Geofencing: The what and how behind it

Are you working with high-value, high-risk, or time-dependent goods every day? Do you have weekly nightmares about whether your trailers with a combined value of five million euros will arrive in time and undamaged? If the answer to these questions is yes, geofencing is the technology you need. This blog post discusses what geofencing is, how it can impact your business,  for which industries it’s useful, and how to choose the right solution.

Geofencing uses GPS or RFID technology to create a virtual boundary. This boundary is an invisible parameter set around a specific monitored geographic area. It also detects violations of the boundary. In other words, if you want to capture a location in a broader way than a pinpoint, you can use geofencing.

Geofencing combines GPS or RFID technology with dedicated software to track people, animals, equipment, etc. The software can send users alerts and notifications about the assets that they are tracking.

In this paragraph, we will look at the benefits geofencing can offer. Because it is a technology with the potential to transform individual parts of data into valuable business data. After discussing these, we will look at different industries that can benefit from geofencing by applying it in various ways.

• Make informed decisions – As more and more containers, trucks, and warehouses are connected to the Internet of Things, the available data increases. And as systems become more integrated, the value of geofencing will increase. Which in turn allows companies to make informed decisions earlier on. This will increase the usage of software that allows geofencing.
• Minimize theft and accidental loss–  When you geofence an area, you will be notified when (valuable) assets move outside or inside the area. Furthermore, when an anomaly is detected, an alert is sent out. This will cut down theft and accidental loss.
• Create transparency – Geofencing can monitor every step, depending on your needs. This creates transparency about what happened to an asset when it traveled. So you can easily locate your assets. Due to this transparency, you can take immediate action if needed.
• Increase operational efficiency –  With geofencing, you can fine-tune efficiencies. For example, customers can receive alerts as a trailer with goods is approaching. Viewing this information in real-time allows you to be more flexible, improve planning, and reduce the number of manual reports.

Many industries can benefit from geofencing. First of all, retailers use it to identify customers near their locations. In this way, they can deliver targeted marketing messages. Secondly, geofencing has a large role to play in logistics. It allows logistics and transportation companies to track their fleet from origin to destination and discover anomalies. Thirdly, healthcare facilities can improve patient care by helping patients find their way in the hospital with geofencing. Finally, geofencing enables farmers to track herds on fresh pasture to minimize laborious work and improve animal welfare.

How useful a geofencing solution is, depends on the strength and flexibility of the software. Every use case needs a different sort of asset tracking solution and thus different ways of setting up geofences. For use cases in logistics and supply chain, for example, it is important to handle a range of different location scales. Sensolus allows you to create a geozone that matches with a specific phase in your logistics or supply chain process. This can be very detailed when you need to find a particular manufacturing part in a warehouse or can be on a broad scale if you need to know when a truck enters the United Kingdom, for example.

One thing is certain, geofencing is an incredibly strong business solution and we are just beginning to discover its full potential. For more information about how we take geofencing to the next level in our asset tracking solution, contact our Sensolus Sales team.