In today’s global economy effective asset management becomes an important differentiator for any business that manages mobile assets. Companies from various industries - construction, transportation, manufacturing, and others - own trucks, trailers, pieces of equipment, tools that constantly move around. Not surprisingly, these assets oftentimes get lost, misplaced, forgotten, and unaccounted for. This leads to unnecessarily high operational costs and lower productivity.
Having recognized this problem a number of technology companies have built solutions to help manage mobile resources and assist businesses in improving operational efficiencies and reducing lost productivity. GPS-based fleet management systems, asset monitoring platforms, stolen vehicle recovery solutions, and many others are now widely available to businesses willing to take advantage of them. Despite such availability of various types of solutions to manage mobile assets, there is one important issue to acknowledge. Most of them are specialized and are built to manage a particular type of assets. If it’s a fleet management solution, it’s appropriate for managing a fleet of vehicles. If it’s a construction equipment monitoring system, then it’s geared towards overseeing pieces of equipment. This forces businesses to juggle various systems to oversee all the assets they have. That in itself presents a new kind of operational challenge and is therefore not optimal.
Solution companies need to start recognizing this need and build comprehensive asset management platforms that give a single point of view and holistic management capabilities across all types of mobile assets. It would be logical to assume that the added challenge lies in designing the functionality that will allow for seamless management of, for example, Ford F-150 trucks along with the diesel generators, containers, forklifts, and nail guns. But that is just a part of the challenge. Another important aspect of the challenge is support for various telematics and IoT devices that get attached to the assets and generate data points. These devices can vary from vehicle trackers to Bluetooth beacons to IoT gateways to video telematics devices. Such devices more often than not would come from different manufacturers, use different communication transport protocols, and encode data using proprietary formats. As we can see, there’s also a significant complexity at the back-end to support the hardware.
Gurtam’s flespi platform is designed to remove the architectural complexity, as it relates to data injection and normalization. Thanks to the inherent support of hundreds of IoT and telematics devices, device management capabilities, real-time analytics, and a set of flexible APIs (REST and MQTT), a substantial part of the challenge we discussed above can be considered solved. And most of the attention and development resources can be directed at designing superb customer experiences and getting to the market quicker.
Flespi team is excited to see more and more innovative solution companies leveraging its back-end product to build the most versatile asset management platforms of the new generation! We are always happy to offer architectural guidance and help in finding the most optimal development approaches and applying the best practices.