ALK Technologies — a developer of routing, mileage and mapping software — announced Tuesday, Aug. 7, the release of ALK|FleetSuite 21, a newly updated suite of fleet management technologies.
The company says ALK|FleetSuite 21 employs the mapping data of PC Miler 21 to provide critical visibility and control of fleet operations, including turn-by-turn directions for drivers, fleet location displays for managers, and arrival time notification for customers — all with pinpoint precision.
“ALK|FleetSuite 21 harnesses a number of ALK fleet technologies in an important management tool that provides drivers with customized directions,” says Ed Siciliano, vice president of sales and marketing for Princeton, N.J.-based ALK. “With ALK|Fleetsuite, drivers can navigate efficiently while avoiding low bridges, weight limits and other truck restrictions. ALK|FleetSuite Mapping shows managers exactly what they need to see, from a single truck on a city map to an entire fleet spread across the continent.”
ALK|FleetSuite 21 has been updated with the latest street-level data, including truck-specific detail. There are more than 460,000 highway miles of truck restrictions and allowances, as well as more than 5,000 truck weight enhancements.
According to the company, drivers using ALK|FleetSuite Directions can generate automated turn-by-turn driving directions in real time to their final destination; these directions can be transmitted with varying degrees of detail to conserve bandwidth and minimize messaging costs. Even at the lowest level of detail, the directions convey the necessary information in a visual format drivers can understand at a glance, ALK says; directions are transmitted in XML and are delivered seamlessly in real time over the drivers’ communications systems.
With ALK|FleetSuite Mapping, fleet managers can pinpoint the exact location of their fleet based on real-time latitude/longitude information. They also can zoom out to any selected point of view, from a city, a county, a state, a region or virtually all of North America.
While a truck is en route, ALK|FleetSuite Estimated Time of Arrival/Out of Route, (ETA/OoR) is designed to issue an alert when a truck deviates by a user-defined degree from the assigned route. Similarly, ALK|FleetSuite ETA/OoR can maintain an ongoing estimate of a truck’s arrival time at a specific destination and generate a revised ETA as conditions change, the company says.
ALK|FleetSuite’s elements can be licensed separately so fleets can find the solution best fitting their needs, ALK says; the software can run on PC/LAN Windows, Citrix Metaframe and Windows Terminal Server, AS/400 and CIC/MVS, IBM mainframe, UNIX and Linux, with other platforms able to access the suite using TCP/IP.
