GPS fleet tracking helps plumbing company recover stolen truck

Problem / LeadingEdge Plumbing & Rooter suffered a small-business nightmare: the theft of a company truck from a job site. It was the first time that had ever happened in the company’s 20-year history. When police finally recovered it, the thief had managed to off-load all of the expensive tools and equipment onboard — which the company never recovered.

Solution / Immediately after this theft, LeadingEdge Plumbing realized it was critical to know where its trucks and expensive equipment were at all times. After extensive research, the company chose ClearPathGPS based on the top star ratings on review sites like TrustPilot and Capterra, along with the ability to get up and running quickly and the flexible month-to-month service contract.

Result / LeadingEdge got the chance to learn firsthand just how smart the decision was to equip its fleet with GPS tracking units when another company vehicle was stolen from a job site. “But this time,” explained the owner, “we were able to call the cops right away, and using ClearPathGPS’ live map view of the truck’s movements, we guided police right to it.” Soon after, the police stopped the vehicle, apprehended the thieves, and recovered the truck and equipment worth about $100,000. Other results achieved include better dispatching and service as well as more accuracy with job durations and timecards. 888-734-0384; www.clearpathgps.com

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Custom app enables collaboration between operators at different manholes

Problem / Padre Dam Municipal Water District in Santee, California, has roughly 170 miles of sewer mains, over 15,500 total wastewater connections and a population of more than 70,000 people. With so much ground to cover, its team needed a way for operators to transfer data to each other from different manholes. This would allow them to avoid over-flushing manholes and pipe sections, creating better time management and productivity.

Solution / In collaboration with Padre Dam, WinCan created a custom flushing application that allowed the municipality to update maintenance data in real time.

Result / “When the two operators are cleaning the same section, they won’t have to call each other,” says wastewater collections supervisor Rich Schultz. “Data will auto-populate up to the minute — helping to ensure they’re not over-flushing the area. It’s going to help minimize potential human errors, opposing numbers and incorrect upstream/downstream manhole numbers.” In addition to this custom application, WinCan VX enables Padre Dam to visualize data through Esri’s ArcGIS, using an integration that has expedited their workflow by prioritizing different manholes. “They open ArcMap and they code it with sections from a given work order that have already been CCTV’d, sections that still need to be done, and any section that hasn’t been inspected in two years,” Schultz says. With free-flowing manhole and pipe data from WinCan and Esri, Padre Dam was not only able to solve the problem with manhole-to-manhole communication, but they also improved the completion time and quality of inspections across the municipality. 877-626-8386; www.wincan.com