Building work trucks is big business.
Whether it’s building a batch of custom-designed trucks to a customer’s specification or replenishing an upfitter’s own finished inventory of trucks designed to meet the needs of particular industries, the ability to work at speed, and at scale, is crucial.
But the upfitter industry isn’t built to the same scale as the giant automotive OEMs that manufacture the chassis used by upfitters as the foundation for industry-specific service bodies.
Compared to most upfitters, automotive OEMs have vast yards adjacent to their assembly plants, capable of storing thousands — or usually tens of thousands — of vehicles. They have the financial resources to be able to finance those vehicles, and sophisticated systems for tracking vehicles through their yards.
Industry challenges for upfitters
Very little of that applies for the typical upfitter.
They don’t have vast yards adjoining their conversion plants. They have yards — but typically also a clutch of satellite yards, often many miles away from the primary plant location. Most upfitters don’t have the same comfortable inventory financing resources as the automotive OEMs, and they don’t have sophisticated systems for keeping tabs on vehicles’ locations.
This means that the upfitter industry faces very different pressures than OEMs. Once an upfitter has taken a batch of chassis (or vans) into its inventory, speed is vital. So if a chassis can’t be located, it’s bad news.
The costs of poor locational visibility
Just how much bad news depends on the particular circumstances and the physical footprint of an individual upfitter’s business.
Generally, an inability to quickly and efficiently locate vehicles acts as friction in the flow of the conversion process. In which satellite yard are the required vehicles located? Where, exactly, in that yard? The answer to either question isn’t always obvious, or accurate.
The result is that the average time to locate a vehicle — several hours, half a day, a day — acts as a drag on throughput, with upfitters responding by building up buffers of vehicles at marshaling points, so as to minimize lost time during vehicle conversion.
But that lost time, and those buffers, represent inventory that has to be financed. And from an operational point of view, there’s typically a need to conduct regular productivity-sapping yard audits — logging the VIN and location of every single chassis truck body, in every single satellite yard and pre-conversion yard.
At the other extreme, there’s the challenge of finding a single, missing vehicle: the final chassis that’s required to complete, ship, and invoice a batch of, perhaps 50 or more converted work trucks.
Without the specific information on which yard the missing vehicle is held, all of them have to be searched. And in the meantime, the rest of the finished converted work trucks can’t be shipped or invoiced.
Pinpoint real-time accuracy
Clearly, for the upfitter industry, the attraction of a solution that would provide locational accuracy for individual chassis — and finished vehicles — is obvious.
Upfitters would gain greater operational efficiency (and fewer yard audits), smoother workflow for faster throughput, and lower inventories — which means less cash tied up in financing those inventories.
But does a solution actually exist? Yes — because leading automotive OEMs, who face the same challenges but at even greater scale, have already solved the problem.
The Cognosos real-time vehicle location solution delivers location intelligence, through the use of low-cost wireless-equipped GPS-enabled hardware tags. The tags transmit vehicle location to in-yard radio masts — generally one mast per typical upfitter’s yard.
What happens when a vehicle is moved within a yard? An onboard accelerometer, built into each tracker tag, detects the movement and, when the vehicle comes to a stop, automatically triggers the tag to upload the new location. Likewise, movement between yards is detected when tags leave one satellite yard and arrive at the next.
The basic tag provides a GPS location accurate to within two or three vehicle spaces — ample in most use cases. Best of all, the tag can guide the pick-up driver to the exact vehicle by flashing a light, triggered by the pick-up driver’s smartphone. At night, or in inclement weather, it’s a capability that vastly improves efficiency.
Tangible benefits for upfitters
The bottom line, in short, is clear. Real-time location solutions have much to offer the upfitter industry — including a compelling ROI, linked to tangible benefits.
Learn more about Cognosos’ real-time vehicle location solution, its benefits, features, and how it works. Ready to see how it can help your business? Get in touch.
