Autamarocchi, forerunners in digital transformation
Autamarocchi is one of Italy’s largest transport companies, with offices throughout central-northern Italy and Europe, a market leader in container transport and FTL (full truck load) conveyor transport, where the shipper fills the entire capacity of the carrier.
The company has always had a strong focus on the digitalisation of its workflows, and has been using YouCo’s IT services in the logistics and conveyor fields for more than 10 years to turn technological innovation into competitive advantage.
Monitoring and communicating with drivers
In 2012, when the collaboration between YouCo and Autamarocchi began, “smartphone” technology was in its infancy.
The need was to improve the efficiency of freight transport activities equipping its operations centre with monitoring and communication tools to enable it to follow drivers on their daily rounds.
The solution proposed by YouCo and adopted by the customer was YouTrackControl: it provided the driver with a smartphone communicating with the operations centre via an application that fully controlled the phone and the functions enabled on it.
In addition to price performance, the elements that convinced Autamarocchi to adopt our solution were the completeness of the product, its ease of customisation to the customer’s particular needs, and the presence of third-level technical support in Italy capable of intervening quickly to resolve SW anomalies.
A solution that, updated on an ongoing basis, still works today.
At the start of the day, the driver receives a smartphone to which he matches the vehicle and, if necessary, the trailer to be coupled by simply reading NFC codes (Near-field Communication), and receives a list of the jobs to be done and the necessary travel documents on his phone from the centre.
Thanks to the app, drivers are always in “virtual” contact with their dispatcher, who can follow them from the control centre console also through an audio message exchange system which provides real-time job status.
In the course of the day, the driver sends documents, photos, delivery notes to the station, tracks fuel deliveries made, reports the containers delivered and those loaded. It is also possible to print travel documentation on board, as the phone pairs up with the printer on the transport via a Bluetooth communication system.
YouTrackControl also transforms the smartphone from a potential source of distraction into a safe device, enabling only permitted functionality depending on the state of the vehicle. If the vehicle is in motion, all functions are disabled and the driver can only either receive phone calls or press an emergency button that automatically puts him or her in contact with the dispatcher.
It is the central console that remotely manages the phone’s configuration by distributing only the applications allowed by the company, including the company applications that the driver will use during operations.
Continuously updated solutions
The duration of the partnership with Autamarocchi shows how strategic and successful it is to provide (for YouCo) and adopt (for customers) solutions that allow adaptation of the product to the progress of technology and customer requirements.
Recently, we introduced a licence plate reading system, that the parking attendant uses to read the number plates of the conveyor cabins parked by the drivers at the end of the job. The system can also read number plates that are not perfectly clean or that are in non-optimal light conditions, thanks to a heuristic algorithm that also identifies the plate on the basis of a comparison with the customer’s registration data.
This functionality allows the customer, for example, not only to associate the carrier with its position on the yard, but also to schedule maintenance activities to which carriers must be subjected in compliance with legal obligations, avoiding the reassignment of cabs to be serviced.
More features will be introduced in the near future. Drivers will be equipped with an OCR system thanks to which, during their jobs, they will be able to automate the entry and transmission to the centre of information that currently requires manual entry.
The journey with Autamarocchi continues on a pathway to innovation.
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