Real-time tracking of a global container fleet

The pandemic has made it critical for transportation and logistics firms to manage their assets (or fleets) more efficiently.

Demand is high for real-time asset tracking and tracing solutions. For the marine services business of our client, real-time management of a global fleet of containers required continuous, global tracking.

Tracking the container fleet and meeting compliance requirements was laborious and error-prone, often leading to delays and lost opportunities. The client also did not have a mechanism to track customer usage of pay-per-use containers.

We were tasked with creating multi-tenant based cloud application that would be optimized for cost and yet not compromise the user experiences of customers and field teams.

Our decade-long experience in radio-frequency identification (RFID) helped us address this challenge. Our information engineers, UX designers, solution architects, and business analysts worked onsite with the customer to test scenarios and create a new architecture along with new user experiences and interfaces.

We built the solution using the latest Microsoft Azure cloud services and BizTalk and RFID middleware for an integrated framework involving multiple customers (tenants) and services. An offshore team engineered the new application with the capabilities sought by the client; the architecture team helped create new systems and environments for development, quality assurance (QA), user acceptance testing (UAT), and production.

The solution was capable of handling large amounts of streaming data with the help of edge services located near-site. Customized workflows captured container movement within each site, while GPS services tracked container movement across the globe. The application, which was deployed well within the scheduled deadline, enables post-production maintenance and enhancements from our offshore center.

We engineered real-time tracking and tracing for the client’s global container fleet, with map support and enhanced personalization for users based on location and asset class. Responsive design ensured that the application could be seamlessly used across various devices. Our experience with RFID and cloud-based engineering helped us anticipate and prepare the scenarios well in advance so that solutions could be delivered to the client fast. This significantly reduced the time for the client to prepare cost and compliance status reports, and location-based dashboards for KPIs. The near-real time tracking of containers reduced the time to calculate exact container usage and certificate status from days and hours to a few minutes.