Geofencing. What Is It? Why Do I Care?


GPS Geofencing: A Powerful Supervision Tool

The concept of geofencing is pretty simple. Think of it as an invisible, electronic fence around a region of interest. Common geo-fence locations include the office, a customer’s location, a city, or even the something as narrow as a highway corridor.

One example application is a customer of ours who runs a boat-sharing club. All of his boats are harbored in the same marina, and when a client takes a boat out for the day, one of the staff members will make sure that the client has everything they need for a fun day on the lake. The tricky part comes when the customer returns the boat at some point later in the day.

Before they had a tracking system, some poor guy would have to keep an eye out for boats as they were coming in to the marina, and then scramble to make sure somebody met each boat as it came in. After the tracking system was installed, it was an easy task to set up a text notification to let the team know when a boat was coming back into the marina, making it much easier to ensure that the client was welcomed back from their day on the lake by a friendly staff member.

Geofences can also be used to make sure a vehicle never goes outside the boundaries of a pre-defined region. We have municipal customers whose vehicles rarely should leave the city limits. In this case, we set up a rule that the right people are notified when a vehicle leaves the city limits.  Nine times out of ten, there is a reasonable explanation for the vehicle skipping town, but we have caught people using their work vehicles for things that they should not have been using them for.

Geofencing can be a powerful behavior modification tool to add to your field staff supervision. Once employees know that their actions are being monitored by the boss, most of the shenanigans come to an immediate halt. If you’d like to see how this tool could be used to augment your field staff supervision, feel free to book a free, no obligation consultation with me and I’ll be happy to do what we can to help.


About Don Sesler

Don Sesler, The Technology Whisperer: As the owner, I have the honor of leading a team of super-smart individuals who share my passion for helping entrepreneurs and business owners not fall victim to complex technology challenges that can kill productivity. We want to tame your technology so that it works for you and not the other way around. What technology problem is making your life more complicated than it should be? Reach out to me and tell me your story.