There are many benefits that come with tracking your trailer, especially if you’ve invested in a dedicated trailer tracking solution that can provide extended functions and visibility. These systems are designed to provide near immediate return on investment through the money they save you and the ways they protect your assets. In fact, those two benefits can be used to categorize many of the more granular benefits of trailer tracking. Let’s take a look at all the different ways that trailer tracking saves you money and protects your assets.
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- 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.
How Trailer Tracking Saves You Money
One of the biggest benefits of trailer tracking is that it helps your company save money in a variety of different ways. Whether it helps you reduce replacements, increase capacity, or meet compliance requirements, a robust trailer tracking system helps your company both reduce spending and increase revenue. Let’s dive into some of the specific ways these systems help you achieve these goals.
Improved Resource Allocation
One way that trailer tracking can help your company save money is by providing the guidance and information that you need to improve your resource allocation practices. The problems that cause poor resource allocation are typically centered around not knowing what resources you have available at your disposal or not utilizing those resources to their fullest potential. This could be due to resources being misplaced, overlooked, or even intentionally avoided by workers in favor of newer models of the same resources. Within the context of trailer tracking, not using resources to their full potential can also be a result of underloading a trailer before its deployment, meaning that more than one trailer might need to be deployed to the same destination when one could have sufficed. These problems cost the company money because it usually leads to unnecessary replacements and increased fuel consumption and costs.
Trailer tracking helps address these issues by providing an automated, up-to-date look at what assets are being used and what resources are currently available. Resources that are in use, such as trailers and portable equipment, will show on the system as being on the road. Available trailers will be stationary at the yard or storage facility. With this knowledge, operators can ensure that all trailers that are not currently waiting for maintenance or inspections can be deployed when needed. Also, if all available trailers are out on the road, the system can be used to track their progress throughout the transportation journey, allowing operators to anticipate which one will arrive back at the yard or warehouse for the next load first. This helps ensure that the personnel needed for loading is ready as soon as the trailer arrives, letting them hit the road again sooner. In terms of ensuring individual trailers are being properly filled, cargo and pallets can be tagged so that their location is reported in tandem with the trailer they are in. If there aren’t many tagged assets within a trailer, managers know that it can carry more cargo to the same destination or to one that’s nearby, reducing the need to pay more money for gas or to invest in additional trailers.
Informed Process Improvements
Another useful way that a trailer tracker can help your company save money is by using the data it provides to make informed process improvements that increase your business’s capacity and reliability. The current state of your process can cause you to miss out on potential income if it’s not carefully constructed to maximize productivity and overall efficiency. By taking steps forward and carrying a continuous improvement mindset, you can continuously improve these processes so that you can serve more customers with greater reliability, allowing you to make more money and save money from customers demanding replacements for damaged goods.
Trailer tracking can help you achieve this goal by providing complete visibility across every stage of your logistics operations. Most logistics companies already have reliable telematics systems in place, which help them make certain decisions. However, by virtue of being tied to the vehicle rather than the trailer and its assets, these systems are limited in the scope of the visibility that they can provide. By supplementing telematics with trailer tracking systems, fleet managers and other operators are provided with increased understanding of how their processes actually progress. They can then address bottlenecks and other disruptions quickly and work toward long term improvements that increase capacity and quality, bringing in more revenue and preventing fees related to damages and returns.
Proven Compliance with Industry Regulations
Trailer tracking also provides monetary savings by helping you avoid fees associated with legal action and noncompliance with industry regulations. Depending on what goods your company is responsible for transporting, there are very strict regulations about the handling and maintenance of those products. For example, if your company delivers perishable goods such as food or pharmaceuticals, you will be required to keep those products at a specific temperature at every stage of the transportation and delivery process. Not maintaining compliance or not being able to prove that you are maintaining compliance can result in costly legal repercussions, as well as increased spending to replace what was destroyed. By ensuring that you can both maintain and prove your compliance with industry standards, you will not have to pay this extra money over the course of your operations.
The primary solution that can be used to achieve this goal is a trailer tracking system that supports cold chain monitoring on the product, unit, or pallet level. While drivers with refrigerated trailers have control and visibility over the overall temperature of the trailer, they cannot see any internal fluctuations. Although a trailer might be set to a certain temperature, certain products within that trailer might not be maintaining that temperature due to a blocked vent, the way the trailer was loaded, or the way that the product has shifted during transport. By placing individual tags on the product or unit, these fluctuations can be quickly detected and addressed before the product is compromised. Additionally, asset tracking systems provide a historical record of temperatures that can be used in case a company’s compliance is challenged. This way, you can avoid the costs associated with replacing damaged goods and not meeting compliance requirements.
How Trailer Tracking Protects Your Assets
Besides producing cost savings, the other primary benefit of tracking your trailers and the associated assets is protecting your assets against loss, theft, and damages. Trailers and their contents are easy targets for thieves, and it is easy for both trailers and their contents to be damaged when they’re on the road all day. That’s why it’s important to face these challenges head on, which trailer tracking helps you accomplish.
Real-Time Location Visibility
Using a trailer tracker helps you ensure that you have complete control and visibility of your assets at every stage of the logistics process. There are no blind spots in your coverage, which instead persists regardless of where your trailer is, whether it’s connected to a power source, and whether the truck connected to it is currently running. The key challenges that you face without real-time location tracking include an increased risk of loss and theft, since visibility blind spots are often where these mishaps occur. Additionally, not having real-time tracking makes it incredibly difficult to recover those lost or stolen assets in a timely fashion. Even if an asset’s just been misplaced, you’ll only have a record of the last known location. As for stolen assets, it’s pretty much a lost cause, as you’ll have no way of knowing where the thief has taken the goods. This risk can be addressed by the real-time tracking provided by a trailer tracking system.
By employing trailer tracking, you gain complete visibility over your assets and their movements. This is important because it gets rid of blind spots and allows you to receive updates about unauthorized movements as long as the tag is still secured in place. If an asset is stolen or misplaced, it can simply be looked up in the system, located, and retrieved. There’s no room for error due to improper or neglected scanning, because scanning isn’t a factor with a real-time location tracking system. Instead, tracking is automatic and can be conducted even if your asset goes somewhere completely unexpected.
Complete Utilization Data
With the strategic use of a trailer tracker, you can ensure that you maintain complete data records on the usage and utilization of your assets. This helps protect your assets from untimely breakdowns and premature wear-and-tear by providing the resources you need to understand both usage and maintenance patterns. Without this understanding, it can become quite common to overutilize some assets while underutilizing others. This results in the overutilized assets breaking down far more often and far sooner than your company likely prepared for when they invested in that asset. This is particularly relevant for trailers, which experience the wear and tear of long journeys as surely as the trucks themselves. Lacking this understanding can also make it easy to mess up maintenance scheduling, which poses a danger not only to the trailer and its contents, but also to the driver and everyone else on the road.
Using a trailer tracking system can help you obtain the utilization data that you need in order to prevent these problems. When your trailers are affixed with tracking devices, those devices are able to create an automatic record of the periods of time that the trailer is in motion or at rest. This can help indicate both how long it’s been on the road and how long it’s been sitting in the yard. This enables yard managers to effectively cycle through trailers based on which ones have been used the least, evening out utilization across all available assets and prolonging their lifecycle. This also helps generate a record of mileage, which can help remind managers when a trailer is in need of maintenance or inspections. This helps preserve both the safety of the trailer and the safety of everyone on the road.
Product-Level Condition Monitoring
While we have already discussed how trailer tracking can be used to save operational costs by reducing noncompliance and other legal fees through condition monitoring, this same feature can also be used to ensure asset safety. Monitoring the condition of a product is all about ensuring the ongoing quality and safety of the product, that it can be consumed or otherwise used by the end user without putting themselves at risk. This is, after all, why there are so many regulations surrounding the transportation of these goods. The safety of the cargo translates directly into the safety of the people who will be consuming that cargo, making it of utmost importance. However, ensuring that products retain the necessary temperature or other vital conditions is again faced with the challenge of ensuring that each individual product is actually remaining within the critical range.
To reiterate, a trailer tracking system has the ability to monitor the temperature and other conditions on the level of the unit, pallet, or product, depending on your unique needs. This allows you to ensure that each product is truly being held within critical range. If a product drops out of range, you will be alerted immediately so that you can take measures to fix the problem in order to preserve the product. Failing that, you will know which product has to be disposed of rather than having to dispose of the entire contents of the trailer. With proper condition monitoring enabled through trailer tracking, you can ensure the safety of both the products that you are delivering and the end user.
Save Money and Protect Your Assets with AirFinder
Our AirFinder Everywhere solution prioritizes helping you save money and protect your assets. This trailer tracking system is designed to be a low-cost investment that provides complete visibility and improved functionality so that you can take measures to reduce spending in your operations and rest assured that your assets are safely maintained. To learn more about how this solution can work for you, book a demo today!
