Cellfind, a subsidiary of Blue Label Telecom, has introduced a set of location based service (LBS) workforce and asset management solutions to help enterprises increase efficiency improve productivity and reduce costs.
Quentin Joubert, product manager at Cellfind, says these solutions make it simple for managers to locate a cell phone, GSM modem or group of phones simply by sending an SMS query or tracking them on a Web page. The asset can be shown as a dot on a map or as a set of co-ordinates.

With this information, companies can better track and manage assets such as vehicles as well as employees in real time, adds Joubert.

“Managers can use the technology to track individual SIM cards or to see a list of assets in an area plotted on a map,” Joubert says.

“For example, a roadside assistance or IT support company could see which of its drivers are in the vicinity of a client who needs help and which of them is nearest. This can save enormous amounts of petrol, ensure more productive use of people’s time, speed up customer response times and improve management of movable assets such as fleet vehicles.”

Joubert says the solution can be configured to meet a wide range of business needs such as geo-fencing or realtime tracking of valuable assets. For example, a manager could set up the system to send an email or SMS update about a driver’s location every 30 minutes as well as an immediate alert when the driver has strayed more than 50 kilometres radius from the intended destination.

That means companies can quickly pick up if employees are, for example, running personal errands that take them away from their work routes, says Joubert. In some cases, it’s an effective tool for managing workers and in others it can give early warning of a vehicle hijacking or theft of an asset.

The Cellfind solution can be mapped to an organisational chart so that an enterprise can manage different categories of employees in an appropriate manner. For example, one would be able to track admin, after hours support, sales and technical employees with different parameters and communicate with them individually or in groups via SMS, Joubert says.

“This workforce management solution includes the ability to set individual access rights for logging in via the Web; adding, deleting and editing phones, defining location alerts, locating, viewing reports and sending SMSes,” he adds.

The application can be easily configured to track the days and times each employee should be tracked and also to manage the consent and privacy agreements upfront with employees. Administrators also benefit from daily, weekly or monthly reports on application usage that gives a view on location requests each month, SMS sending and more.