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Satellites Unlimited Inc. (SUI), a family-owned business that sells and installs DISH services across Alabama and six other Southeastern states, faced several challenges. They needed to monitor and record proof of on-time arrival and valid fuel card use. Maintaining a high standard of safety practices on the road was also a priority. Additionally, they were in search of a fleet tracking provider that offered reasonable pricing and adequate customer support.

Quality Transport Services (QTS), an assisted transport company in Arizona, faced several challenges. They needed to maintain detailed tracking records for each transport vehicle, encourage consistent, safe driving behavior around the clock, and differentiate QTS above its competitors. The company's fleet vehicles collectively make 50,000 or more trips, driving over a million miles per year, making these challenges even more significant.

Joseph T. Berrena Mechanicals, Inc. faced several challenges in managing their fleet. They were using platforms that were cumbersome and difficult to use by various types of users. They needed a fleet safety program that was cost-effective. Additionally, they needed a solution to monitor the maintenance of their fleet. The company was looking for a solution that could provide real-time diagnostics for all vehicles and was easy to use by different groups of people.

Bug-N-A-Rug Exterminators, a family-run business established in 1996 in Wilmington, NC, was locked into a long-term, expensive contract with Verizon and MyFleet from AT&T. The company was looking to streamline and cut costs as they were dealing with up to 10 invoices per month with separate unit charges and data fees. As the company grew, more vehicles were added on with new contracts, leading to multiple contract end dates. Buying out through the end of an expensive contract wasn’t an option. Bug-N-A-Rug waited until there was a manageable amount of vehicles on the contract before buying it out for a better solution. One key area that needed improvement was the real-time tracking on the vehicles to be able to dispatch the closest or next available technician for immediate service.

All-Lift, a rapidly growing business specializing in the service, repair, and sale of forklifts and forklift parts, was facing several challenges. The company was finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of its service vehicles, leading to inefficiencies such as dispatching vehicles to sites where a technician was already present. This resulted in a loss of time and fuel. Additionally, the company had to rely on handwritten sheets for payroll, leading to inaccuracies in compensating their technicians. All-Lift also lacked an official means of tracking company vehicles outside of working hours, leading to unauthorized use. This culminated in an unfortunate incident where an employee received an impaired driving infraction while driving a company truck.

Smith & Solomon, a commercial driver education company, was facing several challenges with their previous fleet management products. The technology was outdated and unreliable, leading to frequent device failures and replacements. The company also had to deal with large upfront costs. The company needed a solution that could track interstate mileage for tax purposes, maintain vehicles subject to new driver abuse, and track vehicles across states and business locations. The company experimented with several products, but none met their expectations or budget.

Misericordia University, located in Dallas, Pennsylvania, faced a significant challenge in managing its fleet of vehicles. The university's athletics department frequently used these vehicles for out-of-town recruiting, and drivers often found themselves unsure of their exact location during incidents. The university lacked a fleet tracking solution, making it difficult to gather details about incidents involving their vehicles. Additionally, the university needed a way to monitor employee performance, particularly in cases where vehicles remained idle or in the same location for extended periods, which could indicate that an employee was not completing their assigned tasks.

HomeWorks Plumbing, Heating and Air, a home service company based in St. Paul, MN, was struggling with their existing GPS system which was difficult to use, inaccurate, and cumbersome to roll out to the technicians. The company operates three divisions - the installation team, plumbers, and HVAC technicians, all of whom are responsible for delivering quality service to their customers. It was crucial for them to reach the job site on time and safely. The company was also looking for a solution that was easy to install as their trucks are on the road 90% of the time. The previous GPS system was not meeting these requirements, affecting the company's bottom line and customer satisfaction.

Allwell Rents, a company that delivers to sensitive events such as weddings and graduations, was struggling with their previous fleet management solution, Nextraq. The solution was not delivering as promised and was costly. They had difficulty gaining visibility into their fleet activity, scheduling, and performance. Overbooking of trucks was a common issue, leading to delivery disruptions and poor customer service. Their insurance company required GPS tracking, but they needed a solution that offered more than just that. They needed a solution that could enhance their fleet and efficiencies, and help keep operational costs down.

After taking over Dorglass Inc. in 2017, Sammy Reagan, the owner, implemented a safety program and began using Fleetmatics, a fleet management solution, to track safety aspects. However, the software was not user-friendly or easy to install, and the maintenance reminders were not sufficient. The company also had a high number of minor accidents, with 5 to 8 fender benders occurring annually. This led to increased insurance rates and potential for significant loss. Additionally, the company needed a reliable way to track the locations of their vehicles and the duration at each location to ensure accurate labor hours for individual work orders and jobs.

Southern Tire Mart, the number one commercial tire retailer in North America, operates a fleet of nearly 2,000 vehicles across 100+ stores around the US. The company has multiple tiers of drivers, from sales to managers, each with different needs. As the company continued to grow, it faced challenges with its previous telematics provider. The quality of the service started to degrade, tracking accuracy was suffering, and there were major internal changes, including several different customer support contacts over a short period of time. This led Southern Tire Mart to look for a better solution. The company needed a telematics solution that could grow with them, provide accurate tracking, and offer reliable customer support.

Connors Plumbing & Heating, a team of licensed plumbers and heating and air conditioning experts, services South Central Minnesota, a vast area with 16 towns. The company has over 15 technicians in the field, making it challenging to manage and coordinate their operations. The main challenges included identifying the best technician to send to a job based on the location of the technician, vehicle, and customer, keeping a log of vehicle inspections and maintenance, and knowing where everyone is at any time given the large service area and number of technicians out in the field.

Marlboro Towing was facing several challenges. They were in search of a vehicle-based GPS tracking system to improve visibility in Towbook, their dispatching software. The company was also dealing with increasing issues related to driving behavior, including accidents and speeding tickets. These issues were not only affecting their operational efficiency but also increasing their liability. Furthermore, they had had bad experiences with vendors in the past, which made them cautious about choosing a new solution.

Reliable Fire & Security, a family-owned business in Alsip, Illinois, had a GPS vehicle tracking solution in place for many years. However, their contract was coming up for renewal and the old 3G hardwired hardware needed to be upgraded. Dan Hurley, Operations Manager, was tasked with evaluating all of the various options available. His criteria included costs, ease of implementation, with a strong focus on driver safety and lowering liability. Safe driving practices can have a cascading effect on the cost of fuel, tires, maintenance, insurance and maximizing technician’s billable hours while keeping them safe while behind the wheel.

QuadScore, a specialty risk program providing insurance solutions for the American cannabis industry, faced a significant challenge when one of their customers was involved in a fatal auto accident. The company needed video footage to prove their client was not at fault. Additionally, QuadScore was grappling with high auto premiums due to increased claim costs and an unsatisfactory risk profile of clients.

Triton Air, a family-owned HVAC, water heating, and refrigeration company, had been using a GPS vehicle tracking solution for many years. However, they faced a series of accidents where video evidence could have exonerated their technicians. The safety of their employees and the community was of paramount importance to them, and at-fault accidents were causing a significant increase in their insurance premiums. They were also looking for a system that aligned with their safety values and a way to monetarily incentivize their technicians.

Brown and Caldwell, an environmental firm, works with water and wastewater agencies across the United States. They were seeking advanced technologies and tools to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase accuracy to meet clients’ most pressing needs. As utilities look to create more comprehensive inventories of their water and wastewater systems, mobile apps and tablet devices are being used to collect data and help build the foundation for robust asset management systems. In particular, the use of mobile apps and smart devices has proven to improve productivity for the geographical location, inspection, and assessment of wastewater collection systems. However, before the switch to mobile technology, the Brown and Caldwell team gathered historical data from record drawings into GIS and exported them to paper map books. Inspection crews would attempt to locate these structures. Paper forms were used to get collection condition information. More than 60,000 photos were taken using digital cameras. Another team of surveyors, both conventional and GPS-equipped, would follow to get to precise location and rim elevation of these structures. Areas that had been redeveloped or which contained new structures proved problematic for the two crews. Overall, project workflows were prone to disruption, and were large, complicated, and had intersecting tasks.

The Santa Barbara County Fire Department (SBCFD) in California is tasked with performing defensible space inspections on more than 16,000 buildings in their area each year. Defensible space is an area around a structure designed and maintained to reduce its fire risk. During an inspection, firefighters conduct a structural survey on the building to identify its material makeup and ensure it has a 100-foot buffer, free from dead trees and overgrowth. Until recently, the department used paper inspection forms, an inefficient process that made surveying every structure in the county a challenge. This system gave SBCFD no visibility into how many inspections each of its 16 stations were responsible for. One station might complete two dozen inspections, while another had a backlog of thousands — more than they could possibly complete in the time allotted. And it was difficult (if not impossible) to know how many inspections had been completed, or if any buildings in high fire-danger areas were not in compliance, putting residents at higher risk.

Before switching to Fulcrum, Trimat had laptops assigned to their service employees to write up their inspections in Microsoft Access, on an old system that was built eight years prior. Inspectors in the field would conduct an on-site inspection, and then, while in their car or back in the office, write up their report in the Access database. This process was time consuming and often led to errors in data and incomplete information. Trimat looked into rebuilding the Access system or building a new in-house system and had received quotes exceeding $10,000.

Green Mountain College was facing challenges in streamlining their traditional mapping techniques which involved the use of paper maps, a field notebook, camera, and handheld GPS. Over the years, they tried different technologies including an inexpensive consumer grade Garmin, the Trimble GeoXT and the Trimble Juno, to Collector for ArcGIS running on an iPad mini. However, many of these options still required paper maps, external camera or additional software to create data dictionaries. The college was in need of a solution that could combine all the needs of traditional mapping within a single interface.

HaMaarag, a consortium of organizations responsible for managing Israel’s natural resources, was facing challenges with their traditional pen and paper method of conducting field surveys. The group studies and reports on seven wildlife classes across Israel to contribute to the advancement of knowledge-based management of natural resources. The traditional method was prone to digitization errors, data loss, and bias, which could degrade the quality of their data and analysis. The organization decided to switch to a mobile solution to create a centralized database, which is crucial for statistical analyses.

Halton Company, a global technology organization delivering complex indoor air solutions, was facing several challenges with its quality control inspections. The company was using paper-based quality control forms that were filled out as products traveled through the manufacturing process. These forms were then manually scanned and filed away into a directory on a server. The data was not in an easily usable format and was not supporting any other quality initiatives. The paper checklists promoted cursory examinations, often resulting in incomplete quality control audit documentation. The company was unable to share quality control inspection data to promote constant improvement and had ineffective and delayed identification of quality issues.

Northpower, a multi-utility contractor in New Zealand, was facing challenges with their pillar inspection process. They were using Windows Mobile-based phones with an ArcGIS forms solution to capture inspection results, and paper-based maps to log and navigate to each pillar. This process was inefficient and had several issues. The form created by a third party couldn't be easily updated or maintained, and Windows Mobile was no longer a widely-supported platform. The system wasn't trusted enough to maintain data integrity, forcing inspectors to hand-write inspection results before entering data. Without electronic maps to pinpoint pillar locations, 10% or more could be missed on a patrol. The interface with the back-end systems lacked validation & automation capability.

Degenkolb Engineers, a leading earthquake engineering firm, was tasked with ensuring that hospitals in California complied with the state's Seismic Compliance Program. This program required hospitals to provide documentation that all their equipment and interior components were sufficiently braced to withstand a major earthquake. The firm was initially using a paper, pen, and camera method of data collection, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Photos required a numbering system on a small whiteboard to identify the shot, and significant time was required to organize the data and link pictures to individual entries.

Before the implementation of Fulcrum, House of Hope outreach workers would spend a few hours on the streets, talking with clients and taking notes on paper, then come home and write down who they spoke to and what the conversations were about. The details of these conversations often got lost due to the volume of people they interacted with. Once they had their notes together, workers would manually transfer the data into the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a database mandated by their funders. HMIS is neither mobile- nor user-friendly, and is prohibitively expensive for a nonprofit organization, so House of Hope’s software licenses were limited to fulltime employees, which meant interns were not able to access critical data.

The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) was tasked with identifying problematic coastal lighting that could affect the nesting habitats of endangered sea turtles in 25 conservation areas. This was a part of a contract with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). The contract required IDA to establish baseline measurements of night sky quality along the beach in these conservation areas. Before finding Fulcrum, IDA’s data collection consisted of manual pen-and-paper recording to be organized in Excel, leaving data open to inconsistency and reporting issues. Without GIS integration, GPS data was manually recorded alongside other information, making organizing and analyzing difficult.

Celerity, a telecom contracting company, was facing a challenge with their data collection and storage methods. Their field technicians and engineers were collecting massive amounts of data while conducting route maintenance, inspections, and feasibility studies for their customers. However, their manual collection and storage methods were becoming too time-intensive. They needed a digital platform that would enable them to collect and store data all in one central location. They were looking for a scalable and customizable solution. They tried a few different mobile forms apps, but they were not worth their time or effort due to the price point.

RedZone Software is a company that monitors developing wildfires and deploys fire engines to mitigate the threat to its clients’ assets. After firefighters arrive on-site and respond to the threat, they document everything. This documentation is easily shared with insurance companies and property owners. Initially, RedZone developed an in-house solution for firefighter documentation. However, that solution did not scale to an exceptionally large user demand.

Tilson, a company providing Outside Plant (OSP) engineering, permitting, and construction management in the Telecom and IT industries, was facing a challenge. They had recently been awarded a statewide fiber construction project for the state of Kentucky to provide broadband access across the state. The project involved surveying 10,000 utility poles—including attachments, spans, and specific attributes—and providing a make-ready engineering (MRE) solution for each pole in order to apply for an attachment license for the fiber cable. Tilson had been utilizing several other data collection apps, with mixed results. The collection process often involved taking photos with a camera and a GPS unit, writing records in Excel, then joining them back up in the office. Tilson needed a solution where data was only keyed in once, could be monitored remotely, and exported in a variety of methods easily.

GreenCollar, an environmental markets company, manages over 445,000 acres of forest in Australia. They use environmental markets to protect these forests from deforestation, which requires technical survey, monitoring, evaluation, and management systems. These systems also need to be audited by third parties and government agencies. The company collects a variety of data, including forest biomass data, flora & fauna survey data, verification of roads and tracks, monitoring of farm infrastructure condition, and assessment data on a property to examine a project’s ability to move into the next phase of analysis. However, the large volume of data collection and management, along with the need to complete projects efficiently, was restricted by the delay between collecting data in the field and analyzing it back at the head office to determine the next steps of their projects.