Case Study
A tyre tracking system for Trio Vervoer
Trio Vervoer approached us earlier this year, looking to build a tracking system for their fleet’s tyres – not their vehicles, the tyres that move those vehicles. The company is in transportation, with many trucks that travel across the Western Cape and further across South Africa and Namibia.
As the business has grown, the company found that they needed a way to better monitor the health and safety of their vehicles. Tyres are a huge part of their business and tracking them through the fleet is critical for the safety of their trucks and their drivers, as well as everyone else on the road.
Getting to know the business needs
Our first job was to involve our business team to get to grips with what the company truly needed. They worked with the client, scoping the project and building wireframes to help visualise how the custom software should work.
Trio Vervoer knew how the system should run – they’d been tracking their fleet tyres manually since the company started. They needed to know the full status of each tyre on each truck. This included where each tyre is located on a vehicle, when it was last rotated and from where, as well as how many kilometres had been travelled on that tyre in total and between each rotation and if the tyres were moved between vehicles. Tyres are a massive cost and concern for a transport company like Trio Vervoer.
Once we knew how to roll out the system, we began development. It was to be a web-based system with a bootstrap template so that it could be accessed and used on computer browsers, tablets and mobile phones. For the database, we used MySQL and the software was developed in C# and .NET core.
Switching from a manual tracking system
Trio Vervoer had been manually tracking such a vital part of their business for many years now, and they had plenty of data that they didn’t want to lose when they switched to their digital tracking system. To help out with this, we wrote special import systems to allow for the upload and digitisation of their manual spreadsheets and documents. The system has also been used to bulk upload current data for all of their vehicles and all of the tyres in the fleet.
We have been releasing updates to the system over the last few months, allowing Trio Vervoer to trial each feature and element to ensure it’s working according to the original scope. It’s been a great opportunity to put our business team to work, allowing them to empower both our client and our developers. The client and ourselves envisage good growth in the system and a lot of new features added over the next few months.
