If you are in to fleet management, transportation, or logistics, you may know how hard these businesses are. The prime challenge is to manage your fleet in such way that the fleet and the cargo is secured while increasing the productivity. Therefore, fleet tracking was introduced to the world of transportation for achieving many goals including the security and productivity aspects.

There are two main methods of fleet tracking; GPS and cellular triangulation. When it comes to cellular triangulation, typical mobile service carriers are used for tracking the position of the vehicle. Using three signal stations, the position of a mobile device can be tracked. In this method, a mobile chip is used in a similar device so it acts as a mobile phone but with restrictions on calling. Cellular triangulation carries a few disadvantages that are a bit expensive. The main disadvantage is that when traveling far, there can be many mobile service providers serving the same vehicle as different geographical areas are handled by different mobile operators. The switching between the mobile operators is usually costly and might not give a good value in long term.

As an alternative to cellular triangulation, GPS (Global Positioning System) came in to the picture with many advantages over the previous method. Fleet GPS tracking has become relatively inexpensive compared to the older method as there are many service providers in the market of GPS. The other advantage is that GPS provides the exact location up to one meter precision so there is very less room for an error.

There are three basic categories of GPS tracking for fleet; data loggers, data pushers, and data pullers. Data loggers log the position of the device at regular intervals to the internal memory of the device. Usually these devices have memory cards or internal flash memory installed for storing the data. No one can obtain the location data until the memory card is removed from the devices or the devices is connected to a computer. Once the data is downloaded to a computer or a special device, the fleet route can be precisely obtained. The issue with this type is that you will have no idea where the vehicle is at any given time and you will only know that once the fleet returns.

To address the issue discussed in the data logger type, data pushers were introduced. This type measures the location of the devices at regular intervals and then pushes the information to a centralized server through wireless. This way, the fleet managers will know exactly where the vehicles are at any given time. This is a more secure approach compared to data loggers. Data pullers behave the same way as data pushers but use a different technology. In data pushers, the devices send the data at intervals and no data can be obtained by the fleet managers between the intervals. But in data pulling technology, fleet managers can pull data from the GPS devices at any time.