1) Note down your requirement

The first and foremost point is to make a checklist of all your requirements. The most important point to be noted is Why and what am I going to do with GPS Vehicle Tracking System? These are few of the options you have:

a.Simple vehicle tracking to

i)understand the current location of the vehicle
ii)find the history of the locations where the vehicle has been used.

b. Tracking to understand if the vehicle has entered a predefined area(Geo Fence)

c.Tracking Device to find the number of hours the vehicle and driver has worked

d.Monitor the external inputs to the tracking device – for example, to find when the vehicles Air Condition (AC) has been switched on and off.

e.Monitor driving patterns – like speed, harsh breaking and harsh acceleration.

2)GPS Vehicle Tracking is a Service not a product

Choose your service provider wisely GPS vehicle tracking system consists of Electronics Hardware and Software Application. Since the hardware is made of electronics components, there is always a possibility for the Tracking Hardware to come up with issue or failures. With the advancement in technology, the failure rates have decreased considerably. Even though, taking into consideration the worst case scenario, we need to always look at a company which has sufficient resources to provide hardware support.On a similar lines, the application used to view the vehicles online, requires frequent up gradations and integration. Check if the company has a full-fledged development team that would be able to cater to your software needs.

3) Ask for Technical Specification Sheet of the Hardware

Always try and read the specification of the hardware so that you can understand what configuration of the hardware you are going to purchase. Parameters like battery, internal memory, number of input and output ports, type of inputs – Digital and Analogue, type of casing – waterproof and dust proof, etc. can affect the performance of your fleet tracking application on a whole.

4)Where is the Application Hosted?

It is quite important to note where the Application on which your vehicle is monitored is hosted. There are various parameters that is to be considered in terms of hosting:
a. How good is the infrastructure on which the application is hosted

b. How fast the application is.

c.Rate at which data is refreshed on the server.

d.The duration for which the data is stored on the server.

5)Who installs the Tracking devices on your vehicle.

The tracking device has to be connected to the vehicle. In order for the tracking device to be connected to the vehicle, we need to sleeve the connection from the vehicle battery and loop the connection to the tracking device.In order to find if a vehicle is switched on or off, we need to connect the device input to the ignition of the vehicle. This is help the tracking device and tracking application to detect if a vehicle is switched on or off.