In the realm of commercial asset tracking, understanding the whereabouts and condition of your assets is paramount. Modern technology offers sophisticated solutions that provide detailed insights into asset location, status, and activity. The right solution should be able to address all of your company’s asset visibility needs on a single system, allowing you to tailor the technology to your goals and budget. Let’s review the three crucial aspects you need to know about your assets, what that might mean for your company, and how Link Labs strives to meet those needs.
Increase Your ROI by Investing in AirFinder Everywhere
- Loss Prevention. Reduce the amount of loss that occurs during the supply chain process
- Location Coverage. AirFinder Everywhere uses a combination of GPS, Cellular, and WiFi to determine location everywhere
- Security Alerts. Know when a delay in shipment has occurred so the problem
can be addressed immediately.
1) Where Your Assets Are
The ability to accurately track and monitor the location of your assets is crucial for operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Modern asset tracking solutions such as our AirFinder Everywhere and Onsite solutions offer unprecedented levels of accuracy and visibility, enabling businesses to manage their assets with precision and confidence. Here are some of the key features of our AirFinder solutions that help you know where your assets are located:
1. Up to 30-Centimeter Location Accuracy
One of our most significant differentiators is that we provide an affordable asset tracking technology with the ability to achieve up to 30 centimeter location accuracy. As this level of accuracy is usually dependent on costly location technologies like UWB, most companies settle for less accurate and more affordable systems. However, through our AirFinder Ultra offering, we are able to strategically combine UWB with other location technologies to provide an asset tracking solution that is similarly priced to our other Onsite options, simply extending our capabilities for precision. This level of precision allows businesses to pinpoint the exact location of their assets in indoor or other onsite settings, enabling a greater range of use cases in a greater range of environments. This high degree of accuracy is especially valuable in environments where assets are constantly on the move throughout large facilities or where assets are tightly packed and difficult to differentiate.
2. Seamless Indoor and Outdoor Tracking
Our AirFinder asset tracking solution is designed to work seamlessly both indoors and outdoors, fluidly combining our Everywhere and Onsite solutions into a single, connected system. Whether your assets are stored in a warehouse, on a factory floor, or in transit between locations, our solution can continue to provide real-time location data without any extra human input. This versatility ensures that you have visibility into your assets' whereabouts, regardless of their location, and saves you the time and money it would take to run multiple systems for different stages of your operational processes.
3. Real-Time Tracking at Any Time
Our advanced asset tracking solutions also provide you with the ability to track assets in real time, 24/7. This means that you can access up-to-date location information for your assets at any time, allowing you to make informed decisions in the moment rather than leaving you to analyze what went wrong later. Whether you need to locate a specific asset or track the movement of your entire inventory, real-time tracking ensures that you always have the information you need to keep your finger on the pulse of your daily operations and make the important decisions.
4. Global SKU Integration
For businesses with a global footprint, managing assets across different regions and countries can be challenging. Our global SKU integration allows businesses to use a single tracking system to monitor assets worldwide. This standardized approach streamlines asset management processes and ensures consistency across all locations.
5. Single Pane of Glass Interface
To simplify asset tracking and management, we ensure that our solution’s UI operates on a single pane of glass. This centralized dashboard provides a comprehensive view of all your assets, including their locations, statuses, and histories. This unified view eliminates the need to switch between multiple systems or platforms, saving time and reducing the risk of errors. We also provide MQTT and API integration for customers who already have other management systems in place, allowing you to operate from an interface that you’re already familiar with while gaining the added benefit of the extended location data provided by our solution. This is particularly useful if you operate within the realm of logistics, where telematics systems are standard.
2) How Your Assets Are Doing
Asset tracking is not just about knowing where assets are located but also about understanding their condition and status at any given time. Monitoring the health and performance of assets can help businesses prevent costly breakdowns, optimize maintenance schedules, and ensure that assets are operating at peak efficiency. For logistics operations, it can also help ensure that products are delivered safely and in their ideal conditions, helping to improve your company’s reputation for reliable transport. Here are some of the conditions that our AirFinder solutions can help you monitor:
1. Temperature Monitoring
Temperature can have a significant impact on the condition and safety of many products, especially consumables such as produce and pharmaceuticals. Monitoring the temperature of these products in real time can help businesses ensure that they are operating within safe parameters and can detect any issues that may arise due to temperature fluctuations. While refrigerated trailers do have an in-built temperature monitoring system, our AirFinder solution can provide granular temperature monitoring at the pallet, container, or asset level, allowing you to detect fluctuations within the trailer caused by blocked vents, shifting cargo, or damaged packaging. If a product's temperature begins to fall out of range, you will receive an alert for that specific product so that you can address the issue to hopefully preserve the cargo and reduce in-transit waste.
2. Humidity Monitoring
Humidity levels can also affect the performance and longevity of assets. Beyond using humidity sensors to keep sensitive products in their required ranges, you can also use them to ensure the well-being of mechanical assets that are susceptible to moisture damage. By monitoring humidity levels for these assets, businesses can take proactive measures to protect their assets and prevent issues such as corrosion or mold growth.
3. Shock Detection
Assets that are in transit or subject to frequent movement are at risk of experiencing shocks or impacts that can damage them. This is a particularly prominent issue within trucking and logistics, where drivers may face repercussions for damage that occurs in-transit. Shock detection sensors can alert businesses to any impacts that assets experience, allowing them to take corrective action and prevent further damage. This can also help verify that assets are being handled responsibly, allowing management to identify common factors that result in damage, whether that consists of packing certain assets together, driving on a certain road, or having a certain driver behind the wheel.
4. Tampering Detection
One of the biggest challenges that companies face is the risk of their assets being tampered with, accessed, or removed without authorization. While theft might be the immediate assumption, this “tampering” can also encompass miscommunication and misunderstanding about how assets are supposed to be handled and where they’re supposed to be. Regardless of the reason, tamper detection sensors can alert businesses to any unauthorized manipulation of assets, allowing them to both prevent theft and to address any mistakes.
5. Open/Closed Status Monitoring
For assets that have movable parts or compartments, monitoring their open/closed status can provide valuable insights into their usage and condition. This information can help businesses track asset utilization and detect any anomalies or issues that may arise. The most obvious use for a tag or sensor with this function is for trailer doors. If a trailer’s doors are opened at a time where the driver shouldn’t be active or while the trailer isn’t in a location where it should have stopped, fleet managers can use our AirFinder system to receive alerts. They can then check up with the driver to figure out what’s going on and take corrective action if necessary.
6. Additional BLE Sensor Integrations
In addition to the above factors, our AirFinder solution can also integrate various Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensors to monitor additional parameters such as vibration, acceleration, proximity, and more. If there’s a condition that’s important to you, our BLE tags can be configured with the necessary sensors to ensure the visibility that you need.
3) What Your Assets are Doing
The final thing that you need to know about your assets is what your assets are doing. This can provide invaluable insights into their usage, efficiency, and overall performance, allowing businesses to optimize operations, enhance security, and improve decision-making processes. Here are some of the asset behaviors that our IT asset tracking software is designed to help you track:
1. Crossing Outdoor or Indoor Boundaries
Tracking when assets cross boundaries, whether they are outdoors or indoors, can help businesses ensure that assets are where they should be and are not being used in unauthorized areas. It also helps them keep track of an asset’s progression through a process, allowing them to monitor the efficiency of that process. For example, within a manufacturing plant, tracking WIP through different stages of production tells you if you’re on track to meet your production goals and what stages are taking longer than usual. Within logistics, you can receive alerts when assets arrive or leave from a location, allowing you to ensure that cargo ends up on the right trailer and arrives at the final destination in a timely manner.
2. Dwell Times
Dwell time refers to the amount of time that assets spend at a particular location. Monitoring dwell time can help businesses identify inefficiencies in their operations, such as long wait times at loading docks or storage areas. This helps them assess where more or less resources are needed, provides insight to any bottlenecks, and creates accountability for their workers. Tracking dwell time also helps companies avoid fees from keeping assets stored in a given location for too long. With access to this kind of data, businesses can improve overall efficiency and reduce costs.
3. Transit Times
Tracking transit times can provide businesses with valuable insights into the efficiency of their transportation and logistics processes. By monitoring how long it takes for assets to move between locations, businesses can identify bottlenecks and delays and take corrective action to improve transit times. It can also help them make more accurate predictions in the future, allowing for improved resource allocation and providing transparency to their customers and other stakeholders.
4. Separated from a Group
In some cases, assets are meant to be used or transported as a group. The most obvious example of this is when certain cargo should all be on the same trailer, or when certain portable equipment is meant to remain with a trailer. Monitoring when assets become separated from the group can help businesses prevent loss or theft and ensure that assets haven’t been left somewhere they shouldn’t have been. With our AirFinder system, you can receive reports of what’s traveling with a trailer when that trailer starts moving or leaves a designated area. If certain cargo or equipment aren’t reported, you can quickly contact the driver and remedy the situation before they get too far and you lose too much time.
5. Route History
Tracking the route history of assets can provide businesses with a detailed understanding of how assets are being used and where they are going. This information can be used to identify patterns and trends in asset behavior, allowing management to optimize routes for efficiency and improve overall asset management practices based on the data provided.
Access the Information You Need with AirFinder
Our AirFinder asset tracking solution is designed to provide insight into where your assets are, how your assets are doing, and what your assets are doing. We understand that what this means might be different for different companies, so we emphasize the importance of working together to fit you with a solution that is tailored to fit your unique needs and asset tracking goals. To find out more about what your ideal asset management solution could look like, book a demo with our team of experts today.
