Let’s Talk IoT Devices: Asset Trackers

Hello and welcome to the third episode Soracom’s Let’s Talk IoT Devices webinar series. Today’s webinar is on IoT Asset Trackers. My name is Dora Terjek and I will be happy to host you for today. Today, we will discuss the various components of IoT Asset Tracker solutions. As well as the technologies, their features, and their suitability for different use cases. We will also be looking at the different industries where Asset Tracking is being used effectively. And we will also touch base on some real world examples of how companies use it to enhance their operations. We will also be introducing you to ThingsMatrix and their asset tracking solutions, deep diving into cold chain monitoring, as well as into logistics. And finally, we will be discussing the role of connectivity in IoT asset tracking. I would encourage you all to use the chat box on your screen throughout the whole presentation to ask any questions that you may have about any of the topics we are presenting. So, please feel free to type a question at any time during today’s session and we will make sure to go through them. Just a quick introduction again. My name is Dora and I am an IoT Device Product Manager here at Soracom. Today, I’m really, really pleased to welcome our expert speaker, Tom Burton from ThingsMatrix. Tom is an award winning sales executive with over twenty years of experience in telco and SaaS sales, and he heads up the global sales team at ThingsMatrix. Hello, Tom. How are you today? Hi, Dora. I’m doing great. Thank you so much for allowing me to be here to talk about asset tracking. Very good to have you here with us today. Tom, can you tell us a little bit about what makes ThingsMatrix stand out as an asset tracking solution provider? Certainly. At ThingsMatrix, our focus is to help companies realize efficiencies through our robust IoT device management platform. Another unique thing is that our parent company, FIBOCOM, is the second largest provider of cellular modems in the world. That provides us not only strong financial backing, but also robust r and d as well as a global presence. In fact, we have customers on every continent in the world today. Awesome. Really good to hear. We’re gonna talk a bit more about you a little bit later. I also would like to give a little bit of an overview about Soracom. I will try to spend no longer than sixty seconds on us. Soracom is an IoT connectivity and platform service provider. And we do deployments and different IoT applications to launch at scale. We also provide affordable and reliable IoT connectivity that accelerates speed to market. It makes it easy to connect to the cloud. And it helps our customers reduce data consumption and their costs. We were founded in Japan in two thousand fifteen by former AWS and telco veterans. And today, we have physical offices in Tokyo, Seattle, as well as in London. And our global team is distributed all over the world. We are very proud to serve more than twenty five thousand startups, including small and medium businesses, as well as global enterprises all across the industries. Examples are from agriculture, energy, construction, transportation, consumer electronics, manufacturing, real estate, even healthcare. And, in fact, you’re gonna find the Soracom SIM in over five million devices today all around the world. We are financially supported by KDDI in Japan. And we also have additional capital investment from technology giants including Hitachi, Saicom, and Sony as well. I think that’s enough about Soracom for now. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the world of IoT Asset Tracking. And on the next slide, we are going to look at the three major pillars that build Asset Tracking. First of all, let’s talk a little bit about what Asset Tracking refers to. It is basically the use of Internet of Things to track and monitor the location and movement of assets. These assets can be anything from equipment, vehicles, inventory, and even people. Asset tracking is a rather complex process that involves several components working together to provide real time visibility into the movement and the location of different assets. And these components can be grouped in three main pillars. The hardware, the connectivity, and the management platform. Let’s talk a little bit about the hardware itself. This includes the actual devices or sensors that are attached to the assets being tracked. These devices then collect and transmit data about the assets location, movement, and environment as well. The hardware used for asset tracking can vary depending on the type of assets being tracked and the environment in which they are located, as well as the specific needs of the business. For instance, GPS trackers are commonly used for outdoor tracking. While RFID trackers are commonly used for indoor tracking. We’re gonna deep dive into the different technology types in a bit. When we think about connectivity, we refer to it as the second pillar. And this evolves around the communication technology that is used to transmit the data collected by the hardware to the management platform. The connectivity can be provided by various technologies. We’ve been talking about GPS and RFID earlier. It can also include WiFi, Bluetooth, satellite, cellular technology, or even a combination of these. And last but not least, let’s talk a bit about the management platform, which is the third and the final pillar of asset tracking. This is the software layer used to not only receive, but also to store and analyze and visualize the data collected by the hardware itself. The management platform provides real time visibility into the location and into the movement of the assets. These three pillars work very well together in a close collaboration. Next, we are going to look at what type of questions to ask when we are about to build an asset tracking solution. One of the first things you will want to decide on when investing in IoT asset tracking is the type of tracking technology. So, the first thing is what is the actual problem that we are trying to tackle? Would we like to have visibility into the movement, location, or the condition of the actual assets? Or would we like to improve operations, reduce costs, and increase our efficiency? Getting real time insights into what is happening to the asset can improve logistics, the resource management, and the security part as well. It’s very important what exactly you are about to track. Is it animals, people, vehicles, tools, fixed equipment? And all of this influences, for instance, the size of your tracker. Another thing to look at is the location of your assets. There are different asset tracking solutions depending if your asset needs to be tracked on a global or local scale. Indoor versus outdoor, in a rural versus in a city environment, or above versus underground. The next thing on our list is to define how often you need to receive information from your tracked asset. In real time or maybe less regularly, for instance once per day. How much data do you need your asset to send? That’s also a very important question. Just location updates or maybe weather condition and real time asset status? You may need a data heavy real time asset tracking solution or one that sends just a few bytes once in a while. There is a big difference between the two. The data needs of your asset tracking solution will also have an influence on your technology choice. If you just need location updates or also additional data, for instance, sensor readings or weather conditions to be reported back, Well, this all brings us to how big the message size is expected to be. Another question to look into is about the expected lifespan of your tracker device. Is it less than two years or more than ten years or somewhere maybe in between? And usually the last thing we recommend to look into is how much power does your tracker going to require? Some assets require low power tracking solutions, while dynamic assets may need to send frequent updates on the location. Does the asset have an independent power source that makes power consumption relative to the asset’s lifespan may be critical? These are all questions that are going to lead us to our technology choice. And as you see on this slide, there are various types of IoT Asset Tracking technologies in the market today. Some of the most common types can be grouped into various categories depending on range, power consumption, and other factors. We often differentiate between short and long or wide range asset tracking technologies. And you can see that under the short range, we will touch base on RFID, NFC or near field communication, Bluetooth low energy or BLE, and WiFi based tracking technologies. In a second, we’re gonna look at the pros and cons, and the different components of these. Under the long and wide range technologies, we include cellular, low power wide area networks, as well as satellite communication. So, again, on the next two slides, you will see a breakdown of the most popular short and long range asset tracking options. This is the short range asset tracking technology overview page. Very quickly, we’re gonna deep dive into each and every of these technologies. RFID, the first one on this list, is a passive form of Asset Tracking because it cannot really pinpoint a device location. Instead, it just reports whether or not a particular RFID tag is within range of an RFID scanner. For instance, you could have a handheld RFID scanner that only detects tags within a few centimeters of the scanner. Or you could have a scanner with up to eight hundred meters of range that alerts you whenever a tag enters that range. Although RFID can’t provide precise location information or transmit data, it is available in various form factors and ranges. It doesn’t require battery and it’s very low cost. However, RFID is highly susceptible to interference And it’s important to keep this in mind. When we look at NFC, it is a very well established method that is both low cost and easy to operate. By transmitting data using radio waves, NFC communicates across a wide range of devices. In practice, an NFC tracking system is an effective way to send messages between electronic tags and readers. Many of us use NFC in our daily lives via our smartphones, For instance, for smart payment. But NFC is also well used as an asset tracking system. Like many tracking systems, it provides several benefits for asset managers, such as relative security and low running costs. Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE, is used for applications that do not need to exchange large amounts of data, and can run on battery power for years at a cheaper cost. Tracking via BLE is based on measuring the signal strengths of the Bluetooth receiver compared to the Bluetooth beacons within range. It’s quite simple and easy. BLE tracking solutions are often used for indoor logistics where you can set up the beacons and define the tracking space for the best results. Wi Fi is unique among the IoT asset tracking options because of its ability to transmit large quantities of data in a relatively short amount of time. It’s fast and reliable. So, it makes it ideal for short range data transmissions. On the other hand, Wi Fi is less than ideal when it comes to accuracy. It relies on triangulation and is only accurate within fifteen meters, approximately. It’s a bit expensive as well, especially when supporting more than ten to twenty devices. Alright. Let’s look at the long range and satellite technologies very, very briefly. Cellular is the first one on our list. And tracking assets with cellular connectivity relies on getting location data from a cell tower that’s nearby. Each tower location is mapped within a global database. And when passing in the proximity of one, the tracker sends an update with its current location. Cellular tracking is one of the most popular solutions for IoT, because it supports highly accurate location tracking with real time and high volume data capabilities. This solution type is suitable for highly mobile assets, like road vehicles and cargo, where the location stamps and the asset status data is required to be sent at regular intervals. With the advancement of 5G, cellular tracking accuracy is expected to increase even further. As for LPWAN, or low power wide area networks, we distinguish between the licensed and the unlicensed spectrum. Low Power Wide Area Networks are a subset of cellular connectivity that has been developed specifically for the IoT industry. It includes narrowband IoT and LTE-M or Cat-M1. Low power wide area network solutions exist to make cellular connectivity more affordable, secure, and also less power intensive by transmitting data with a shorter and weaker signal. Narrowband IoT is particularly well suited for asset tracking, as it offers high accuracy and reliability even in challenging environments like underground. LTE-M is also ideal for IoT asset tracking, offering relatively low latency and high throughput. Licensed low power wide area solutions create an internal network subset. Hence, they increase security and are perfect for tracking assets within a designated area. Examples may include shipping docks or construction sites and the like. A quick note about the unlicensed spectrum that includes Sigfox and LoRa. What characterizes these two technologies is the usage of free frequency bands. They have low energy consumption and a long range, but can only transport small amounts of data. And the last one on our list is satellite IoT, which refers to the use of satellite communication networks and services to connect terrestrial IoT sensors and IoT end nodes to a server. Satellite IoT has been in use since the late nineteen seventies for M2M and IoT purposes. And it’s been historically considered a last resort alternative to terrestrial networks. Mostly because of its higher costs and the low cost legacy solution power efficiency. But recently, with the growth of the IOT market and the coverage limitations of cellular networks, there has been a renewed interest in satellite based IOT connectivity. So, in the past few years, several incumbent satellite operators have announced plans to deploy or even have commercially launched satellite IoT networks that promise to deliver low power, low cost connectivity to IoT devices directly from space. So, what we are expecting is definitely an increase within satellite IoT. And we think it’s most suited for tracking assets in remote or hard to reach areas. Mining or smart agriculture are very good examples for those. Alright. Let’s look at use cases and the different industries that benefit most from those. So, by now you understand that IoT asset tracking can be used in a variety of industries. We can use it to improve operations and to increase efficiency. We have seen a lot of very interesting use cases in areas like agriculture, e mobility, supply chain management, smart cities, and many, many more. We can zoom in some of the interesting applications on this slide. One of the most notable areas has been in the agriculture sector. For example, crop monitoring, agricultural machinery tracking, and livestock monitoring. In construction, IoT Asset Tracking can be used to track the movement of non powered mobile assets, like equipment and machinery, as well as vehicles on construction sites. IoT Asset Tracking has been instrumental in the growth of sharing services, like e scooters and shared bicycles. Providing valuable insights into their usage patterns and maintenance needs are really important for those operating companies. Within the area of people tracking and personal safety, IoT asset tracking technology has been used to monitor the safety and well-being of people, particularly the elderly and those working in hazardous environments. Another industry that has greatly benefited from IoT Asset Tracking is logistics. Returnable transport items, or RTIs, such as pallets, glass stillages, crates, kegs, and bulk containers can now be tracked and monitored throughout their journey. Within logistics, cold chain monitoring allows for real time monitoring of temperature sensitive goods during transportation and storage, ensuring the preservation of their quality and safety. IoT enabled appliance monitoring is relevant for the retail and food production industries, as it allows for better inventory management and reduced waste by providing real time data on the usage and performance of refrigeration units. And, of course, there are many, many more exciting use cases across various other industries. What I would like to zoom on now is actual real life use cases showing you some of our customers from Soracom who have successfully leveraged our SIM connectivity to improve their businesses. Again, these are real world examples of how Soracom has helped businesses achieve their goals and also overcome their goals and challenges in their operations. The first example is Pebblebee, which is a Seattle based smart tracking tech company. They make hardware devices and an app to locate lost keys, pets, and more. They have both consumers and b2b customers in their focus. The next one is a company from Japan, Go for IoT. And the founder saw an opportunity to apply cutting edge IoT technology to address agricultural equipment theft. The team has developed a programmable connected end with end device called Khiko that can detect suspicious equipment movements and send alerts via SMS, email, or even voice calls. Their use cases are actually well beyond agriculture by now. They offer protection for construction equipment, boating vehicles, classic cars, and even camping cars. Ubiquicom is an Italian company and they offer real time location services systems or RTLS, giving customers in logistics, manufacturing, transportation, and related industries the ability to build a comprehensive image of the status and location of their assets. Mobile Objects AG is a telemetry provider. They offer GPS and GSM trackers tailored to fleet specific needs. And the Hocobo team is looking at improving efficiency in the logistics industry between different players. They have a service that consists of five different applications that are collectively called mobile. And it’s designed to function alongside complementary services and products from outside of different companies. So, they can create an effective end to end logistics ecosystem. And we are very, very thrilled to collaborate with ThingsMatrix to offer a proven portfolio of solutions to our customers and ecosystem partners looking to improve their asset monitoring capabilities. I will hand over to Tom now to walk us through ThingsMatrix turnkey solutions and some exciting tracker devices that are already proving to be game changer technologies. So, Tom, can you talk us through the ThingsMatrix asset tracking platform and its capabilities, please? Absolutely. Thank you, Dora. So as you can see here, this aligns really well with what Dora outlined at the beginning of the conversation, which was the three pillars of asset tracking. At ThingsMatrix, again, focus is to provide a robust platform. But because we realize the importance of all three pieces of that, we also provide hardware, our own hardware. We have the ability to integrate third party hardware as well. So it’s not just unique to hardware that we provide. And of course, connectivity is one of the most important aspects. And that’s why we partner with Soracom. You know, we wanna make it easy. We wanna make it turnkey and an all in one service for our customers to be able to solve complex issues with their business through IoT. How is the ThingsMatrix platform actually built up? Can you give us some insights? Absolutely. So on the next page here, we’ll see starting at the bottom. Our platform is split into six modules. The first one, first three relate to the device. As you can see TMX access, that’s user management and device management. So being able to set restrictions on certain users, admins, etcetera, as well as be able to get critical information off devices like signal strength, battery life, etcetera. The next one is TMX Upgrade, which is our firmware over the air update service. So you can push critical updates to devices as needed, either individually or in bulk. The third piece is TMX logging. So, you know, when you’re logging data to ensure that you can action upon that data at any given time and then store that data on our cloud platform. You can access it at any time. Moving to the right, TMX Insight is our AI based data visualization engine. So all the data that can be collected off the devices, every customer has a unique need for how that data is visualized. And so we can customize that engine to produce data output for each and every individual customer as needed. The next piece is TMX Connect. That’s where Soracom comes in and our integration with Soracom. So that customers can manage their SIM cards at any time. And then of course, one critical piece is TMX Locate, that’s all of our geolocation services. Obviously a critical piece in regards to asset tracking solutions. All of that flows up into our console. So we do have our own web based dashboard. We have our own application where customers can go to manage all of these things in one pane of glass. With that, we also recognize that the customers also have their own IoT platforms at times. And so we provide b to b APIs so that if a customer wants to continue using their IoT platform, they can do so. And all of the data from the devices and from our platform can be pushed into theirs. So the integration is really simple. The last piece up at the top there is what we call AEP or vertical IoT applications. Because we serve customers in so many different types of verticals and industries, each customer has a unique need in how that dashboard looks and feels, and they wanna see data in their own nomenclature. Right? So they wanna be able to call, you know, a particular asset. Maybe it’s a cooler or a truck number, etcetera. And they don’t need to see all of the data that is coming off those devices. So it takes a bit of customization, but we can customize that for each and every individual customer so that they see the data only that they wanna see. Cool. Thanks for this overview and and walk through. Earlier, you were referencing cold chain and and your asset management solution. Can you tell us a bit about the components behind this solution? Absolutely. So, you know, when you look at at the various verticals, starting down at the bottom left there, right, asset tracking is is wide and far when we talk about the the capabilities of what it can do, right, and the different verticals that it covers. So things as simple as vehicle tracking or container tracking requires different sets of hardware than something such as appliance monitoring. And so, depending on the vertical, we have customized hardware solutions from trackers to gateways, which communicate in two directions, not just collecting data. And then when you combine those with sensors, you can really put together a robust solution that solves a lot of issues that customers may have in their businesses. Of course, all that gets connected through our partnership with Soracom. So then that data can go to our platform and it can be actioned. And the lines here just show the different paths, right? Whether that business data is going directly to the customer system from our hardware, if it’s going to the ThingsMatrix platform to be analyzed, it really depends on the customer specific use case. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, firmware over the air is a extremely important piece of that so that we can help customers deliver continuous updates to devices as needed and as their business needs change. Fantastic. Can you give us some insights into one of your trackers? How it’s looking like and what the capabilities are, the hardware capabilities? Yeah. The the the first one here is on the side of, you know, simple asset tracking. Right? So you wanna know where an asset is located, and maybe you need to get very simple data off of it, such as temperature, humidity, etcetera. So the TMX zero zero one is perfect for that because it’s extremely robust. It’s I p sixty seven waterproof and dustproof. So it can go anywhere, and you don’t have to worry about it, you know, dying on you in the in the middle of nowhere. It also has an extremely large battery. So you get very large standby time of at least five years. Of course, that depends on many different inputs, such as how often that tracker is checking in. I think you mentioned that when you talked about the various needs and how you look at asset trackers. But also, what type of data is it reporting? How often is it connecting to the network, etcetera? Of course, this has GPS built into it as well. So it’s not just the cellular location data. You can get very, very specific and accurate location data through a combination of GPS and location based services from cellular. Brilliant. Another unique thing about this is that the battery is replaceable and it’s a standard off the shelf CR123A battery. So after those five years or however long the battery lasts, it can easily be serviced and replaced and that asset can continue to be tracked. Another thing with the TMX001 is its capability to communicate with Bluetooth low energy sensors. So a scenario there would be container tracking, where you have the tracker, the TMX001 on the outside of the container, and you have a Bluetooth low energy sensor on the inside that’s collecting temperature data. That would be reported back to the TMX001 and then sent over the Soracom network to our platform where that data could be actioned. So maybe it creates an alert of a low temperature scenario or a high temperature scenario, and then you can action on that data as needed for your business. Really, really cool. Shall we look at the router as well on top of the tracker? Yeah. Absolutely. So as you kinda go up the chain in terms of complexity, right, You move into what we call a smart IoT gateway. And and what that adds is the ability to communicate both directions. Right? So I’m not just sending simple requests to the device. Now I’m sending complex requests to the device, meaning I can if it’s connected to a cooler, cabinet cooler, or a controller for refrigeration unit, I can now set the temperature. I can can change dynamically what type of tamper alerts I wanna get off of that machine or what type of data that machine is gonna send me and return. On this device, the TMG06, we have not only CAT M, LTE connectivity, but we also have RS two thirty two and RS forty five, which are industry standard interface ports for controllers and other industrial devices. So that this device could be connected to those devices to be able to control them remotely and robustly. This also has BLE, so you can do remote sensors. One of our customers, for instance, uses this to manage commercial coolers in restaurants and grocery stores. Right? And so they wanna be able to get information like if a door was left open, and then be able to action that information as well. Of course, this supports external power because it is more robust, but it also has battery backup. So it has a twenty two hundred milliamp battery. So in the event there is a power loss, the unit can continue to communicate, alert you that power has been lost. And again, you can take action on it. Really nice. Earlier, we talked about satellite IoT. And I wonder if you were making any kind of future proofing in your device portfolio in that direction? Absolutely. You know, we we believe that satellite is is an important, you know, future technology. Obviously, it’s here today, but with the advent of low earth orbit satellites, the ability for these to communicate faster and transfer more data is there now. And so it it makes it practical to put into use. This is a a twenty twenty four roadmap item for us, the the TMX zero zero two. So we’ve added that satellite connectivity. I do wanna stress though, that it’s really there to augment cellular. It’s intended to serve a situation. Again, I go back to container tracking or agriculture where there’s poor cellular signal. That asset can still be reached so that you can determine the location. But maybe it’s moving in and out of poor cellular signal. That way you’re never without knowing where that asset is. We’ve combined that with another technology, solar. So that asset can stay in the field for much, much longer, up to eight years, potentially longer, again, depending on how often it checks in with the platform. And so you never have to worry about for a very, very long period of time, whether or not you’re gonna have those assets be reachable. And just like the TMX001, it supports BLE, supports the tamper alerts, external power, etcetera. One of the things with this device though, is that it does support meshing. So what that does is it allows this device to connect to other devices near it so that it can determine what is the most efficient path for communication. And what that does is it potentially saves the amount of data that’s being transferred over the network. It, in a smart way, chooses which device has the best signal to be able to communicate. That way you can ensure that if you you have devices that are together in one location, they can always find service, whether it be satellite or whether it be cellular. Very, very cool again. Thank you for that. Tom, do you actually agree that asset tracking solutions are only as reliable as the networks that actually connect them? Absolutely. It’s it’s critical. And that’s absolutely why we chose to partner with Soracom through our venture here with these devices on our platform. Let me bring up this slide, which is a kind of reference back to the different technologies that we went through earlier. And we looked at the top questions, what your business actually needs to consider when planning an asset tracking deployment. And the actual connectivity choice depends on on the defined needs, the circumstances, and and the detailed specifications. So, once again, just a very quick summary. If your deployment needs widespread coverage and relatively fast data speeds, then in that case, cellular may be your best technology option. If you will be deploying remote or hard to reach areas, just as you said, Tom, satellite connectivity may be the only viable option. But if someone is about to track a large number of objects over long distances, then low power wide area could be the best bet. And, if there is a specific location, like a warehouse or a factory, where there is only need for short range solutions, then think about WiFi or BLE. And, as you mentioned, blended connectivity is also often the right answer if you need comprehensive coverage to increase the chances. Yeah. If you are feeling unsure, our experts at Soracom can actually guide you through all these technologies. We are an expert for cellular, but also for licensed and unlicensed low power wide area. And also, for satellite and blended connectivity. We are here to help. Here is actually a quick view of our network coverage for four gs or LTE. But you will find more information on other network coverage options on the Soracom website. And if you are ready to connect and you would like to know more about Soracom and how to start your IoT solution, we are here to support again your applications, your projects. Please come and visit us at Soracom. io where you can read a lot more about what we provide. Again, feel free to arrange a consultation with any of our experts. And you can even set up a Soracom account or a proof of concept project. So, you can start experimenting yourself. You can also email us at Soracom.Io and a member of our sales team will be able to get back to you right away. Again, feel free to browse our website for further information and listen to the previous episodes of our Let’s Talk IoT Device webinar series. Soracom’s motto is you create, we connect. So, we are looking forward to working with you. And that’s just about what we had for you today. All that remains for me is to say another huge thanks to Tom for joining us on this episode. I really hope you found the discussion helpful. And we hope to see you again in another Soracom webinar in the future. Please don’t hesitate to raise any questions via the chat function. We will follow-up with you individually after the webinar if we cannot immediately answer you. And we will also send out the webinar deck shortly to all participants. Thanks again everyone. Goodbye, and have a lovely day.