Commercial fleet vehicles are the driving force behind commerce and public mobility. Fleet managers have the important role of organizing and overseeing vehicles for performance, maintenance, and tracking purposes.
Telematics solutions collect, store, and analyze data that can be sent to fleet managers. This data helps fleet owners and managers evaluate vehicle maintenance, driver operation, and cargo management.
Today's Internet of Things (IoT) technology is transforming fleet management with the ability to connect vehicles and capture a wide range of data about vehicle performance, route, passengers, and cargo.
IoT Asset Tracking Market Development
According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, global spending on asset tracking by enterprises will increase from $16 billion in 2022 to reach $45 billion in 2027 -- that's a substantial growth rate of 184 percent.
The management and security of high-value assets are becoming of increasingly significant importance for many stakeholders, and demand for technologies that provide real‑time monitoring within the supply chain is ever more demanded.
Asset tracking in this context refers to systems that leverage wireless connectivity to remotely monitor asset locations, based on real-time data with the aim of better managing asset conditions.
Juniper analysts predict that the growing availability and affordability of asset-tracking solutions will drive the adoption of managed services amongst the largest enterprises that operate their own supply chains for high-value assets.
It's predicted that the most sought-after industry solutions will be those which can meaningfully demonstrate a return on investment by minimizing theft and loss of assets during transit.
Juniper now forecasts that the number of assets tracked will reach 24 billion by 2027 -- increasing from only 8 billion in 2022. They urge asset-tracking platform providers to include real-time monitoring solutions that can leverage multiple technologies, including 4G, 5G, and global positioning systems (GPS).
Widely used today, GPS is a cost‑effective technology, however, the comprehensive network capabilities of 4G and 5G wireless network services must be implemented to monitor assets with the highest values.
Outlook for IoT Asset Tracking Application Growth
Juniper analysts now predict that this increasing reliance on 5G networks will present significant opportunities for hardware vendors over the next 5 years. They anticipate that the growing demand for ‘always connected’ supply chain solutions will drive the interest in 5G-enabled asset-tracking hardware.
In turn, supply chain hardware vendors must focus their development on sensors that leverage the data-intensive nature of 5G to provide new features -- such as real-time anti-tampering notifications.
That said, I anticipate an applied artificial intelligence (AI) system will be able to simplify processes by integrating every organization onto a single platform and feeding the information simultaneously.
Fleet managers can save time and costs on planning, maintenance, and monitoring operations due to all the IoT data being accessible for analysis. Ensuring that all employees have access to the data will likely lead to superior fleet management methods, with every team member now enabled to work in sync.