Live GPS tracking for field teams

Nobody asks for GPS tracking in a team meeting. They ask how to stop ringing three mobiles to find one person who is free. A map is the shortest answer if everyone agrees what the dots mean.

Online means connected to the platform. Offline means not. Stale means the last GPS fix is older than your threshold. Stale is not an accusation. It usually means someone is in a basement plant room, inside a metal-roofed store, or on a phone that paused updates to save battery. Treat it as a reason to use voice, not as proof someone is in the café.

Why supervisors actually want a map

The honest reason most teams add a live map is not surveillance. It is that "who is nearest" gets asked constantly, and answering it by phoning three people wastes minutes that matter when a job or an incident needs someone now. A map with clear status markers turns that question into a glance instead of a round of calls.

It also changes how reassignment works when something goes wrong. If an officer or crew member goes stale mid-shift, a supervisor sees it immediately rather than discovering it when a radio call goes unanswered. That earlier warning is often more valuable than the map position itself.

Keep the map readable

Name or callsign on the marker. Colour by status. Zoom to the patch you actually care about today, not the whole county. A map that shows every user across every site your organisation runs is harder to act on than one filtered to today's shift.

RevoNet uses OpenStreetMap through Leaflet. Councils and contractors are not signing separate map data deals just to see where the cleansing crew is, which matters for public sector procurement where a second data contract can take longer to approve than the software itself.

Make it acceptable to staff

People tolerate tracking when the purpose is obvious: safety, assigning the nearest job, calling backup faster. Write a short internal note on when supervisors may look at the map and when reassignment needs a voice confirm. Staff who understand why the map exists tend to raise fewer objections than staff who find out about it after the fact.

Do not use the map as the only performance metric. Jobs closed and incidents handled matter more than lines on a screen, and treating position data as a productivity score is the fastest way to make a genuinely useful safety tool feel like surveillance.

Battery on long shifts

Aggressive GPS refresh drains phones and PoC radios. Balance update frequency with a ten-hour stewarding shift or a parks route that barely gets signal in the valley. There is a real trade-off here between position accuracy and getting a phone through a full shift without a midday charge.

Test this on the actual hardware you issue rather than assuming, since battery behaviour under GPS load varies noticeably between device models and even between Android versions on the same model.

What the map is not

A live map is not a substitute for a check-in policy, and it is not proof of where someone was at an exact moment if you need that for a formal purpose. Treat map data as operational support, the same way you would treat a supervisor's memory of where a crew was working, rather than as evidence in its own right.

It is also not a replacement for lone worker procedures your organisation already runs. A map showing someone as online tells you they have signal and battery. It does not confirm they are safe. Pair map visibility with whatever check-in or escalation process your safety policy already requires, rather than assuming the map alone covers that responsibility.

Common questions

Do I need to keep the app open? Mobile clients report in the background according to platform and device settings. Test on the hardware you issue, not your personal phone on Wi-Fi, since background behaviour differs between devices.

Can I hide the map from some roles? Yes. Permissions control who sees dispatch views. Tenant admins set that, so a duty manager can see the whole picture while a team member only sees what they need for their own job.

Is data shared between customers? No. Your map belongs to your tenant only, and no organisation using RevoNet can see another organisation's positions, users, or incidents.

What counts as stale, exactly? It is a time threshold since the last GPS fix, not a judgement. A position that has not updated in several minutes flips to stale as a prompt to check in, nothing more.

Does the map work indoors? GPS accuracy drops indoors the same way it would on any phone. Treat indoor positions as approximate and use voice to confirm anything that actually matters.

Walk a test route with two accounts on the free plan before you put the whole crew on it, and check coverage on the parts of your patch that worry you most rather than the easy stretch outside the depot.