CLIEncoders · Industries
Logistics, fleet and mobility engineering
Everything in logistics is moving, which means connectivity is intermittent by definition and every design decision has to assume the link is currently down.
Movement changes the architecture
A tracker crosses cells, tunnels, borders and warehouses with no signal. Treating the network as available produces a system with holes exactly where the interesting events happened.
So the device is the source of truth, not the server. Events are timestamped and stored locally, forwarded opportunistically, and reconciled server-side into a coherent history. Power is a design constraint too — vehicle power disappears when the ignition is off, and asset trackers on trailers and containers may have nothing but a battery for months.
Vehicle data, and its limits
CAN bus gives access to a great deal more than position: fuel, engine hours, fault codes, driver behaviour. Standard OBD-II parameters are well documented, but much of the genuinely useful data is manufacturer-specific and undocumented, and we will not pretend otherwise before looking at your actual vehicles.
For cold chain, temperature monitoring with the properties an audit needs — calibrated sensors, a record that cannot be quietly edited, and alerting fast enough to save a load rather than merely document losing it.
Making the data operational
Live tracking and historical replay, geofencing with entry and exit events, route adherence, and reporting that answers the questions an operations team actually asks rather than displaying everything available.
Alerting is where these systems earn or lose their keep. A geofence that fires on GPS jitter trains everyone to ignore alerts within a fortnight, so hysteresis and confidence thresholds are part of the design rather than a later fix.
Questions
What people ask before starting
Can you read data from any vehicle?
Standard OBD-II parameters, yes, across most modern vehicles. Beyond that it becomes manufacturer-specific and often undocumented, and honest scoping requires testing against the actual vehicles in your fleet. A mixed fleet is normal and means expecting different capability per make rather than one uniform dataset.
How accurate is the tracking?
GNSS gives a few metres in open sky, degrades in urban canyons and indoors, and jumps around after a cold start. For most logistics purposes that is ample. If you need lane-level or warehouse-aisle precision, that is a different and considerably more involved problem, and we would want to understand what decision depends on the extra accuracy.
What about devices crossing borders?
It becomes a connectivity and cost question — roaming agreements, multi-network SIMs, and the fact that a tracker silently accruing roaming charges is a real operational surprise. It is worth designing the reporting interval with data cost in mind, not just battery.
Can this integrate with our existing TMS or ERP?
Yes, through whatever interface it exposes — API, file exchange, or database view. The integration is usually more work than it first appears, mostly in reconciling identifiers between systems that disagree about what a shipment is called.
Related
Where this usually connects
Tell us what you are building
One technical call is usually enough to tell you whether this is straightforward, genuinely hard, or the wrong approach entirely. We would rather say so early than quote for the wrong thing.
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