GE Global Research, the technology development arm for the General Electric Company, and SandLinks Inc., of Israel and Dallas TX, have developed an In-transit Total Asset Visibility (ITAV) Solution, with the support of the BIRD Foundation.
The ITAV solution culminates the successful completion of a $2 million, multi-year development project that demonstrated the ability to track the location and condition of assets while in-transit.
The solution integrated GE Asset Intelligence’s VeriWise Asset Tracking Service and SandLinks’ Ultra Wide Band (UWB) RFID technology. GE’s telematics systems track the location and status of trailers, trucks, rail cars, fleet vehicles and other high value assets globally, while SandLinks provides real time, item level asset management, including inventory, location and remote sensing.
“This opens up a whole new dimension of In Transit Total Asset Visibility (ITAV),” said Dr. Joe Salvo, Manager, Pervasive Decisioning Systems Laboratory., GE Global Research. “Our satellite/CDMA based technologies can currently provide clients with the timely and accurate location of their mobile assets plus valuable usage and routing analytics. When adding the ability to assess the condition of assets while in-transit, we are now enabling a new ‘mobile inventory’ management paradigm that will provide a much higher degree of visibility into supply chains.”
Dr. Salvo added, “Providing total supply chain visibility will help to mitigate shrinkage, catch manifest errors in near real time, deliver the status of sensitive goods ahead of delivery and even redirect individual items’ destinations while in-transit.”
A team of engineers and scientists from SandLinks and GE Global Research have combined state-of-the art application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs and system-level thinking to deliver the price and performance features required to capture value in this rapidly evolving market.
GE and SandLinks have plans to offer this new integrated ITAV service. Commercial pilots will be available in the Q3 2009.
