Saturday, June 10, 2006

Tracking trucks: with these high-tech systems, your trucks are always within range

Becki Fredrick and Peter McDaniel work for concrete producers of different sizes, but they have one thing in common: They're both using wireless truck tracking systems to improve efficiency and save money.

Sometimes called telematics, these systems rely on computer software and a communications network to bring truck location, activity status, and in many cases, engine fault codes, to personal computers at one or more central dispatch offices.

The communications medium can be a low band two-way radio, a Global Positioning System (GPS) using satellites, or cellular telephone technology. Several manufacturers, including Mack Trucks, Trimble Navigation Limited, Qualcomm, International Truck and Engine, and Caterpillar, recently have begun marketing new truck and equipment tracking systems or have upgraded their existing offerings.

McDaniel, who is distribution technology manager for Chandler Concrete Co., of Burlington, N.C., oversees more than 200 ready mix trucks from 22 plants. All use some type of truck tracking system. Twelve of the plants and 90 trucks are outfitted with a communications system and software from Distributed Networks Inc. (Dinet), of Oceanside, Calif.

Using a keypad and terminal in the truck, drivers enter truck activity status, such as "Loading" or "To Job." That information flows via two-way radio to a central Diner server, then moves into Command Series dispatching software that places the trucks in the proper place on the truck tracking system.

A dispatcher can tell where all trucks are at any time because the software contains map zones with all possible destinations for concrete pours. Based on the time intervals a customer wants between trucks, the dispatcher can calculate cycle times.

As each truck feeds the status information to central dispatch, Command Series software creates a truck demand graph that charts the number of trucks available on the vertical axis versus time on the horizontal axis. A dispatcher can calculate his available trucks versus demand and tell if he has extra trucks, or not enough, and can deploy trucks accordingly.

More efficient

"Before these systems, when a truck left a plant, the dispatcher for the most part didn't know where it was, and he didn't know how many trucks were on the way back to the plant," says McDaniel. "All they knew was the truck was on the way.


Comments: Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]





<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Subscribe to Posts [Atom]