Fleet Tracking and Dispatching System for Prophesy

The client

Prophesy Transportation Solutions, Inc. is a leading provider of software, Internet and mobile communications solutions to the transportation, logistics, and distribution industries. Since 1984, Prophesy has been offering products and services for dispatch, accounting, mobile communications, logistics management, load building, mileage and routing, fuel purchase optimization, fuel and road tax reporting, driver log auditing, driver management, and vehicle maintenance.

The scope

The scope of the project was to develop a mobile, server, and GIS web application integrated with Prophesy Dispatch solution. The solution allows to:

• Locate the entire fleet on digitally enhanced, full-color maps.
• Support various GIS provides, including ESRI ArcGIS, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, PepperWhite, etc.
• Know instantly when scheduled appointments are running behind schedule.
• Track company’s trucks and loads.
• Receive automated mobile check calls from drivers.
• Generate different types of trip reports (speed analysis, fuel management, distance covered, reverse geo-coding)
• Take control by quickly identifying service delays and out-of-route conditions in real time.
• Two-way messaging and data relay between dispatcher desktop and driver mobile device.
• Review any load from recent history to determine the cause of any problems.
• Review drivers history over a given timeframe.
• Create a breadcrumb trail of truck activity (recording positions as frequently as once a minute) for fuel tax reporting and other purposes.

The solution

Our development team developed & implemented the application from the bottom to the top. The process implied intensive R&D and prototype development & testing activities. This experience helped our team to extend our knowledgebase and provided us with a deeper understanding of GIS systems. That allowed us to satisfy the customer’s requirements and successfully develop & implement the solution. Among it’s functional features, the following major functionality was transferred to the web:

• Generating the most efficient route (even for multi-stop trips), completed with detailed driving instructions
• Providing detailed full color mapping of created routes
• Accounting for bridge heights, low underpass and commercial vehicle restrictions, seasonal road closures, toll road avoidance and actual posted speed limits
• Full trip report, including stops, time, distance, fuel, consolidated by states.
• Best way, fixed way and round trip optimization methods using air, rating and driving miles options

Users and rights management module was added to enable Prophesy control system usage and load. With Prophesy Mobile Comm, route and scheduled itineraries are electronically sent, stored, viewed and managed on the drivers' handheld phones or other devices, allowing users to significantly reduce and even eliminate the need for voice communication between driver and dispatcher, saving hours and hours of unnecessary phone time, avoiding misunderstanding mistakes and expenses involved.

The outcome

The product ensures that useful information gathered by mobile communications devices, (such as GPS-enabled phones, in-cab devices, and mobile data terminals) is immediately and automatically transmitted back to the server, and stored for monitoring, analysis and later retrieval, allowing dispatchers and management to track the details of scheduled appointments with ease.

Prophesy Mobile Comm is the comprehensive and affordable mobile communications solution for trucking companies. It has been designed from the ground up to follow the natural process of daily trucking operations, while using advanced technology to eliminate cumbersome manual processes that waste precious time and money.