Archive for January, 2010

We often get basic questions from prospective customers who are interested in handheld data collection software on mobile devices.  We just published a brief presentation that should help you to understand what your options are with handheld data collection software, whether you should use a mobile forms application like goRoam.Inspections or if you should use a Line of Business Application like our goRoam.Delivery, goRoam.BulkDelivery, goRoam.Service for Work Orders.

You may also be interested in the presentation on Handheld Data Collection – Device Selection.

A key step in managing service and delivery organizations is knowing where your customers are.  In addition to our batch customer geocoding tools, we can geocode individual customers, view them on a map, and view groups of customers on a map.

goRoam.MobileHub users  can simply load the customer edit form and click the ‘geocode me’ button to get a geocode based on the customer’s address.  As always, you can enter detailed routing as well as tags. One or many tags can be assigned to a user to allow grouping and sorting according to your business rules.

We have also added a new ‘Customer Map’ control that takes advantage of geocoding to select groups of customers and view them on a map.  The typical use would be to view and confirm customers by route, delivery sequence, tag, city, etc.

Notice that you can select one or many customers to view. When you move your mouse over a customer, the customer details are shown.  Note that the customer map can be printed.

For customers who need more accurate geocodes than street maps provide, we have added the ability to synchronize goRoam mobile deliveries with vehicle GPS systems such as GEOTAB. This is important when you have a customer’s  geocode at the street address, but in fact deliveries and service are away from the street. For instance, with customers such as Wal-Mart or HomeDepot, the typical geocode is at the street but service and deliveries are at the back dock which may be 400+ yards away. If you set a geofence alert at the street, you will not have accurate alerts or time on site reports.  

We now support this in batch for large scale GPS geocode updates/corrections.  Customer GPS coordinates can be updated in batch or exported to a CSV file for other applications.