Yellow Goods Management solution: managing yellow goods can be the most critical part of your operations.

Our Yellow Goods Management solution enables smarter, more efficient fleet management.

The solution.

For our client, a materials handling rental company, the objectives for its IoT-enabled fleet was to improve control over the location and utilisation of assets, and ensure compliance to rental contracts. To achieve this, we created a real-time Yellow Goods Management solution on our Rayven Platform that integrates all relevant data sources and monitors asset performance remotely to provide all-new insights.

Defining what data to collect is critical.
In order to create a solution to improve the company’s control over vehicle asset usage, we identified the key data to collect. Our Yellow Goods Management solution needed to include:

1. Real-time tracking of assets
2. Over 30 data points from CANbus
3. Rental information, including: rental dates, engine time allowance, geofences, and leasing charges
4. Accelerometer data
5. Weather information

Initial goals of the solution.
The first goal of the solution was to integrate the various data sources and to set up a hierarchical structure that would allow each fleet manager to see the information they require in a custom, white-labelled dashboard. This would need to include:

1. Monitoring of real-time data received from the CANbus and accelerometer via web-based and mobile solutions
2. Ensure device management monitoring was implemented
3. The ability to define business logic to meet the fleet managers’ specific objectives
4. Notifications via email or SMS messages when vehicle behaviour was not in accordance with a customer’s contract
5. Collection of data for predictive analytics
6. Provision of real-time vehicle asset location
7. Testing of the application to ensure that all of the client goals were met

Before making the solution live, we tested four critical aspects of our Yellow Goods Management solution:

Security.
Our Rayven Platform is built with security as a top priority and our proprietary security architecture ensures that data is secure at all points of the environment.

The solution includes data encryption in transit from device-to-cloud, as well as device authentication; security (Bearer) tokens; SSL, AES and RSA encryption; as well as additional device security checks done via automated polling.

Connectivity.
As the devices are expected to work in highly-remote areas, the solution was designed to use low-band LoRa devices, which transmitted the data directly to our servers using a secure connection. To maximise battery life, data is only transmitted when a vehicle engine is on.

To ensure the system is always working – even when data isn’t being sent – a heartbeat pattern was implemented and a protocol put in place so that each device sends a device-to-cloud messages at least once every 24 hours.

Data integrity.
Once data began to flow, the solution was tested to ensure reliable streaming connectivity from the devices and to confirm that notifications were raised when devices failed to communicate. In addition, notification thresholds were confirmed by fleet managers.

Industrial data science.
The objective of exploratory data analysis was to observe trends in the data and compare them between different locations:

1. Compare performance utilisation between vehicle assets and their contract
2. Forecast which vehicle assets would be under- or over-utilised
3. Forecast which vehicle assets would exceed their plan allowance

What’s next?

We are continuing to collect data and to work on improving forecasting accuracy. In addition, there are plans to roll-out hundreds of additional new fleets, all featuring our Yellow Goods Management solution.