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Talk to the global leaders in fleet management, vehicle tracking and personal safety
Keep left: Cyclists should always stick to the left so as to make way for motorists. Riding in the middle of a lane is irresponsible and dangerous.
Stop: As road users, both motorists and cyclists are required to obey all traffic laws. That includes stopping at an intersection.
Wear a helmet: Cycling with a helmet has been a South African law since 2004.
Identification: If you are involved in an accident you need to be sure that something or someone can speak on your behalf if you are unable to. When going for a bike ride ensure that you carry identification and emergency contact details for a spouse, relative or friend.
Tell a friend: Cyclists should always tell someone which route they plan on cycling.
Remember your manners: Indicate your intentions (for example if you are going to turn right), and check to make sure the driver has seen you. Make eye contact with motorists at intersections – smile and nod your head so that they know you are there. Thank motorists that give you the right of way.
Hotspots: Avoid roads that you know are unsafe or high accident zones. Contact the PPA on 021 689 8420 to find out about unsafe hotspots in your area.
Ride unplugged: You need to know what’s going on around you, so put safety first and leave your iPod or MP3 Player at home.
Remember: Wear sunscreen with a minimum SPF of 25-30. If you’re riding long hours and distances, take something to eat to avoid sudden sugar level drops. And remember to drink when you’re thirsty – it is best to carry a bottle of water, as well as a good electrolyte replacement like Powerade.
You can follow the 5 celebrity riders MiX Telematics will be tracking during the Cape Argus on twitter
Counting down to the world-renowned Cape Argus Cycle Tour, we are proud to announce our partnership with Sport24 and the Bobs for Good Foundation, a charity that provides quality South African made leather school shoes to impoverished children.
MiX will host a hospitality tent to welcome the celeb and staff riders, their families and friends and our valued customers. “We are expecting a really fun-filled day and are proud to have partnered up with Sport24 for such a worthy cause,” says Catherine.
MiX Telematics has teamed up with Habitat for Humanity and sponsored the building of a house in Mfuleni, a township located around 30 km outside of Cape Town. The lucky homeowner to receive the house will be Mgqomo Nondalele, a 50-year-old unemployed father of three.
Habitat for Humanity South Africa is a non-profit housing organisation that seeks to provide simple, decent and affordable housing to communities throughout the world. HFHSA has been actively building in S.A since 1996 and to date 2818 houses have been constructed across 34 communities. HFHSA aim to facilitate community development through education and training phases.
We didn’t stop with sponsoring but for the past 4 days, we have had teams of 13 people helping build the house every day.
Whilst this is by no means the most powerful use of the latest innovation on MiX Mobile, our Camera View feature does allow you to find your vehicle in parking lots. In fact there are many other applications for this visually-rich positioning information also known as Augmented Reality (AR) such as Wikitude World Browser or Layar Reality Browser.
Augmented Reality essentially allows you to superimpose data such as location and status from your vehicle l via your camera view. This gives you a 3D view of where your vehicle is located as well as its current position in relation to you. You can simply follow your phone to lead you to your car.
Augmented Reality demo
Augmented Reality options
Improvements to the safety features and technology used in our vehicles these days bring down the number of accidents and make them safer. But we still need to focus on closing the margin on human error. One of the best ways is to practice safe driving behaviour when you are on the road, and that’s why we’ve put togther helpful tips for you to use over the holidays.
We will cover the basics from what you need to take care of in your driving checklist, making sure you prepared from the beginning; crime prevention to in-journey management while you are travelling the long distances as well as the basic traffic rules.
If you have any helpful safe driving tips you want to contribute to inform others, post them on our wall on Facebook or reply to us on Twitter, and we will make sure they are highlighted.
The tips will appear on our MiX Telematics Facebook page and on our MiX Telematics Twitter stream.
MiX Africa hosted a Mad Hatters cake sale on Friday 29 October in aid of CANSA
It was a great success and fun was had by all the teams involved, who raised a fantastic amount of R30,000.25
| Pledge | Final | |
| Ice Queen Parlour | R2,000 | R2,320.05 |
| White Rabbit | R2,250 | R2,026.70 |
| Techno Treats | R3,000 | R7,021.90 |
| Fancy Cakes | R2,500 | R5,484.50 |
| Polka Dots | R2,500 | R1,250,00 |
| Odd Tea Cups | R2,500 | R4,941.50 |
| Pink Ladies | R1,000 | R4,739.20 |
| Logistics Army | R1,500 | R2,216.40 |
| Total | R17,250.00 | R30,000.25 |
You can have a look at the great images from the event on our MiX Telematics Facebook page.
This originally appeared on Sam’s blog, Inevitable
So its one month later… what has happened?
After 1 week we started adapting the board. The first change we made was to add blocks numbered 1 to 10 in the todo column so that it was clear what was highest priority.
After 2 weeks some more board changes occured…
The second change was to move to a bigger board! We had all the issues that were being worked on pre-kanban on the board, but we excluded them from the limits on the columns. The result was a really messy board.
The third change was to introduce a “parking lot” column. Many issues were with customers or hardware, and they got “blocked” stickies but were holding up the process due to column limits.
The fourth change was to add a swimlane for “pre-kanban” issues. This way we could easily identify the issues with the current support team and those outside of the team.
All of these changes resulted in a much cleaner board, and made adhearing to (and noticing) the limits much easier. One glance at the board could now show bottlenecks easily.
After 3 weeks we held a retropective with a representative from each column attending. In order to get feedback from all people involved we also sent out an email asking everyone who was involved for feedback.
The questioned asked were:
General feedback – overall for the 3 weeks how did you feel about the new support process?
Select one:
Happy ………….. OK …………. Disappointed
Other comments:
What worked well:
What can be improved:
What doesn’t work:
Any suggestions:
Important to note is that everyone agreed that making issues and bottlenecks visible on a board works well – better than any previous attempts at managing support items. YAY!
Looking at the data collected we then used dot voting to highlight which problems were most important to the group and thus needed to be addressed first.
These were:
Clearing the backlog – Currently the backlog items are piling up as we are limiting how many issues the support developers can look at.
Knowledge Transfer – There are a handful of developers with loads of domain knowledge. As such they do more or less everything around those domains. We need to start the painful prcess of transferring this knowledge. Naturally as the domain expert is not doing the actual work it will be slower. The suggestion here was to try dedicated time from the experts – 2 hours a day for 3 weeks.
Support Process Flow – documented. Whilst the kanban idea was explained to the first group of developers going through it – it has not been explained to the second group, so they were a bit lost for the first day or so. Also the testers in the support team have never worked in an agile way so the stand up routine is still a bit odd to them. We agreed to do a basic diagram of how the board works and what each roles responsibility is. This way anyone can look at the diagram and quickly come to terms with the new process.
One additional small item was actioned:
Template for sticky – each sticky on the board looks slightly different – and it does get confusing. We will put up a template (start date top left, end date top right etc) for people to follow.
Our standup process has changed. We were going around the group – each person saying his bit but that meant jumping around all over the board and it was very confusing. After attending a Kanban course our Support Manager made the suggestion of starting from the last column and addressing all tasks there then working our way backwards to the first column. This is much better!
Moving from right to left emphasises the PULL of kanban, we are also able to discuss blockages in any of the columns as soon as we discuss the column rather than waiting till the end of the stand up. After some internet searching I came up with a new format for our stand-ups. This is now printed up on an A3 paper and stuck up next to the board as a reminder.
Another contentious issue is when to do full solutioning, when to apply a quick fix and when to add a change required to the product backlog for the development team to do. We have decided to have this discussion after our first column (Dev Analysis) and present the choices with pro’s and con’s for the Support Manager to decide on.
To add a bit of fun to the board I created South Park characters with some space to scribble your name underneath. We have 3 of each character. So each person on support can pick one that personifies them, add their name to the bottom (it wipes off) and stick that on the tasks they are working on.
We started with 3 developers rotating through support for the duration of a sprint. The idea is to balance this evenly between all 6 development teams and rotate amoungst them so that everyone gets a turn to be in support.
We’ve had some good days and some bad days. All in all, based on feedback and observations we are all getting more comfortable with the new kanban process, and starting to make it work for us.
MiX Africa are hosting a MiX Mad Hatters cake sale on Friday 29 October in aid of CANSA
Our departments are being challenged to decorate a wall in their department, celebrating the lives of those people who are fighting the battle or who have fought and won and those we have loved and lost. At some time or another we have all been touched by Cancer in some form and we would like to celebrate the lives of all these people. On the wall of celebration staff can include photographs, pictures, recipes, lyrics from a song or a story. If it can stick to the wall, it will be included.
The 9 teams participating in the Mad Hatters cake sale are:
| Department | Team Leader/s | Pledge | Theme |
| Enterprise | Zelda | R2500 | Alice in Wonderland |
| Sales and Marketing | Liza | R2000 | The Ice Queen Parlour |
| IT | Rinske | R2250 | White Rabbit |
| Technical and Production | Siphelele | R3000 | Techno Treats |
| Services | Lieza | R2500 | Celebrity Treats |
| Operations | Sandra | R2500 | Polka Dots |
| Head Office, Group Head Office, Training and HR | Simone | R2500 | The Odd Tea Cups |
| Finance | Michelle & Shelly | R1000 | Pink Ladies |
| Logistics | Matthew | R1500 | Salvation Army |
D-day
Friday morning will be more like MiX Mad Hatters Day where we’ll see who brings the icing and who brings the cake. If you are near the Midrand area in Johannesburg, drop by and show your support.
Pick your favourite design for our new Twitter background and stand a chance to win MiX Telematics / Bushnell binoculars worth €150. It’s that easy.
No retweet to win or anything else. You let us know what design looks the best and the option with the most votes will appear on Twitter. Participants that voted for the popular option will be entered into the draw.
Background - Option 1
Background - Option 2
Bushnell binoculars
Our Communications Manager, Tammy recorded this video at the launch of the first ethanol-powered bus in South Africa on the 12 October, which will reduce carbon emissions. MiX Telematics and Scania tested the exhaust fumes on a white handkerchief in the video below.
What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?
