GPS in this business answers two questions that feel similar and are not. Where is my truck right now, and where is unit 1085, which was on the Hill Street job on Friday and is not there this morning. The first needs a live position a few times a minute. The second needs a position a few times a day. Buy the hardware for the question you are asking.
Trucks: live, and probably already done
A service truck wants a live position: the dispatcher's map, the driver's next arrival time updating with traffic, the trip history when a customer says the truck never came. Two ways to get it. A plug-in tracker in the OBD port, cheap and installed in a minute. Or the telematics account you already pay for: if the trucks are on Samsara, Geotab, Motive or Verizon Connect, a read-only connection brings the positions into the dispatch map with no new hardware. Nothing should be written back to that account; the dispatch software reads positions and that is all.
The third option is the driver app itself, which reports the phone's position while the driver is on the clock. It is free and it is good enough for a one-truck company. It is not good enough when the phone is in a jacket in the yard.
Units: a few times a day, for years
A portable toilet does not need a live position. It needs to be where it was left, and if it is not, you need to know by morning. A stick-on or screw-in battery tag that wakes up a few times a day, reports where it is and goes back to sleep does that, and because it sleeps the battery lasts for years. Put a tag on the units that go to events, the ones on remote sites, and the ones on the job with the history, and track the rest by the placement pin.
What the tag gives you that a pin does not: a unit that moved overnight, a unit that is 9 kilometres from its pin because it was taken to another lot, and a trailer of units that is not on the highway it should be on. Alerts for those, and a device health list that shows every tag's battery and last report, so the one at 17% gets swapped before it goes quiet.
What to do with the data
Prove the stop. Trip history that shows the truck at the site at 10:40 ends the "nobody came" call. So does a stamped photo, and together they are conclusive.
Tighten the routes. The day's trips, with idle time and distance per truck, show the dead time routing is supposed to remove. Forty minutes of idle at a gas station is a conversation, not an accusation, but it is a conversation you cannot have without the data.
Move the pin. When a tag disagrees with the placement pin by more than a few metres, someone is wrong, and it is usually the pin. Let the office move the pin to the tag's position, or flag the unit for the next driver to check. The unit tracking post covers pins.
Find the unit. The one that walked off the site is at the position the tag last reported. Go and get it.
What it costs, honestly
A tag per unit plus a small monthly fee per tag, so tagging a 500-unit fleet is a real line. A tracker per truck, or nothing if the telematics account is already there. Price it against one lost unit and one disputed invoice a quarter. Most operators land on tagging a fraction of the fleet and tracking every truck.
