Tracking the Trucks (and Truckers)

Use of IoT and advanced sensors is helping to keep an eye on manufacturers' assets as they roll out of the plant and onto our roads.

With GPS tracking on our phones, in our cars and even embedded in devices moving through the supply chain, we can keep tabs on just about anyone or anything anywhere. The same goes for trucks as part of a fleet management system. But one company, ERM Advanced Telematics, is taking fleet tracking to the next level using sensors, GPS, geofencing, and more to provide location services, monitoring of driver behavior, fuel management, cold chain activity and even immobilizing assets and stolen vehicle recovery.

According to ERM, although there are many innovations available to add to fleet management services, many companies are not benefiting from them because of a lack of automation and integration. Take tire pressure monitoring, for example. Sensors can monitor the temperature and ideal pressure of each tire, but these are generally standalone units that only send an alert to a vehicle’s dashboard. But, in reality, these diagnostics should be sent to the fleet manager in real time to reduce operational and maintenance costs.

Using the company’s StarLink devices installed on the vehicles, customers can blend the driver, vehicle and road experience with these vehicle diagnostics to improve fleet management. In addition, ERM’s accessories are built with embedded processors and designed to gather telematics statistics according to configurable, predefined rule-based models. This means that ERM’s devices gather only the information that is relevant and required by the telematics service provider partners and their customers. This makes the gathered telematics information less expensive to transfer over the cellular network and easier to analyze.

And let’s not forget the Internet of Things (IoT). ERM offers tools for connected car and vehicle-to-vehicle logistics applications to create new revenue opportunities in the form of IoT services.