Introducing Location Tracking for ArcGIS

August 30, 2019

George Kouroupis

Have you wondered how you can improve the efficiency, safety and coordination of activities of your field crews? Location tracking is a new system-wide capability in ArcGIS that gives mobile users the ability to share their location while going about their work. Providing real-time assessment, proof of work, situational awareness and verifying levels of service are just a few use cases for location tracking.

Through Esri’s brand-new app, Tracker for ArcGIS, know the real-time location of your most valued assets, your mobile workers. Tracker provides the ability to capture, view and analyze the movement of workers. Integrated directly within the ArcGIS platform, this Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solution makes it easy to identify who was where and when based on their detailed tracked data.

Tracker supports the following common workflows:

Event situational awareness: monitor staff during planned events.
End-of-day assessments: use location tracks to assess the effectiveness of the day’s mission to aid in planning the next day or phase.
Verify the number of miles driven by a worker or the commitment to level of service by contractors.
Validate the location of vehicles such as snow plows or garbage trucks to honour Service Level Agreements and to communicate with citizens.
Invasive species mapping: verify the areas of a grid that were covered or missed.
Pavement inspection: Report on road coverage and progress.
Point-in-Time homeless surveys: identify gaps in area coverage by staff/volunteers.
Site planning: verify where market analysts have been for analyzing the effectiveness of their assessments.
Employee awareness: keep track of VIPs travelling away from the office.
Department of Public Safety patrols: identify crime patterns.

The app’s powerful location tracking capability offers significant value for multiple industries and sectors, including:

Public Safety (Law Enforcement, Emergency Management)
Utilities (Electric & Gas, Water)
Natural Resources (Petroleum, Agriculture, Forestry, Mining)
Local, Provincial and Federal Government agencies (Public Works, Public Health, Census)
Commercial (Financial, Retail, Insurance, Supply Chain)

Location Tracking for ArcGIS includes a mobile app for iOS and Android devices that efficiently runs in the background to capture location tracks, then feeds these tracks directly into a location tracking feature service, a new capability within ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7. Location tracks can be viewed and interrogated by authorized viewers with the Track Viewer web app or other visualization and analysis tools in ArcGIS that leverage its location tracking capability.

With location tracks inside ArcGIS, you can use the power of the Esri Geospatial Cloud to gain meaningful insight into the location behaviour of your workforce:

Create linear heat maps to visualize the density of location tracks over time.
Aggregate tracks to analyze coverage over an area and identify gaps.
Use incident detection to detect abnormalities in location behaviour.
Verify where inspectors were when inspections were performed.
Derive new datasets from locations travelled.

Why use Tracker for ArcGIS?

Know where everyone is. Tracker enables field personnel to securely share their locations with supervisors who benefit from seeing where their workers are. Knowing the precise locations of your field workforce helps you to verify work, monitor safety and better coordinate personnel and resources in response to unplanned events.

Review where people have been. Tracker stores location tracks so you can access and review them later. You can use stored location tracks to analyze the places workers visited during their shifts. This helps prove work was conducted at a specific location, measure whether contractors met service level agreements and even derive new datasets using the tracks collected.

Improve efficiency in the field. Analyzing the location behaviour of your workforce can improve operational insight and boost efficiency. Find patterns that contribute to efficiency gains or losses, spot areas where you aren’t meeting compliance requirements and identify potential process enhancements or corrections.

Support field personnel. Enable personnel to see where they are and where they have been so it is clear whether the intended territory has been covered. When the day is done, users can easily turn off the Tracker mobile app.

How do you use Tracker for ArcGIS?

Watch this video to see how you can use Tracker for ArcGIS. Learn how the collected information can be disseminated and analyzed across your organization using ArcGIS Enterprise.

Combined with other ArcGIS apps, you can maximize efficiency in your field workforce on a platform you can trust that runs in your own IT infrastructure. Your GIS data feeds directly into ArcGIS where it is available for visualization and analysis by stakeholders across your organization.