Asset tracking has been around for decades. It has been intensively evolving and transforming along with business needs, industry demands, emerging technologies, socioeconomic factors, and other factors.
Since essentially asset tracking (aka asset management) is about knowing where the company’s resources are, what state they are in, and whether any action is required with respect to them, the complexity of the asset tracking solution and its specificity will greatly depend on the nature of business, the assets to be monitored, the need for indoor / outdoor / blended tracking, and the necessity to communicate with third-party services.
Sidenote: in this article by “asset” we mean almost any movable or immovable object that is usually not a subject of fleet management, e.g. a coffee machine, a hand drill, a laptop, an attachment to agricultural machinery, a container, a pallet, whatnot.
In this article, we want to look at the universal API-first IoT and telematics hub and how it can address the major trends in asset tracking.
Why use flespi as an asset tracking API?
If you hire flespi as an asset tracking API, you get a hub for all your assets data with a universal API to store it, access it, manipulate it, aggregate it, and forward it to any destination platforms in your asset management software infrastructure.
Let’s see some key benefits flespi can bring to the asset tracking infrastructure.
Integrations enablement
As soon as you pair your asset tracking devices with flespi, you no longer need to communicate with them directly — all the interactions can be done via the flespi API — data consumption, device management, debugging, and troubleshooting.
Moreover, once the data gets into flespi and before it leaves for the destination(s), you get a chance to perform transformations and enrichment to shape the messages exactly as you need (also via API).
The prepared data is ready to be forwarded to 20+ target platforms as well as to custom destinations via generic streams. So regardless of your further intentions (some of which may change or not be finalized yet), you have all your assets data ready to be dispatched wherever necessary.
Versatile data consumption options
With flespi, you get REST API, MQTT API, and streaming options to have the asset tracking data delivered to the target destinations (ERP, CMMS, CRM, etc.). Streaming is designed for real-time data needs, MQTT API is great for instant updates and catching events, and the REST API is designed for static data needs. For example, if you need to know the current location of your assets, this would be a good use of streaming, if you need to know when the tool left the construction site, you can subscribe to a specific event via MQTT, and if you need a list of all items to sync with an internal inventory record on a daily or hourly basis, this would be a good use of the REST API.
Having a universal asset tracking API facilitates integration with your ERP or any asset tracking application. It can also serve as a foundation for your own custom solution — if you delegate the backend stuff to flespi, you don’t worry about getting, storing, and processing the data, you focus on devising the business logic and delivering value to the customers based on this data.
Hardware independence
Flespi is agnostic to the source of asset data — be it an asset GPS tracker by 100+ manufacturers, a BLE tag, an IoT device, or even a third-party platform — you will still get the standardized JSON that can be consumed equally well by any destination. This gives you great flexibility in picking the hardware used to monitor your assets since you become virtually indifferent to the limitations of the destination asset tracking platforms — all of them will readily accept the unified dataflow from flespi.
High availability data hub
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a one-stop shop that collects, processes, prepares, and carefully stores all the asset tracking data in the cloud while also providing instant access to all and any parts of it? This is exactly what flespi does. And if your concern is about introducing one more potential point of failure, figures will say louder than words — with 99.99+% average monthly uptime flespi is not going to let you down.
How flespi can address asset tracking trends?
According to IBM the following trends will be shaping asset tracking technologies and solutions in the near future:
Demand for real-time data and analytics
Flespi is ready to meet this demand at any scale — the data from the asset tracking equipment will swiftly transit through the platform and get to the software or service of your choice.REST architecture design & interoperability
Perfect match here — flespi prides itself in the flexible exhaustive API that allows performing any operations on the platform.Advancements in indoor positioning and location sensing technologies
As long as the device can send data over the internet, flespi will receive and handle it — GPS trackers, BLE tags, IoT sensors, etc. are welcome.Addressable indoor map layers and objects
We do not work with mapping ourselves, however, flespi is ready to cooperate with geolocation and indoor positioning services.Artificial Intelligence
We are not there yet, but we are analyzing the parts of flespi functionality that can be reinforced, improved, or optimized with AI.
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Asset tracking is not simply here to stay, but it will obviously expand to new areas of business, to new types of goods, and across new tools and platforms. Businesses are not willing to leave money on the table, especially in the turbulent times we are living in now. As the scope of projects implementing asset tracking software grows, the demand for unification (across data sources) and customization (tailored functionality, integrations, specific analytics) will also increase since rarely will one size fits all.
To stay on top of the trends and futureproof your asset tracking solution with a universal API, you want to check flespi as your reliable companion.
Keep calm and leverage asset tracking via API!