As the holiday season approaches, many retailers will be faced with bigger concerns than holiday sales and the rush of people. They will now have to worry about employee theft, which, according to a new report, is a bigger part of retail loss in the United States than shoplifting.

The Global Retail Theft Barometer is an extensive report on shrink (loss of inventory) cost. It uses statistical research based on the loss of inventory to help retailers measure how they perform against averages for specific vertical markets, merchandise and regional geographies.

Shrink which is made up of supplier and employee fraud, administrative errors and shoplifting, increased in America from 1.28 percent of sales between 2013 and 2014 to 1.97 percent in 2014 through 2015.

These statistics were determined based off common retail respondents’ responses both years to Global Retail Theft Barometer surveys. Shrink was up from their previous .94 percent of the past year average of surveyed common retailers to 1.42 percent. Read the rest of this entry »

To find the best options to save Tanzania elephants, a special program was launched by the Tanzania National Parks. This program monitors the movements of elephants in Ruaha National Park and is supported by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Working together with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the UNDP is helping to fund this program in order to support elephant monitoring in Rungwa Game Reserve and Ruaha National Park. This monitoring is being done through the use of a satellite system.

Mr. Allan Kijazi, Director General of Tanzania National Parks, said the main objective of monitoring the movements of elephants through satellite is to gather up information on the elephants seasonal movements in the Great Ruaha landscape.

In order to monitor the elephants’ activity patterns and regional and local movements, the World Elephant Centre was contracted by the UNDP to tag 30 elephants with GPS tracking collar units.

Each unit will come with a mortality sensor built right in to inform researchers if a fitted elephant is killed. The 30 GPS units will be spread evenly around core areas, game reserves, and wildlife management areas around the Ruaha ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot riding on the services of a refrigeration service and repair business. Food safety is a big concern for restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more. When the unit goes out it could be devastating, financially, for the facilities, in question. That’s why it’s so important for companies that offer these services to have GPS fleet tracking. GPS tracking provides the following benefits, and many more.

Timely Estimates for Response Times when Refrigeration Units Fail

GPS fleet tracking allows dispatch to know the locations of all refrigerator services vehicles at all times. This means that they can accurately pinpoint the closest available vehicle in order to respond to the crisis in as timely a manner as possible. This allows the facility to make arrangements to avoid food spoilage, if possible, and reroute or defer deliveries of new foods that will need to be kept cold in order to avoid further waste.

Verification of Service Calls Read the rest of this entry »

The Kakadu’s floodplains are being devastated by wild buffalo and they are destroying native fauna and flora as well. However, a new program where GPS tracking collars are being used is set in place to better understand the feral animals’ movements which will help the World Heritage National Park finally stop them.

In Arnhem Land, neighboring Kakadu National Park, there was a 2014 aerial survey of the wild

buffalo which estimated that across 92,000 square kilometers of country there were about 98,000 buffalo.

According to Charles Darwin University’s PhD student and the project’s main researcher, Stewart Pittard, the buffalo are becoming a huge problem.

Benn Bryant, wildlife veterinarian, was brought in to sedate the buffalo while Pittard secured the collars on their necks. The team comes in by helicopter and chases the herd of buffalo until they are able to shoot a tranquilizer dart into one of them. Once shot, the buffalo will collapse in minutes.

While unconscious, which is a brief time, temperature readings and blood will be taken by the wildlife veterinarian along with measures and records of its respiratory rates and heart. While this is happening, Pittard attaches the collar on the neck of the buffalo as the team above in the helicopter keeps an eye out for other dangerous wild animals. Read the rest of this entry »

For any business that has vehicles in operation on the road, GPS fleet tracking is a valuable tool One of the ways many business owners are constantly surprised to find GPS fleet tracking services to be extremely beneficial for is in the area of building trust with customers. These are just a few examples of how GPS fleet tracking can help you build better trust with your customers.

1) Allows You to Provide Accurate Appointment Windows for Customers

There’s nothing more frustrating for customers to spend four hours waiting for a delivery, repair person, or installation only to discover that they will need to wait even longer. GPS fleet tracking allows you to create a much more accurate window of time for appointments. This means your customers can trust you to be there within the time frame you promised.

2) Shorter Appointment Windows

While you’re at it, you can use the power of GPS fleet tracking to not only create more accurate appointment windows, but also to create shorter ones. GPS fleet tracking makes it possible for your drivers to travel more efficiently. The fact that they are being tracked encourages prompt service and no deviations from the prescribed routes.

This gives you a fairly accurate estimate of how long it should take to get from the next based on GPS data and route information. Build in a little extra time for contingencies and you should be able to make appointments within shorter windows which creates even happier customers who don’t feel tied to their homes all day. Read the rest of this entry »