Fleet Management Solution with Real-Time Tracking & Tracing of Vehicles

Business challenge

The modern transportation and logistics industry demands market players to integrate usability and agile approaches to offer competitive and user-friendly products in order to attract new carriers and suppliers. As the transportation market moves from outdated systems towards innovative digital solutions, Intellias has partnered with Europe’s top mobility service provider to build a real-time platform for truck fleet management. Our client planned to help their customers move from merely optimizing costs to generating new revenue by offering insights from location technology and vehicle telematics.

Effective truck fleet management relies on achieving a full payload and running optimal routes to increase profit margins. For small and midsize carriers that export and import goods across countries, planning tours based on truck freight rates is crucial for profitability. Independent operators need to keep track of their fleets, search for new orders, and check delivery details on their own, whereas forwarders employ dispatchers to supervise these processes. Another type of customer is supermarket chains that need to deliver cargoes from warehouses or large distribution hubs to their stores using regular routes with standard stops.

Thanks to our vast experience in fleet management software development and location-based services, our client chose Intellias as an engineering partner to implement their concept. The developed live platform has helped cargo carriers increase transparency and improve fleet cost management, resulting in fewer empty runs and more truckloads, while benefiting from the scalability, security, and flexibility of the AWS cloud. This fleet management case study focuses on how we designed the solution and what benefits it has brought to our end customers.

Solution delivered

Freight search and real-time visibility

The freight search module developed by the Intellias team is one of the key features of the truck fleet management platform. This fundamental component allows users filter through aggregated freight orders from multiple forwarders and select the most relevant results. For example, drivers can pick up an extra load en route to fill up free space in trucks, thus improving fleet cost efficiency and route planning.

Another set of features includes real-time tracking using IoT devices installed in trucks to collect data on location, driver performance, idling, fuel consumption, and more. This intelligent GPS fleet management system generates live updates to promptly solve inefficiencies, mitigate risks, and locate cost savings for carriers. Comprehensive tracking reports allow cargo transportation companies to generate business insights and optimize their supply chains. AWS big data technologies enable the platform to process large volumes of IoT data, supporting deeper analytics, high performance, and seamless scalability.

Focus on user experience

To meet our client’s key goal in accurately addressing customer needs, our UI/UX designers conducted a comprehensive study of fleet management solutions on the market. After gathering and analyzing requirements, we defined three primary user roles — administrator, dispatcher, driver — and created human-centric design to accommodate specific usage scenarios.

The administrator functions include adding cargo transportation organizations to the system using extended access rights. Dispatchers responsible for route planning can create tours based on real-time features to optimize fleet engagement, improve cost efficiency, and avoid downtime. We also designed a mobile solution to equip drivers with a handy tool for quickly providing status updates to and communicating with operators on assigned jobs.

Web portal and mobile app

Intellias engineers built two essential parts of the live platform — a web portal for administrators and dispatchers and a practical mobile app for drivers.

The web portal, targeted primarily at small and midsize freight operators, provides an all-in-one fleet management solution that helps users find suitable orders using custom filtering. For larger carriers working with supermarket chains, the portal allows for easily keeping track of vehicles, managing deliveries, and planning routes. The real-time monitoring feature is crucial for these big enterprises, as they operate across multiple subdivisions and need effective tools to control their fleets.

The driver app comprises key functionality for day-to-day activities, focusing on ease of use and productivity. Features include picking tours using a QR scanner, logging time, reporting on delivery statuses, contacting the operator via chat, and adding new cargo units. A live map shows the nearest points of interest (POIs) and provides customized search based on driver preferences.

AWS cloud solution

Our expert team at Intellias designed and implemented a robust cloud architecture for the platform, leveraging serverless solutions to ensure high availability and cost efficiency, even during heavy traffic and significant data loads. The solution harnesses AWS big data services, including Amazon Kinesis, to facilitate near real-time data ingestion and processing from IoT sensors, while Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose efficiently routes the data to Amazon Redshift for in-depth analytics. This architecture empowers the platform to manage significant volumes of sensor data without sacrificing performance. Real-time analytics capabilities provide fleet managers with predictive insights, enhancing their ability to make swift, data-driven decisions. The scalability and flexibility of the AWS cloud infrastructure support the rapid growth of the business, allowing the platform to adapt to the evolving needs of both small operators and large-scale logistics enterprises.

Business outcome

The importance of fleet management solutions is growing as transportation and logistics companies want to optimize their operations and costs. We used the latest location technologies, IoT connectivity, and UI/UX best practices to help our client build an innovative solution to manage truck fleets, accelerating the time to market. Cargo carrier companies get tangible benefits from using this fleet management system:

• An all-in-one open platform aggregates freight jobs across various forwarders, enabling independent and large-scale carriers to optimize their value chains.
• Integrated search for freight orders allows for finding the most relevant results based on custom filtering, streamlining jobs to carriers.
• Easy tour creation, fleet condition monitoring, employee management, and user registration within an organization using QR codes improves performance and reduces overhead.
• A unified solution that incorporates all customers, suppliers, delivery orders, routes, and the entire vehicle fleet in one place eliminates the need to manage multiple systems.
• When planning regular deliveries, dispatchers can reuse already created tours and tweak them as needed, saving significant time and effort.
• Using IoT devices for real-time visibility allows for accurately monitoring vehicle conditions, driver behavior, and fuel consumption to take prompt action and mitigate risks.
• Mobile app features such as document management, a QR scanner, communication chats, estimated time of arrival, and work logs help increase drivers’ efficiency and well-being.
• Optimized cloud costs are achieved by leveraging AWS’s flexible cost management features while maintaining high performance.
• The solution adheres to AWS Well-Architected best practices, ensuring robust security measures and compliance with enterprise standards.

By relying on Intellias’ engineering expertise, our client built an unrivaled live platform for cargo transportation that won a telematic award, making a successful case study on fleet management solution development.