Alltel adds another enterprise location service

Sal Dhanani, senior director of marketing and co-founder of TeleNav, said TeleNav Track enables enterprises to control their field and labor costs, important in today’s economy, and provide work flow automation — reducing paperwork and the time needed to process it.

“There are various product components, but it starts with GPS, our forte,” Dhanani said. “The fact that your drivers don’t have to stop and get directions or look at a map — that alone saves them enough time to pay for the service, phone and more. On top of that, we’ve added GPS location services to ensure workers are where they are supposed to be. They can quickly tell a customer if they are five minutes away or, if the customer says they never show up, you can prove they were there and waited for 20 minutes and no one came out.”

Along with an updated TeleNav Track, the LBS vendor today also unveiled the TeleNav Enterprise Server, which lets users integrate the Track service with third-party applications, including customer relationship management, payroll, accounting or dispatch. TES automates the flow of data between TeleNav Track and these third-party apps and eliminates the need for duplicate data entry.

GPS, along with data transfer, can be a battery drain on handsets, but users can control it by limiting how often their location is tracked. Dhanani said that on TeleNav Track, some data is instant and some comes in at a certain frequency — typically GPS updates every 15 minutes. Wireless forms and dispatching gets pushed out immediately, while a company can control how often updates are processed. TeleNav Track, which Dhanani called a very horizontal product ideal for any size business with a field component, starts at $9.99 per month for basic services and goes up to $21.99 for the full suite.