Driver monitoring and communication
Autamarocchi is one of the largest Italian transport companies, with offices throughout Central-Northern Italy and Europe, a market leader in container transport and full truck load (FTL) transport, where the shipper fills the entire capacity of the carrier.
The company has always paid great attention to the digitalization of its processes and for over 10 years has been using IT services offered by YouCo in the logistics and transport sector, to transform technological innovation into a competitive advantage.
The collaboration between YouCo and Autamarocchi dates back to 2012. The client’s need was to improve the efficiency of their goods transport activities through monitoring tools and communication between the operations center and drivers, allowing them to follow the driver’s daily missions step by step. YouCo therefore proposed to the client to equip their drivers with a smartphone on which to configure an application capable, among other things, of communicating with the operations center.
In addition to competitive pricing, the elements that convinced Autamarocchi to adopt our solution were the completeness of the product, its ease of customization to the client’s specific needs, and the presence of third-level technical support in Italy capable of intervening quickly to resolve software anomalies. This solution, which today we could define as a verticalization of YouLogistics, is still in use, albeit with due updates.
How it works:
- At the start of the day, the driver receives a smartphone to which they pair, through the simple reading of NFC (Near Field Communication) codes, the tractor unit and possibly the trailer to be attached, receiving on the phone from the control center the list of missions to be carried out and the necessary travel documents.
- Through the app, the driver is always in contact with their dispatcher, who can follow them from the central dashboard, even through the exchange of audio messages, having real-time evidence of the status of missions.
- Throughout the day, the driver sends documents, photos, delivery notes to the control center, tracks fuel refills performed, reports containers delivered and those loaded. They also have the ability to print travel documentation on board, as the phone pairs with the printer present on the vehicle through a Bluetooth communication system.
- With the Safe Drive functionality on the smartphone, only allowed functions are enabled depending on the truck’s status: if the vehicle is in motion, every function is disabled and the driver can only receive phone calls or press an emergency button that automatically connects them with their dispatcher.
- The central console remotely manages the phone’s configuration, distributing on it only the applications allowed by the company that the driver will use during their missions.
Constantly updated solutions
Recently, we have introduced a license plate reading system, which the yard attendant uses to read the license plates of transport cabins parked by drivers at the end of their mission. The system is able to read even plates that are not perfectly clean or in suboptimal light conditions, thanks to a heuristic algorithm that identifies the plate also based on comparison with what is present in the client’s registry.
This functionality allows not only to associate the vehicle with its position in the yard but also to schedule the maintenance activities that vehicles must undergo by law.
Drivers will soon be equipped with an OCR system thanks to which, during missions, they will be able to automate the input and transmission to the control center of information that currently requires manual entry.
