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Jungheinrich AG, one of the world's leading providers of intralogistics solutions explored new ways to deliver fleet management solutions. Prodrive Technologies was selected to design and manufacture the hardware for this.
Bas van Bree, Program Manager at Prodrive Technologies explains.
Telematics (also referred to as telemetry or fleet management) has the potential to make processes safer and more efficient, particularly when fitted to a lift truck. One of the leading forklift fleet management solutions in the market today is provided by Jungheinrich and is called ‘Jungheinrich Fleet Management System (FMS)’.
The telematics system components are installed on many Jungheinrich trucks when it’s on the production line. Once in service, this gives the lift trucks the ability to send recorded data to the Jungheinrich data & service cloud. Here, it is combined with business data, forming a comprehensive basis of information to benefit businesses.
Prodrive Technologies helped to develop the hardware fitted to each truck. Those solutions are now produced for Jungheinrich every year.
About the Jungheinrich Fleet Management System (FMS)
The Jungheinrich FMS is the digital solution for efficient and cross-location control of your truck fleet. The web-based tool combines truck data and commercial data in one system and, in conjunction with comprehensive data analysis, provides you with concrete information for business decisions.
Thanks to intelligent access control, the reporting of shock events, and cost and productivity data, you can use the Jungheinrich FMS to increase the utilization of your fleet, reduce operating costs, and increase safety for people and equipment in the warehouse. The system comes in different functional modules/bundles to flexibly accommodate your needs.
Jungheinrich’s challenge
Jungheinrich was looking for a new partner that could design and build high-quality, bespoke telematics hardware in volume. The company already offered a Gateway solution, but it did not have as many functions as today.
Therefore, Jungheinrich was keen to develop a more sophisticated solution that could be fitted to all equipment on their production lines.
Jungheinrich already had a list of functional requirements to help solve a range of customer challenges. For example, it needed a wide temperature range, industrial, heavy-duty, and cellular connectivity to feature both 4G and Wi-Fi. It also needed to interface with the equipment’s CANbus to support all the inputs and outputs required.
Telematics product design for Jungheinrich materials handling equipment
In close collaboration with the Jungheinrich team, Prodrive Technologies developed exceptionally reliable and stable telematics hardware that operates across all different models in the Jungheinrich range.
During the initial design process, Prodrive Technologies provided a flexible development service that accommodated core changes to the initial scope as their product lines evolved. Since the initial launch, Prodrive Technologies has evolved the design several times according to market demand and available technology.
In addition to the telematics hardware, Prodrive Technologies also provides part of the software that runs on the hardware which is frequently updated to adhere to the latest standards and delivers continuous support for the integration.
Volume production of telematics hardware for forklifts
In production, each telematics unit is already pre-programmed before it leaves the Prodrive production facility with strict quality control to verify the functionality of all circuits on the board and the software.
Prodrive Technologies is large enough to manage the volumes that Jungheinrich needs but small enough to make sure that Jungheinrich remains a priority customer.
Prodrive Technologies also developed hardware for more advanced fleet management requirements. It depends on the end-user as to how the fleet management functionality is used.
Development and production of telematics for OEMs
Prodrive Technologies’ development teams, production techniques, and highly automated factories help to bring low-cost, high-quality telematics to every OEM.
For more information about our telematics design and production service, or to get a quote, contact us.
For more insight, read our blog about “How OEMs can reduce telematics hardware costs.”