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Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Тема: Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Currently when you use the Tools/Address Search feature, any geofence that the address is in, shows up in the list.  This is a very handy tool.  When you use Nearest Units and do an address search, to see which vehicle is closest, geofences do not show up.  This would be very helpful to have listed here.

Here is the use case.

Service clients use geofences for service or delivery areas.  When dispatch get's an ad-hoc call, emergency call, etc, they want to search to see which vehicle to send to the call.  Right now they can see which vehicle is closest, however they don't know which delivery zone they vehicle belongs to.  Essentially they could be assigning the wrong vehicle to the call without knowing it.

This very simple addition would alleviate that problem all together.


Who will use the requested functionality?

We are entertaining a new client which has 400 vehicles presently.  They do not have this functionality with their existing provider either.  If we had it, we would win this account for sure.  I can share my prospect's information privately if you'd like to speak to them about it.

  • Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting
  • Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting
Andrew Singer
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Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Re: Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Dear Andrew, andrew@astreon.com

thanks a lot for your request. I have some doubts as to whether I fully understand your idea. So let me sum it up a bit and ask the questions I have.

So in my vision, your use case is the following: the dispatcher gets a call from a client that there is some issue (or whatever) with the delivery and the dispatcher needs to quickly send the delivery person to the client to solve the issue. The dispatcher enters the system, enters the client's address, sees that vehicles 1,2,3 are the closest to the client (with the help of Nearest unit tool) and can be sent to the client. The thing is that each address=client is within a particular delivery area (which can be a geofence in Wialon) and each vehicle is assigned to a specific delivery area. So the task of a dispatcher is to send to a client not only the closest vehicle to the client's address but also the one that is assigned to the same delivery area as the client's address.

To solve this task you suggest showing geofences as well as vehicles in the Nearest unit tool.

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Below are my questions/concerns in regards to this vision:

1) Units in Wialon can not be assigned to a geofence. So how in this case you think what you request can help your customer solve their task?

2) Does your customer has information on what address are within what delivery areas and what vehicles are assigned to these delivery areas?


Looking forward to hearing from you.

Maria Starikova,
Wialon Hosting Product manager, Gurtam
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Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Re: Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Hi Mars, your summary of the client use case is accurate.

1) Units in Wialon can not be assigned to a geofence. So how in this case you think what you request can help your customer solve their task?

-  The address being searched represents a temporary marker on the map and shows which units are closest.  All we are asking is for the geofence or geofences to show up that the searched address is inside. Knowing the service area (name of the geofence) will help the dispatcher determine which vehicle to send.  There does not need to be an association from the geofence to the vehicle.
- The dispatcher does know which vehicle is assign to which geofence (they call the geofence a route).  Either the name of the vehicle has the route name, or they know by driver name (also part of the vehicle name).
- So in the case, simply knowing which geofence an address falls inside is very useful, similar to the address search tool.
- Also knowing which vehicle is closest is important because is the vehicle is very far from the customer, they'll assign the job later in the day when the vehicle will be closer to the customer, which helps them set the appointment time with the customer.

2) Does your customer has information on what address are within what delivery areas and what vehicles are assigned to these delivery areas?

- No they do not.  That is why they want the mapping tool to assist them.  Currently they search in Google Maps along side their current GPS system.  They are trying to get everything they need inside 1 screen.

Andrew Singer
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Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Re: Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Hi Andrew, andrew@astreon.com

Thanks a lot for the description, it is now clear.

So potentially we can add information on the geofence/geofences that the searched address is in.

Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

But how conceptually this solution will be better than just displaying geofences on the map with their titles and immediately seeing them?  It seems that such a way of presenting the information is better than overloading the Nearest Units window with more data and it does solve the problem you talk about.

  • Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting
Maria Starikova,
Wialon Hosting Product manager, Gurtam
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Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

Re: Nearest Units Showing Geofences - Wialon Hosting

HI Mars, thank you for the visual.  Yes that is the perfect place for the geofence reference information.

Why is this better than seeing it on the map?  It's not.  It is just nice to have more information at your fingertips without having to zoom in/out or perform additional mouse clicks.

Some customers have so many geofences that they overlap when zoomed out, making it difficult to visualize.  Other customers use geofences that are very large to depict delivery or service routes.  In both scenarios you can't visualize that an address falls inside a geofence and which geofence that may be.

Thank you!

Andrew Singer