PROCON Becoming a Leader in Fledgling GPS Industry

When Doug Travis was named general manager of a buy-here, pay-here dealership in Oklahoma City, Okla., he already knew how a good GPS tracking device can help a used car operation's bottom line.

That's a few months into his new job he told his employer that they needed to do business with PROCON Inc., of Knoxville, Tenn.

Since February, the Car Factory has installed PROCON's SAT Track devices on about 1,000 cars.

"You come to expect a certain level of service that our previous (vendor) just didn't offer," Travis says. "The other product was cumbersome, time-consuming and worked about 75 percent of the time. Going to SAT Track feels like going from the dark age to the space age."

PROCON Inc., of Knoxville, Tenn., was founded five years ago by Brian Boling, president and CEO, and Tim Welch, chief operating officer, as SecureAlert Telematics.

Boling and Welch, both of whom are veterans of Philips Consumer Elec-tronics Corp., repositioned the company in 2004 as PROCON Inc. to offer business-to-business products in the Location Based Services (LBS) industry.

Today it sells mass-market products to businesses wanting to protect the people and things they care about by staying connected to them using GPS, wireless and computer technology.

Its SAT Track product, which is already one of the top five auto theft recovery brands in the United States, has helped PROCON to quadruple its growth this year.

Welch expects PROCON will complete 2008 with over $35 million in sales. PROCON is catching the attention of the entire automotive market across North America.

The reason? Credibility and dependability, said Danny Neveu, PROCON's vice president of sales.

Buy-here, pay-here dealers like Travis embrace PROCON for its dependability and convenience. PROCON provides monthly auto tracking and numerous pooled tracks so an automotive dealer can monitor inventory at all times.

PROCON encourages dealers to "track early and track often" with the most reliable and simple tracking technology availble on the market.

PROCON's business clients can depend on SAT Track, because it is built on the same GPS platform that PROCON uses to serve major clients, such as the U.S. Air Force and ADT Securities.

In a 400-tracking test, its technology boasted a 100 percent success rate.

Additionally, its tracking application can be accessed through a Web site or a client's mobile phone, which is an uncommon convenience for the automotive market.

Clients can also disable the vehicles from their computers.

PROCON can easily perform these functions because it has developed a proprietary infrastructure that feeds information to an array of GPS products that it sells.

The company's patented and state-of-the-art Tele-matics Operating Program (TOP) supporting its location-based services is comprised of call center systems, commercial tracking platforms, Web tracking platforms, telephony solutions, billing system and customer service systems.

That TOP system allows PROCON to offer clients value-added services, such as emergency assistance, travel information, con-cierge services and individual- or vehicle-locating and tracking capabilities.

PROCON recently signed a three-year, $50 million contract with an Ohio company to distribute its SAT Track to new car auto dealers.