Visibility and data security, what is important to know?

Transports monitoring is gaining importance and emerges as a vital trend in the TSL industry for the year 2022. When sharing the location of the fleet with your customers, it is worth to make sure that the data is secure.

The first thing to look for on a telematics data integrator website in order to make sure your location data is safe is a privacy policy. In the case of companies operating in the European Union, the law requires its compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is also worth to learn how does the process of entrusting GPS data needed to enable monitoring works like. For example, after the carrier’s fleet is integrated, the CO3 platform requires the carrier’s consent for providing the location data of the vehicle for certain time to an authorized entity. What’s more, the fleet owner is able to configure the shared monitoring on his own: change the time for which the location data is shared or stop the sharing altogether.

What kind of data is shared?

More and more companies find it necessary to monitor all the stages of fulfilling the transport order. According to the results of the 2020 European Road Transportation survey, already 58% of carriers indicate the position of the load on request, 42% allow online monitoring of delivery locations, and 36% are able to provide ETA on request. The spectrum of data needed to identify the carrier and specify the location of its vehicle is quite large. In the case of CO3, on the website you can search for transport companies using the platform by entering the company name or tax identification number or by searching for a specific vehicle by entering its registration number. Providing the search engine is meant to help clients in quick verification of carriers that are able to provide the monitoring, even in the case of a newly established cooperation or execution of an order by a company selected through a transport exchange. Regardless of the period for which monitoring is made available via the platform, the client will receive access to the following data:

• Vehicle position (location and geographical coordinates)
• Ignition status (on / off)
• Current vehicle speed

– What is worth remembering is that we do not download driver data for monitoring purposes. Even in a situation where the contractor providing monitoring to the client uses the subcontractor’s fleet to perform the order, the contractor appears as the owner of the fleet to which the monitoring applies to – says Grzegorz Patynek, CEO at CO3.

When the monitoring is shared?

Due to the complexity of the supply chain and the many links involved in it, according to KPMG forecasts, logistics managers of leading organizations will strive to improve visibility as well as accelerate and improve the quality of response to supply disruptions. That confirms that real-time monitoring is becoming a necessary requirement for companies fulfilling transport orders. When choosing a solution through which the carrier wants to provide monitoring to customers, it is worth paying particular attention to when the location data will be made available. In the case of CO3, it depends on the carrier’s decision and the type of cooperation it has with its customer. After completing the implementation process, it is possible to automatically or manually start sharing data based on the consent of the carrier and the agreed method of cooperation with its client. Regardless of which sharing option is chosen, the transport company always has access to information with whom and when vehicles locations are shared. In order to monitor the location, the following are provided:

• in the case of single order monitoring – data of selected vehicles based on the transport order ID, license plate, place and time of loading and unloading;
• in the case of periodic monitoring – data of selected vehicles based on the transport order ID, license plate, place and time (e.g. loading and unloading time).
• in the case of permanent monitoring – the location of indicated vehicles will be automatically made available, and the carrier’s task is to identify vehicles that will be visible to a given customer 24/7 at the time specified by him.

– Thanks to the unique CO3 method of implementing a fleet of carriers, the time from the moment of contact with the carrier to the moment of making the signal available is the shortest on the market. Nevertheless, we maintain data security all way through. We constantly control the security of our databases and comprehensively develop the platform – explains Grzegorz Patynek, CEO at CO3. – Among the implemented innovations, it is worth to mention letting the client independently verify whether a given carrier or a given vehicle already uses the CO3 platform. If so – they will be able to create a monitoring order on their own, which will then be sent to the previously selected carrier. After the carrier accepts the order monitoring request, it will be automatically enabled under the order specified by the forwarder / shipper. In the result, not only the process is more convenient for a client, but also a transport company benefits. It is able to monitor its fleet for free, while increasing its competitiveness by offering its clients real-time monitoring. From the beginning of CO3, we knew that good cooperation with carriers, quick integration of the fleet and friendly support are the foundations on which we would like to build our solution. We want each user to receive a measurable package of benefits and be able to develop their company more efficiently thanks to the optimization of processes that are often very resource-intensive – explains and sums up Patynek.