As the world of telematics, asset tracking and supply chain transparency becomes more complex, a new partnership between HERE Technologies and Actility will bring together a system using the internet of things to find trucks and freight, to enable better visibility of where things are in the supply chain.
This video shows how the Volvo Group have introduced a system to enable them to find trucks they have made, bot on the road or on site.
The partnership will be between HERE and ThingPark, the Actility internet of things (IoT) network management platform, and is expected to provide a new, state of the art service for mapping and location data management.
HERE reckon the new tool will address existing challenges facing industrial warehouse sites, providing industrial facilities with an end-to-end, customisable solution to track assets and optimise the supply chain. The system focuses on critical assets for customer operations including Returnable Shipping Assets (RASs) or Returnable Industrial Packaging (RIPs).
On large industrial, warehousing sites, items can get lost or stolen. Furthermore, in cases where inventories rely on manual input, assets aren’t always stored efficiently. Finding an asset in a warehouse and optimising stock is difficult enough; tracking it across the world is another matter entirely.
These are challenges that the new partnership is aiming to address, offering an end-to-end, customisable solution to track assets and optimise the supply chain of any industrial facility. The focus of this solution is on critical assets for customers’ operations such as racks, pallets, crates, tubs, bins, containers, forklifts, industrial tools and heavy mobile machinery.
The planned new IoT tracking service for mapping and location data management is to be based on ‘LoRaWAN’ networks. LoRaWAN is, a low power, wireless protocol for wide area networks allowing devices to communicate with IoT applications over long-range wireless connections.
Actility already powers more than 50 telecoms operators with LoRaWan connectivity across the globe. Its enterprise-grade LoRaWAN network server, ThingPark Enterprise, operates over 35000 network base stations worldwide. This partnership with Actility also benefits from their Abeeway tracking devices that work both indoors and outdoors via a multi-technology geolocation system, which integrates GPS, Abeeway’s patented low-power GPS, WiFi Sniffing and Bluetooth Low Energy.
HERE Tracking takes Abeeway trackers’ indoor positioning capabilities one step further with Venue Maps and a radio mapping application. Venue Maps can be used to map the inside and outside of any industrial facility accurately, be it a warehouse or a factory. This allows for the development of a custom radio map of any given site for both Wi-Fi and BLE technologies.
With this kind of tracking, assets can not only be tracked on public roads, railway tracks or ships globally but also on warehouse floors and within private yards with improved accuracy.
“With HERE Tracking as a foundation, we can now offer our customers one single interface to manage all their devices,” said Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility. “This will dramatically improve their Life Cycle Management as all costs related to lost item replacement or search for misplaced items are now becoming obsolete. Together, HERE and Actility are seamlessly offering indoor and outdoor asset tracking.”
These systems can be connected to ERPs and Transport Management Systems to enable extended features and custom business dashboards can be created, giving users a comprehensive framework from which to build their asset tracking and management applications.
