New mobile telecoms services could help companies keep
track of the location of their staff.
Particularly useful for sales force automation or making better use
of field engineers, the services need no extra investment in
hardware and are much cheaper than GPS. However, they do not have
the same accuracy.
Users type in the mobile phone number of a field employee on the
provider's website and within 10 seconds get the location of the
phone. Services can be tailored for specific business applications.
Early services on the market come from Fleetonline, which is
concentrating on mobile staff, and Followus, which additionally
offers asset tracking for vehicles and machinery. Fleetonline's
service has no set-up costs and charging is per-use with fees - 21p
for Vodafone, 27p for O2 - added to mobile phone bills. GPS units
cost about £2,000 per vehicle.
The services take advantage of the requirement that from July
mobile phone operators must make cell-based location information
available to subscribers for specified mobile numbers.
Analyst Jeremy Green of Ovum said the service has limitations but
is still an attractive option for some businesses. "Any company
with field service engineers, a mobile sales force, or in the
public sector, where the safety of social workers, for example, is
an issue, could make use of this if they need to know roughly where
an employee is but don't require the fine granularity of GPS."