Azure-Based App for Real-Time Fleet Tracking and Automated Route Optimization

Customer

The ustomer is a world-leading provider of turnkey fleet management solutions. More than 30 years ago, the company started operating in the Scandinavian region, but has recently decided to expand its presence worldwide and develop a new product geared towards small and midsize logistics companies. The new product aims at helping companies deploy fleet management solutions with low upfront costs, increase efficiency, provide better customer service, save on fuel and administrative costs, avoid tax penalties, and keep vehicles regularly maintained.

Challenge

The Customer needed to build brand new software with the standard fleet management features. However, instead of dedicated hardware devices that were mounted on vehicles, the solution should utilize mobile phones as personal GPS trackers. The new solution had to meet the following requirements:

• The solution had to provide high-quality user experience on all popular mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and Windows Phone).
• The tracking algorithms should be intelligent enough to perform with minimal user input.
• The solution had to be integrated with the Customer's existing infrastructure and ERP system.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s team started to work on the project with user experience analysis and design. Working with the Customer’s team onsite, a business analyst and a team of mobile developers implemented a simple and clean solution interface universal for all mobile platforms.

The second phase was the technical design of the tracking algorithms. The solution was supposed to collect raw GPS data and based on it, automatically create optimized commercial routes.

Then, ScienceSoft's team established the communication of the mobile software with a backend server and a real-time generation of business data module in the Customer’s ERP system.

As the next step, a self-invoicing mechanism for the drivers was built into the mobile applications, making the solution suitable to companies hiring part-time workers or independent contractors.

Finally, a web dashboard for automatic reporting and intuitive display of the information was implemented. This way, looking at the reports, a user could see that a customer A got an order B delivered on the date C by the driver D.

ScienceSoft's team developed the solution to work in the cloud. This way, the users could have their workspaces set up without installing software on premises. Additionally, ScienceSoft’s team, together with the customer’s team, migrated some of the existing Customer's infrastructure services to the cloud.

Results

The new mobile fleet management solution was implemented, and it had the following features:

• Universal and intuitive user interface.
• Automatic and precise trip creation.
• Real-time generation of business data in the customer’s ERP system.
• Driver’s self-invoicing mechanism.
• Informative web dashboard.
• Automatic report generation.
• Tracking of all of the company’s vehicles on a map.
• Cloud integration.

Some of the major advantages of the new system:

• Low upfront deployment costs for new clients (no need to install expensive hardware devices).
• Low maintenance costs.
• Automation of business data gathering and reporting.
• Easy installation of software updates.

All of the features above made the new fleet management solution affordable and applicable to a broad range of potential clients, such as small and middle-sized businesses, which resulted in a significant increase in the Customer's sales.

Technologies and Tools

iOS, Android, .NET, Microsoft Azure