Netstar, the company most widely known for its vehicle tracking services, has launched a global fleet management bureau housed at the Altron Group subsidiary’s headquarters in Midrand.
The 52-seat facility will manage the live monitoring of “geofenced” hotspots, real-time fleet manager notifications and live video monitoring through Netstar’s in-vehicle AI cameras.
“The management bureau gives us the ability to monitor our customers assets, our own teams and their equipment, and the environment as a whole in real time. We use this information to take proactive action that keeps us a step ahead of any incident,” Netstar CEO Grant Fraser told journalists at the facility’s launch on Tuesday.
According to Fraser, the live monitoring and active response capabilities the centre provides extend beyond the safety and security of Netstar’s own customers.
The company is part of an initiative with law enforcement officials and other role players to improve road safety along the N4 trucking route, which has become notorious for hijackings and incidents of social unrest.
“When trucks were being torched along the N4 a while ago, fleet managers and law enforcement only got an understanding of the situation long after the damage had been done,” said Fraser. “With our live monitoring tools, we are able to use our cameras to see what is happening, notify fleet managers and mobilise law enforcement as incidents occur, not afterwards,” said Fraser.
Netstar expects the preemptive capacity made possible by the bureau’s live monitoring tools to boost its vehicle recovery rate, improve responsiveness, reduce false-positive alerts and enable quicker responses. The bureau is also expected to boost the company’s operational capacity. At present, Netstar monitors more than two million connected devices, analyses over 181 billion data points and downloads about 170 000 hours of video per month. The company hopes to use the bureau’s artificial intelligence software capabilities to scale its operations rapidly, said Fraser.
Always-on
The bureau runs a continuous, two-shift cycle 24 hours a day throughout the year. It’s always-on profile means that its staff – people with a technical “bent” who are trained in “soft skills” and “emotional control” so they can handle high-pressure events like hijackings – can cater to customers in time zones other than South Africa.
From an operational perspective, said Fraser, the lower fixed and labour costs in South Africa give Netstar a competitive advantage in markets such as Australia and countries in Southeast Asia where the company’s footprint is expanding.
Underpinning the bureau’s live monitoring capabilities is a data collection, ingestion and analysis infrastructure. According to Netstar chief operating officer Jeandre Koen, the base of this data-driven engine is made up of around 2.6 million GSM-capable GPS devices, 400 000 nano radio frequency devices, 6 500 narrow-band internet-of-things devices and the AI cameras aboard its managed fleets. Supporting the hardware is a cloud-based data analytics and machine learning engine that tracks important metrics and assists bureau staff in differentiating between false-positive and false-negative events.
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“Data today not only drives the behaviour of the consumer and the commercial fleets, but how we as Altron are structuring and growing the business. Data is key for the customer so they know what is happening, when it is happening and how they need to respond to it,” said Koen. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media