February 2002

The UK company will fit any necessary equipment into vehicles, and then charges a standard fee (typically 20p) to track each shipment. This contrasts with the more familiar UK model, which tends to involve charging per message or polling instance. There may also be a fee per truck per week.

According to UK managing director Ron Leigh, the system can manage entire corporate visibility systems, and treats the truck as "simply a node in the network". It can track either the whole truck or boxes, pallets and other items. The system can also include proof-of-delivery gathering by handheld terminal or other device. "We've had to learn to build interfaces with every kind of apparatus," Leigh says.

 

The company can also supply its own on-board computer, the Prodero, built by a subsidiary based in eastern Germany, although it says its first priority in the UK is to promote the underlying system.

Shipping information is delivered to users on the Internet, travelling via a gateway in Munich, where it is accessed through an Oracle-based data warehouse. A mirror site has already been set up in the US, and a similar one might later be established in the UK. Leased-line links are also offered to large users.

Although visual map-based tracking could be provided, the company says it is not offering this is standard. In fact Leigh says it would be more likely to work in concert with established vehicle tracking systems such as Isotrak or Minorplanet.

The UK business is a joint venture between eight-year-old Euro-Log of Germany and the Generics group, a publicly-quoted research and development organisation based at Cambridge. Major German users include Deutsche Post and Lufthansa, and a prime reference customer is Cargoline, a consortium of 40 operators which uses it to rival the IT capabilities of international carriers. In the US Hewlett Packard is a major user.