Skyonics Weekly

Rash of Partner Data Services Problems

This week, trackm2m, tda, and car coordinates have all had difficulties keeping their forwarding web services up and running. We noticed these problems before any of them noticed and informed them to coordinate a recovery. It's strange that everyone had trouble of this kind this week.

It did uncover a race condition where we divert data we can't send into a forwarding buffer, and in one case we tried to write the data twice, resulting in key conflicts and retrying over and over until the system work backed up. This was fixed.

This is ongoing -- TDA is down again this morning, and the recovery service we call on automatically isn't helping.

Operations Site

Various bug fixes related to UI glitches and the new operational reports, no new features added. Many of the new operations reports could become a jumping off point for automated firmware deployment, diagnostics gathering, imposing data usage control, etc. Planning to call for a meeting about the automation opportunities, targeting next week.

Focused Sales Support for GPS Tracking Systems

Besides the usual odd demos, answering questions, etc, many hours of activity to this week to specifically line things up for Barry Gilbow. We're expecting a near-term order from him for 3k devices to stock inventory, and he expects big first quarter activity into his customers of ~200k trucks for a combined solution of Skyonics fleet management and Vistracks HOS.

Progress on Vistracks HOS Integration

Vistracks' API can supply all the information we want to integrate via their xml web services. Have been working on an analysis of how to integrate their data into our Fleet Management application. Will post more detail separately, but the summary is:

1. Synchronizing their vehicle and driver information. They have information in their records we don't, so we'll need to extend our data model.
2. Display HOS data in new panels and reports. Current driver status, daily log data, violations, DVIR report. Most of this is tabular data and will be easy to visualize as tables, grids, and reports. The log chart is a fair bit of work to render correctly, so we're trying now to open a discussion with Vistracks about getting log chart bitmaps as a short term solution.
3. Driver assignment. Drivers may change vehicles several times a day. The vistracks application paired with our device can determine which driver is operating which asset. We can automate driver assignment through integration of the data.
4. Test data. One of the first things to build out is mock / simulation data for testing, but we also need real production data, from Vistracks using Geometris devices, and tied into a fleet management tenant, to prove out the integration. Reaching out to elogplus to cooperate with us in that regard.

Fleet Management Stabilization

Notable larger things done:

1. Report filters now use our form controls, so we get the nice Driver / Vehicle pick from list for example, and the new date range control.

2. Heat map and asset trace was merged on the history and detail

3. Major new optimization for reports by holding location data as an entity state in the state tracking system. When we deploy this expect many of the reports to generate dramatically faster.

4. Viewing political region data in the places screen (states, counties, etc) works much better now.

5. Glitches in the state and county mileage reports that filtered out too many records fixed ... still working on performance improvements.

6. Layout improvements to all of the existing reports.