June/July 2003

Tracking purely by mobile phone (m.logistics, last issue) has received a further boost with developments from two suppliers.

A new name in the logistics market is Mobile Commerce, an established player in location-based services (LBS), which has put agreements in place with all four major UK mobile network providers. The company gathers data from the networks in the form of map coordinates and passes it on to tracking systems suppliers via an XML message, which shows the unit's position relative to a nearby landmark or address.

"Each mobile network has a different routing infrastructure," says commercial director Martin Brown, "and privacy issues mean it can take three months to get security accreditation." His remedy is to do the "aggregating" on behalf of the systems suppliers. "We allow ASPs to integrate location feed into their applications much faster and at lower cost than if they tried to interface directly with every network operator."

Cellular tracking is sometimes dismissed in the logistics sector for lacking the precision of GPS location. But Martin Brown says there are compensating advantages.

 

"It is a low-cost method of giving an approximate location, and creates a market at the opposite end to GPS. SMS-based cell ID costs around 20p per location request, and there are no hardware costs, so it's ideal for SMEs with, say, 25 workers, who can't justify the investment in GPS equipment." The telephone merely has to be switched on, and whether it works on GSM or GPRS is irrelevant.

Brown also foresees a market for "assisted GPS", which uses both cell ID and GPS. Cell ID gives the initial rough location, then the more accurate GPS kicks in. Faster location can be useful in lone worker situations where the worker is injured, or where vehicles have been stolen, for example.

Mobile commerce is teaming up with various partners. One of the first is Followus, which has developed a system that works with mobile phone handsets, or with a GSM-based locator for larger assets including vehicles and trailers. Followus provides a Web interface which gives map-based locations; or managers can send an SMS message to get the exact location of a particular unit.

Followus charges on a pay-as-you-go basis, with packages starting at £4.99 for multiple location credits. The more credits you buy, the cheaper they become. "Many companies don't need to know where their vehicles or workers are at every moment of the day," says operations director Kevin Brown. "The huge benefit of our system is that there are no set-up costs and the pricing structure is transparent."

Meanwhile, rival Overview Mapping, the company behind the Verilocation service, says it is developing advanced applications involving resource allocation, automatic despatch, routing and activity analysis. The basic service is now fully up and running, the company says, and it claims there are already a thousand users. There is no contract to sign or extra equipment to buy; users merely register their phones and pay per use at 20p per tracking instance.