Drawing a circle on a map is the easy part. Making zone alerts survive their second month — without drowning a dispatcher in notifications nobody reads — is the part that decides whether the feature earns its place.
| Shape | Use it for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Circle | A yard, a fuel station, a customer site | Overlaps neighbouring sites in dense areas |
| Polygon | Real site boundaries, ports, quarries | Too many vertices makes editing painful |
| Route corridor | Fixed journeys, cash-in-transit, bus routes | Needs a sensible width or every overtake is a deviation |
| City or emirate zone | Cross-border and regional rules | Boundary GPS drift — use dwell, not instant entry |
| Nested zones | A gate inside a compound inside a port | Decide which level alerts, or you get three |
Every GPS platform can draw a zone and fire an alert when a vehicle crosses it. The feature is commoditised. What separates a geofencing deployment that is still running after a year from one that got muted is entirely about how alerts behave, not whether they exist.
A vehicle parked near the edge of a zone does not sit still on the map. GPS position drifts by several metres, and a tracker reporting every thirty seconds will cross and re-cross the boundary repeatedly, producing a stream of entry and exit alerts for a vehicle that never moved. This is the single most common reason geofencing gets switched off.
Two settings fix it. Hysteresis requires the vehicle to move a set distance past the boundary before the state changes, so drift does not trigger anything. Minimum dwell requires the vehicle to remain inside for a period before an entry is confirmed. Both are per-zone, because a fuel station needs different behaviour from a port.
A dispatcher does not need to know every vehicle that entered a depot; they need to know the one that entered a customer site outside its delivery window. An operations manager does not need arrivals at all, only overnight movements. When every rule notifies the same distribution list, the list stops reading.
Rules are therefore scoped to vehicle groups and routed to specific recipients, with routine events available as a batched digest rather than a live ping. The test is simple: if an alert arrives and the recipient does nothing, that alert should not have been sent to that person.
A corridor is a geofence drawn along a route rather than around a place, and it answers a different question: not "where is the vehicle" but "is it still on the agreed path". This matters for cash-in-transit, school transport and any contract where deviation is itself the incident.
The setting that decides whether it works is corridor width. Too narrow and every legitimate overtake, service-road diversion or roadworks detour raises a deviation. Too wide and a genuine diversion goes unnoticed. In practice the width should reflect the road, and corridors on urban routes need different handling from a highway leg.
The most valuable output of geofencing is usually not the alert at all — it is the timestamp. Arrival and departure times per site, accumulated automatically, feed site-time billing, driver payroll, customer SLA reporting and proof of delivery. Many fleets install geofencing for security and end up using it mostly for invoicing, which is a better outcome than the one they planned for.
Geofencing is included in the platform rather than sold as a module. Book a demo or message us on WhatsApp — bring your site list and we will show you the zones built against your own locations rather than a sample map.
There is no practical limit for normal fleet use — deployments running several thousand zones are ordinary. What degrades first is usability rather than performance, which is why zones group by client, region or type. If you are importing thousands of customer sites, send the coordinates and they can be loaded in bulk rather than drawn by hand.
GPS drift across the boundary. A stationary vehicle near a zone edge appears to move by several metres between reports, crossing the line repeatedly. Enable hysteresis so the vehicle must travel a set distance past the boundary before the state changes, and set a minimum dwell before entry is confirmed. This is the single most common geofencing complaint and it is a settings problem, not a hardware one.
Yes, and this is one of the more useful rules available. A yard, quarry or school zone can carry its own limit independent of the road speed, with violations attributed to the driver on shift. It is also easier to defend with drivers than a blanket limit, because the rule matches a visible sign.
A geofence asks whether the vehicle is in a place. A corridor asks whether it is still on the agreed path. Corridors suit cash-in-transit, school transport and contracted routes where leaving the route is the incident, regardless of where the vehicle ends up.
Yes, and many fleets find this more valuable than the alerting. Arrival and departure times per site accumulate automatically and feed site-time billing, payroll and customer SLA reporting. Because the timestamps come from position data rather than from a manual entry, they are considerably harder to dispute.
A demo against your vehicles and your numbers is more useful than a sample dataset. Tell us your fleet mix and we will set it up.
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