by Joy Bailer at Telematics 411 Consulting LLC
Two common terms in MyGeotab are Rules and Exceptions. Generally speaking, here is the difference between the two:
To set up an out-of-the-box rule in MyGeotab, navigate to Groups & Rules > Rules. Here you will see a list of all the different rules sorted by category. Some of the most common rules are the ones located at the top under the Safety section.
If you have a brand-new database you will need to turn the rules On in order to have them begin recording exceptions.
In the picture below you can see a number of rules that have already been enabled.
To adjust these rules when they have been enabled, you can click on the slider bars for the items such as Harsh Braking and use the slider bar or input a specific value for the Speeding rule.
Once you have made an adjustment to the rule, you’ll see a button over to the right that says Save. Click this to change the rule systemwide.
NOTE: See the Hard Acceleration rule in the image above to see an example of what the Save button looks like.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: While creating custom rules is outside of the scope of this blog post, it is worth noting that there is a host of other rule-optimization options available for you to tailor your MyGeotab solution to fit your fleet’s policies at a more granular level.
How you configure rules within your database is going to depend largely on the needs of your specific fleet; however, there are some general ideas to keep
in mind in order to help you get rules configured for effective alerting and reporting.
Groups play an important role when it comes to Rules because they help to ensure that your Assets are being accurately assessed when an Exception event is recorded. This is because Assets of different sizes require that different sensitivity levels are accounted for.
EXAMPLE: A semi truck will need a greater sensitivity level than a car, since the truck will not register going over a pothole the same way that the same pothole would be perceived within a small Toyota.
For companies with vehicles of mixed sizes, it may be worth setting up rules for each vehicle size. Here is a sample set of groups that may make sense for a company that has both class-8 trucks for delivery and sedans for their sales staff:
Once you have created groups to satisfy the requirements in your company, you can build rules that apply to specific vehicles. To do this, navigate to Groups & Rules > Rules and locate, for example, the default Hard Acceleration rule in your system. Click the pencil icon on the far right to make a custom acceleration rule:
Give your custom rule a Name that makes it clear what the rule is or does without any explanation. In this example, we are building rules to detect Class 8 Hard Acceleration.
Under the Publish to groups section we will also add our previously-created Class 8 group so that this rule only applies to vehicles with that group designation.
Under the Conditions tab we’ll make sure that our sensitivity is bumped to the appropriate level. In this case, we started with a rule that already had sensitivity in the correct spot, so we will leave this as it is and Save our changes.
NOTE: If you need to change a value here, click the icon that looks like a piece of paper and use the Advanced Conditions Editor that pops up to make the changes.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: While the Notifications tab can be used to set up email notifications, this rule is likely to trigger far too many times to be useful if emailed for each instance. For this sort of rule a Driver Safety Scorecard Report would be a better option for keeping an eye on driver behavior.
This new custom rule will now be displayed at the bottom of the Rules page where you can click it to make changes or view it along with any other custom rules in your system.
This process should be repeated for any other rules that need to be applied only to specific groups of Assets or Users.
To save you some time, here is a table with the different sensitivity-level points for accelerometer data on the slider bars within the Safety Rules section:
It is not uncommon for people to enable many rules within MyGeotab without having a strategy in place, which can lead to frustration due to people getting a lot of email notifications that either aren’t relevant to them in the first place or are at a volume too great to be of any use.
What is much better is to have an idea of what you would like to achieve and then use the MyGeotab platform to help you get to the end goal.
For example, let’s say that you have an ideal fleet-safety program in mind that includes:
With this information in mind, you can begin to build rules and reports to facilitate implementation of that ideal safety program.
If you have a clear goal in mind and use that as a reference for building rules, you will have greater success in rolling them out effectively.
If you really want to leverage the different aspects of rule customization in MyGeotab, take some time to learn how features work that may not be immediately clear from the beginning.
For example, here are some common areas of MyGeotab that are worth knowing for possible rule customizations:
Engine Faults
You can create custom rules based off of specific engine faults to capture instances where either an engine fault code was thrown or the telematics device registered unusual activity. Here are some examples of rules you can create using Engine Faults:
Engine Measurements
By creating rules based on Engine Measurements you can identify times when certain values that can be recorded by the GO device. For example:
Zones
Zones are Geotab’s version of geofences, and they can be used in rules for a number of applications including:
Other Features
Some other features that are worth mentioning for you to consider learning are the:
There are many resources available on these features, which you can find with a simple Google search or by reaching out for more information to your Geotab reseller (usually can be located in your MyGeotab database under Help & Support > Contact Information) or asking more via a post on the Geotab Community, an active global network of Geotab experts.
If you are getting too many emails about rules in your database, you can easily remove the notification(s). To do this, navigate to the rule for which you would like to disable notifications. For standard rules, notifications can be found under the envelope icon to the right of the rule.
Here is what the Notification section looks like after clicking on the envelope icon:
Find the email address(es) listed that you’d like to remove, click the X to the far right of the email address, and click the Save button. You should no longer receive email notifications for this rule.
It’s not uncommon for inexperienced users to set up their telematics system to provide too many notifications. The intent behind this may be good, but the reality is that people begin to ignore notifications when they are receiving too many emails.
The rule of thumb for creating a good system for notifications is this:
If a manager should be notified of a problem right away, the Rule should have notifications enabled.
If an exception is important but does not need to be addressed immediately, the notifications should be disabled and a report created to provide a daily (or weekly, etc.) digest for comparative review.
Rules that will cause more than around two or three emails per day are likely best set up as reports instead of emailed immediately.
While building custom reports in MyGeotab is outside the scope of this blog post, you may find it helpful to engage your Geotab reseller for guidance in creating reports to cut down on unnecessary email notifications. Your reseller’s contact information can be found under Help & Support > Contact Information. You can also ask for assistance in the Geotab Community or consider hiring a consultant for assistance with report implementation.
Geotab rules can help identify drivers that require training due to safety issues, but it is up to each fleet to determine how to implement a driver-safety training program to fit their specific needs.
.sfty makes automated driver training easy by providing advanced settings to let you determine the right time to implement safety training. For example, you can set training videos to send out if a driver reaches a defined number of Hard Acceleration exceptions recorded in a given week.
Yes!
Ordinarily when you set up a new Rule in MyGeotab you will see Exceptions only for instances that occurred after the rule was set up. However, you can use the Reprocess data button under Groups & Rules > Rules to have MyGeotab apply your newly-created rule retroactively.
The Reprocess data button provides a dropdown menu with the following options:
Once you select the date to define how far back you’d like the rule to apply, select which Asset(s) to have data reprocessed for and which Rule(s).
NOTE: You can have a rule reprocess back to 13 months from the day you do the data reprocess in MyGeotab.
Click Apply changes when all the settings have been adjusted as you see fit. Here you may see a pop-up that tells you the database may take a while to reprocess all the information, likely running overnight.
NOTE: If you have a large amount of data and set the date back a significant amount of time, the reprocessing may take multiple nights to finish. This is incredibly rare, but worth noting if you have let the system run overnight and still aren’t seeing all of the data that you expect.
Once the data has been reprocessed, you will see Exceptions going as far back as you specified.