You will often hear asset tracking touted as one of the killer applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). It offers the technologies to track almost any portable item, anywhere. However, in practice the answer is not so simple.
Many organisations have moveable assets that are stolen or lost. They use these in very large numbers so costs of losses can be significant. But often the value of the asset cannot justify the cost of a tracking system.
That was the situation faced by franchised parcel delivery service, CouriersPlease, and the solution — likely to be applicable to many organisations — will be the subject of a fireside chat at IoT Impact 2023 involving CouriersPlease and Thinxtra, which developed and provided the solution in conjunction with Optus.
IoT Impact 2023 is a one-day conference about IoT use cases, case studies and issues, produced by IoT Alliance Australia (IoTAA) and IoT Hub, to take place in Sydney on 23 May.
CouriersPlease delivers some 30 million parcels annually in Australia and moves these around the country in bulk in parcel cages costing around $1,000 each.
Losing cages has always been a problem but with tracking solutions estimated to cost $500 per cage, they could not be justified. However with the surge in business resulting from COVID — annual growth of 80 percent — the cost and impact of cage losses was becoming a problem it couldn’t ignore. The company needed a way to ensure it was getting maximum use of its parcel cages.
The answer was a Thinxtra end-to-end asset tracking solution comprising tracking device and data analytics platform and low power wide area 0G Network.
The network has been designed to support low data rate communications from low-cost devices that can operate for years on a small battery.
Thinxtra operates 0G networks in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Macau and others are in operation in more than 70 countries.
“If we didn't have this partnership with Thinxtra, our team could not have solved CourierPlease's problem cost-effectively,” said Zorawar Singh, Head of Product at Optus Enterprise.
“The alternatives were more expensive, less flexible, scalable, user-friendly, and more difficult to implement. We believe Thinxtra's powerful, national 0G Network is the best connectivity solution and offers the greatest value for the customer,” Singh said.
You can hear about the Thinxtra-based asset tracking system for CouriersPlease from CouriersPlease Head of Operational Strategy and Transformation, Senthu Jegasothy, and Nicholas Lambrou, CEO of Thinxtra, in a fireside chat titled Tell me something I don't know: How Massive IoT provides access to valuable data-driven insights, which will take place from 2:15-3pm at IoT Impact on 23 May at the Sydney International Convention Centre. The session will be moderated by Frank Zeichner, CEO of IoT Alliance Australia.
Thinxtra is a sponsor of the 2023 IoT Impact conference, which will take place at the Sydney International Convention Centre on May 23. See the agenda and purchase tickets to IoT Impact 2023.
