With practical applications for a number of industries, electronic geofencing is the practice of creating virtual perimeters within certain environments. Using GPS solutions to designate areas for various purposes, it’s a modern technology developed to keep track of people’s movements, and notify anyone who might need to know who is going where, and when.

When integrated with radio dispatch solutions, electronic geofencing enables operators to see when employees enter restricted zones, work areas and other sectors. For example, whenever a miner travels to a blast area, a dispatcher will receive a notification. From there, he or she can send a text message or individual call to the miner, instructing him or her to leave the blast zone.

The benefits of such a system are wide-ranging, however to get a better idea of how your organization might benefit from the implementation of geofencing, it’s worth taking a closer look at some of their applications.

Despite a recent downturn, the resources industry is still an enormous part of Australia’s economy. Spend any time on a major mining operation, and you’ll quickly see -and probably hear – the potential hazards. When it’s time to conduct blasting to loosen iron ore for extraction, for example, obviously you need to be sure no people are in the blast zone, so a geofence can alert the right people if and when this occurs.

Should your business involve workers transporting supplies or equipment from a home base (known as a yard) to a temporary work site, creating a geofence can allow you to easily log the times users come and go between each area. For example, a concrete truck returning to the yard to fill up, before heading back to the site to drop off its load.