a rapid response can mean the difference between salvaging a dairy’s product and that dairy losing tens of thousands of dollars.

Alliance needed a reliable way to track its fleet in order to assign the right assets to the right places. Before LiveViewGPS, that often meant phone calls to multiple drivers to figure out who was best positioned to respond, resulting in wasted time. Those delays threatened to be costly, both to Alliance and to its customers.

The Live Trac G-5 tracking system was implemented. Its web-based platform allowed Alliance to see its entire fleet in real time. Instead of a series of phone calls, a simple glance at a screen was enough to get assets on scene faster.

The company enjoyed other benefits as well, thanks to the Live Trac platform’s other reporting utilities. Real-time alerts and detailed reporting helped the company to cut down on excessive idling, aggressive idling, fuel waste, and more. Those metrics have also turned out to be useful training tools, helping drivers to save time, reduce fuel spending, streamline maintenance, and lower their insurance costs. Alliance also reports greater productivity thanks to their new fleet management system.

Conclusion

LiveViewGPS has provided GPS services to individuals, businesses, and law enforcement agencies alike, and has experienced rapid growth by generally living up to its promise to allow its users to track nearly anyone (or anything) nearly anywhere.