Have you ever thought about how your food gets from the farm to your table? Or what happens behind the scenes to make sure fuel is regularly available to your local petrol station? There is always bread on our shelves and milk in our fridges thanks to the teamwork and collaboration of South Africa’s trucking and logistics sector – doing thousands of distribution and delivery trips around the country. 

South Africa relies on a fleet of 500,000 trucks of all sizes to keep our economy moving – connecting ports, factories and warehouses across an area twice the size of France and supporting the daily needs of 60 million South Africans. These trucks are owned and operated by more than 1,000 companies – who are starting to leverage the power of technology to plan, coordinate and ensure on-time performance across the supply chain. 

One virtual cloud: quickly and efficiently share and request vehicle tracking from others by creating time-sensitive virtual fleets.

Tracking vehicles using GPS telematics has become a norm in South Africa. South Africa was one of the first countries in the world to pilot telematics in commercial transport in the early 1990s. South Africa is one of the top 10 telematics markets based on penetration. Tracking is still predominantly used for insurance and stolen vehicle recovery – although operators are starting to use telematics in their operational management. 

Until now, despite having telematics devices in each vehicle connecting to separate clouds, it has been impossible to simply add all the vehicles that you work with onto one virtual cloud. This means that operators spend a lot of time emailing or phoning their subcontractors to receive vehicle locations and estimated times of arrival (ETAs). 

GoMetro Bridge telemetry aggregator: A breakthrough technology that will accelerate the digitalisation of the logistics sector. 

Bridge is a telemetry aggregator – combining multiple telematics and vehicle data  feeds into one unified API. Think of it as the WhatsApp Share My Location – but for every truck, bus or coach in your fleet.  Bridge’s smart request and permission-based architecture ensures that fleet owners always have control over what they are sharing, and gives subcontractors peace of mind that their vehicle locations are only being shared when required.

GoMetro Bridge enables Fleet Operators to get more value out of their existing investment in telematics  by integrating all existing data and tools, and providing them visibility to all of their internal  and sub-contractor fleets. Operational performance  is improved by increased control, diagnostics  and predictive analytics, giving them one view of the truth – regardless of telematics source or format. 

Security and privacy have been a very important part of this product development, and GoMetro Bridge is fully POPIA and GDPR compliant – and is hosted on a secure cloud server. Fleet owners have full control over who they share with and what they share. Transport clients will also be able to get more real-time data on operations, locations and vehicle arrivals – creating a nett benefit for supply chains and controlling risks and costs of delivery. 

See your own vehicles and your sub-contractors’ vehicles all on one screen – regardless of telematics or tracking provider.

Bridge is a self-service platform, allowing fleet operators to onboard their owned vehicles, and the vehicles of their sub-contractors, to one virtual fleet – regardless  of what telematics unit is installed in the vehicle. Transporters can choose to add GoMetro’s other tools to GoMetro Bridge – such as ETA analytics, driver performance scoring, tyre pressure monitoring, temperature tracking and integrations into a range of transport management systems. 

GoMetro is opening up access to GoMetro Bridge, so operators can register today for a free trial and demo period – GoMetro links to all the major telematics providers, and can have a fleet set up in a matter of minutes. Operators will be able to integrate this virtual fleet with their own systems and applications – providing a steady, reliable stream of real-time location information on all trucks in an operation. Get started here.

GoMetro Bridge is being piloted on a number of freight operations in South Africa firstly, but will be rolled out in the UK, EU, Australia and the USA in the next 6 months through GoMetro’s partner network.  

For more information, visit GoMetro Bridge.