A Mining Tracking System: Smart IoT Solution for a Mining Industry

Problem: A mining company wants to address a full list of weak spots, lack of control, and data or reports. The company needs to optimize mining equipment tracking for vehicles by applying smart IoT mining solutions. Here’s what they need to improve or implement:

• Better distribution of dump trucks to excavators, as well as drilling, road construction, sprinkling water on roads, and optimizing vehicle routes.
• Maintenance and repair management.
• More efficient management of parts and materials in warehouses.
• Acquiring a full dataset on fleet operations both for daily tasks control and to base their strategic decisions on.
• Controlling the drivers to prevent violations, decrease vehicle wear and tear, follow safety protocols, and manage drivers' work time.
• Controlling instant and total fuel consumption to optimize it, decrease costs, and prevent fuel theft.

There are just a few of the issues: there were a lot of points for automation, digitization, and control in the client’s vast business, which would lead to the company’s growth leap.

Control of Combine Harvesters Idling in Vineyards

Problem: The grapes are harvested combined and by hand. Usually, the harvesters do not work an entire shift without interruption and stop from time to time. The reasons for stopping can be different: weather conditions, technological and logistic factors, a break for the operator's rest, as well as lack of organization, negligence of workers, and unauthorized smoke breaks.
The company would like to assess the idling periods, analyze them and quickly eliminate the causes: for example, discipline drivers, choose specific equipment that breaks less, and make timely decisions to solve unexpected issues. All this is needed to improve the efficiency of harvesting operations.

Dispatch Management System and A Client Portal for a Building Material Company

Problem: A client, who works to produce engineering materials for large infrastructure projects such as cement, aggregates, commercial concrete mixes, and non-metallic materials, requires Geofence services for solving certain challenges. These requirements aim at automating routine tasks, saving time for the employees, conducting the dispatching operations more efficiently, and providing better service to the clients. The project would take their performance to a new level of quality and efficiency:

• Complicated dispatching operations: the employees had to switch between applications, and process information manually, and there was no delivery management platform in place. It took a lot of time and effort, and offered space for human errors, all these taking resources from the team and not contributing to process improvements. Human errors may have caused additional issues with orders and clients’ dissatisfaction.
• Hectic communication with clients: dispatchers had to consult clients by phone, and information about orders was stored in several resources. The labor costs for this process were very high. Clients were very unsatisfied when they received orders late.

Driver Monitoring System with AI Camera for a Transportation Company

Problem: A client who is engaged in a transportation company aimed to provide integral solutions to the transportation and logistics requirements of its clients. The company relies on advanced control and dispatch systems along with telecommunications technology to maximize efficiency and quality in real-time. The following is a list of concerns to be addressed with regard to the fleet:

• Lack of proof to determine who is responsible for accidents.
• Excessive driving hours based on transportation regulations.
• Poor control and driver management performance.
• No real-time road assistance for drivers.
• No means to prevent road accidents.

Driver Risk Management System for a Cargo Management Company

Problem: A cargo management company with an active fleet focuses on the import and export of goods by sea, land, and air. Even having reliable clients and steady revenue, the company could not control its operating costs which were draining possible profits. The high costs are attributed to excessive idling, fines, and violations from speeding, night driving, and overloading.
The company needs a robust driver scoring system to control driver behavior, which in its turn would prevent reckless driving or let the tracking operator take timely actions should there be any incidents or violations.

Fleet GPS Tracking System for Post Distribution

Problem: A client who provides a total logistics solution to increase the capability of the client’s services and is a complete transportation and distribution service provider. While raising the service level and proficiency to become an international transportation provider, the company needed to solve several issues for better fleet performance:

• The necessity to ensure that only authorized employees drive the post vehicles.
• The client’s concerns are cargo thefts and hijackings.
• The client wants to optimize fuel consumption.
• The client requires a driver behavior scoring system to secure staff, vehicles, and cargo. In particular, they need to track overspeeding, harsh braking, and acceleration.

Fuel Control on a Bulk Carrier Ship

Problem: A bulk carrier has one big tank catering to two engines, two diesel generators, and a heating boiler. The overall fuel consumption depends on the work of each of these units. To get the exact numbers and optimize the consumption, it is vital to understand which of the elements are actually working and in what mode. But because of the ship’s characteristics, it is not enough just to install a fuel level sensor or a flow meter.

IoT Farming Solution: GPS Tracking for Agriculture Management

Problem: A farming company’s application provides an IoT-based agriculture monitoring system that ensures full control over crops, higher profitability, and compliance with food safety standards. So far, the product operates on the national market, but its owners get ready for a global release.
The company needs to connect its IoT-based farming app to a GPS tracking platform to process data from devices installed on tractors and agricultural machinery. However, it was a not-so-trivial problem:

• Tractors and other pieces of equipment in agriculture usually move at a speed as low as one to four kilometers per hour. Most trackers ignore such values and don't send them any further, so a farmer doesn’t have a clear picture of what’s happening in the field.
• The solution must provide a reliable connection with the GPS tracking platform for data transfer and processing.
• As the application is developed as a product for a global market, its owners were searching for devices and ways to transfer data from them that would be available worldwide.

Finding the right hardware for the IoT farming product was a challenge, and the company spent six months checking the leading manufacturers of trackers with no results.

Monitoring of Irrigation Machines

Problem: The company wants to address a wide range of problems related to the operation of irrigation machines and wants to increase production efficiency through the use of artificial irrigation and precision farming.

• Only the equipment vendors offer fleet satellite tracking and remote control of irrigation machines — each vendor offers a different solution. If the farm has the equipment of different vendors, the monitoring becomes inefficient.
• It takes a lot of time to start, control, and stop irrigation machines in view of their significant remoteness and size. During the dry season, it all requires an entire team. At times, such operations can’t be performed because of the weather.
• In case of breakdown, it is impossible to determine whether the irrigation machine is watering the field when it happened or is just driving around. The timely calling of a repair team is also a problem.
• The difficulty to determine if the irrigation machine had already watered the field and how well the work was done, if some areas were missed, or watered several times. On top of that, it is difficult to promptly adjust the irrigation process to weather conditions.
• Agronomists basically work in the dark, with no real data on how much water the soil received, risking losing the crop quality.

Operational Control and Maintenance Platform for Road Safety

Problem:A company dispatches rescue units when a road accident occurs. The following are the numerous challenges that often hinder the company from providing timely support:

• The lack of location information on the rescue unit closest to the operation area, which would take time to arrive, causing a higher possibility of a critical result for victims in the accident.
• The lack of statistical data made it difficult to generate road safety actions: a black point (three or more accidents with victims occurring within the 1 km distance) requires special signaling, speed bumps, road layout modifications, etc.
• The lack of management over rescue units sometimes makes them unavailable for operations because of another accident or being under maintenance.
• Fuel consumption and driver behavior management were also unavailable.