How to integrate Mapping into a Field Service system

By Tom Bowe
VP of Engineering

I attended an Aberdeen briefing this week highlighting the benefits of location-based service. GPS-tracking and vehicle monitoring are becoming standard business practices in the U.S. field service industry.

The benefits are tangible too…some companies are seeing double-digit cost savings in gas! This is good news for us all, and very timely for Metrix. We recently added a “Show Map” feature to our schedule board so dispatchers can visualize customer locations, technician routes and unassigned jobs (like find nearest tech) using a web-based map tool (like Yahoo or Google Maps).

We evaluated the leading map software vendors and found it to be a fairly arduous task. Although, it took less than 60 minutes to integrate to M5 and verify data was passed back and forth properly, it required 3 weeks to fully assess their respective strengths and weaknesses…especially for technician routing which is non-trivial. So, if you need to incorporate maps into your service system (everyone is doing it), I can save you some time!

Google Maps
Pro - Web service is easy to deploy/integrate and has lots of features including routing
Con – Pricing based on total # of requests and page views

MapPoint
Pro - Easy to integrate into .NET and has lots of features
Con - Full client install makes it harder to deploy, especially if multiple versions are required.

Virtual Earth
Pro - Web service is easy to deploy and easy to integrate with…cool “tiles” and free of charge?
Con – Missing some routing functionality, but supposed to be in new v6 api

MapQuest
Pro - Web service is easy to deploy/integrate and has lots of features including routing
Con - Performance seems slower than the others and doesn’t support mouse wheel zooming

Yahoo Maps
Pro - Web service is easy to deploy/integrate with lots of features and can render using Flash which loads faster than AJAX
Con – Missing some routing functionality, but offers workarounds

If you want to know who we selected and why… give me a call and I’d be happy to share. For more information on market trends and business benefits, the Aberdeen report will be published October 31st.

(Case in point...GPS for NYC taxi cabs...Link)


Tom Bowe