New tool to track down trade staff

VisFleet's target market is businesses operating in the 'break-fix' market, such as plumbers, electricians and window glazers. Photo / Supplied

Keeping track of the white van man has been made cheaper and easier with a new iPhone application developed by Trade Me founder Sam Morgan.

Morgan's company VisFleet this week launched vWork Lite, a freely available version of its web-based vWork application, which allows businesses to manage staff out on the road.

vWork Lite offers a simple tracking, scheduling and dispatching service for download through Apple's App Store. The full vWork version of the product gives companies the option to link the dispatch function into billing systems, providing the ability to manage larger volumes of work and fleets.

VisFleet was formed from the ashes of GPS software company iVistra, which folded when an investment by French firm IDentifie failed to eventuate.

Morgan, who took a bigger stake in the business, said the focus had gone on creating a highly scalable software product to take to the world.

Past efforts to develop software solutions for GPS hardware were shelved as the market did not take off as expected. He said the problem was that in-vehicle GPS units failed to deliver adequate business value other than to show where vehicles were.

Since rejigging the company strategy about 12 months ago, the focus has gone on the vehicle dispatch space, or mobile workforce management.

The target market is businesses with 10 or more vehicles operating in the "break-fix" market, such as plumbers, electricians and window glazers.

"They have lots of vans out there and knowing where they are is mildly useful. Knowing where all the jobs are and where the workers are and integrating into the business systems that they have in terms of invoicing and customer relationship management systems off the back of basically free hardware is really where the opportunity is," Morgan said.

He said the rapid adoption of the software-as-a-service model - using software and information over the internet rather than installed locally - and smartphones was turning the proprietary software and hardware developers into dinosaurs overnight.

It also made the entry point for businesses lower. Smartphones are increasingly in the hands of consumers, lowering hardware costs, and vWorks offers a no-contract, subscriber model.

"It really just greatly enlarges the market which this sort of efficiently driving technology can go and target which makes smaller businesses in New Zealand able to compete with the bigger guys that drive those efficiencies,"said Morgan.

Using Google Maps, dispatchers and fleet staff can see and assign jobs on either a PC web browser or iPhone.

Plans to develop an Android-based version were in the pipeline, said Morgan. Beyond New Zealand, the company would make a push into the US. Morgan said most of the competition came from the hardware space and they were not well positioned to make the jump to software-as-a-service.

WHAT IT DOES

* Manages on-the-road staff over web and iPhone applications.
* Integrates into billing systems.
* A free trial version available to manage dispatch and tracking functions.