Route4Me, Inc. recently announced that it has added an auto check-in feature for drivers to its industry-leading route sequencing and optimization platform. The new feature, which cuts costs, saves time, and boosts employee productivity, uses dynamic geo-fencing to eliminate the need for drivers to check in and out of locations manually. Convenient for all businesses, the new check-in feature is ideal when drivers have to visit many destinations per day.
“Our platform is among the few that offer an automatic geo-fencing check-in feature,” says George Shchegolev, Route4Me’s co-founder and vice president of operations. “When combined with our high-speed route sequencing and optimization capabilities, the new feature enhances an already powerful tool by showing users a planned versus actual route in real-time. We have seen an efficiency increase in our beta program by double-digit percentages. Auto check-in also provides tighter control over field personnel, virtually eliminating the need for more training and hours of non-billable wasted time.”
Route4Me’s new auto check-in feature lets businesses specify a proximity shape and size for stops on their route and the amount of time it takes to trigger an automatic check in either in seconds or as a percentage of the expected time on site.
In addition, Route4Me’s new auto check-in feature updates dynamic estimated arrival times in the manifest and logs in times when a driver deviates from a planned route, enabling businesses to detect when drivers are “freestyling.” Drivers can still manually enter their arrival and departure time, and both data sets are stored and available for analysis.
“The more drivers a business has, the bigger the savings,” says Shchegolev. “Businesses with 100 drivers visiting 100 locations a day each will save about 55 hours per day using this feature. Productivity-wise, it’s like adding seven drivers to a fleet at no additional cost.”
The new feature also improves safety on the road, because drivers using Route4Me do not have to look at their phone to manually “check in.” Route4Me plans to link its geo-fencing capability with its forthcoming customer messaging and notification module. The module will automatically notify customers by text message or phone call when a driver is approaching or is going to be late.
Geo-fencing uses the global positioning system (GPS), cellular tower triangulation, WiFi signal detection, and radio frequency identification (RFID) to define geographical boundaries, creating a virtual zone so that drivers no longer have to repeat the same wasteful operations many times per day.