Where to draw a geo-fence
Draw it too tight and you get alerts all day. Too loose and you find out too late.
A geo-fence is an alerting decision, not a mapping one
It is tempting to draw a geo-fence along the site boundary, because that is where the fence physically is. That is usually the wrong line.
The question a geo-fence answers is not “is the asset on site”. It is “do I want to be told about this right now”. Those are different questions, and the second one produces better boundaries.
Size it for the noise you can tolerate
A tight boundary around a yard will fire every time a forklift takes a container ten metres onto the apron. Within a week people stop reading the alerts, which is worse than having none.
Draw the boundary where the asset genuinely should not go past — the gate, the road, the perimeter of the working area including the bits people actually use. Then leave it alone for a fortnight and see how many alerts you get. If it is more than you will read, the boundary is too tight.
Fence the exception, not the rule
For assets that move constantly — vehicles, trailers, anything on the road — a site geo-fence generates constant noise. Fence the places they should not be instead, or fence the territory of an agreement rather than a yard.
For assets that should never move — a generator on a site for the duration of a project, a leased machine in a client building — a tight geo-fence is exactly right, because any alert is a real event.
Decide who the alert reaches
An alert that goes to a shared inbox nobody owns is not an alert. Before you draw the boundary, decide who acts on it and what they do.
In practice the useful pattern is: the person who would have to go and find the asset is the person who gets told it has moved.
Tell us what you need to track.
Tell us about your assets, your operation and what you need visibility on. We will tell you which Tagon device fits and what a deployment looks like.
What to have ready
- What you need to track, and roughly how many
- Where those assets operate
- Indoors, outdoors, or both
- Any system the data needs to reach
That is usually enough for us to recommend a device and a deployment shape.