GE Global Research, the technology development arm for the General Electric Co., and SandLinks Inc., of Israel and Dallas, have developed an In Iransit Total Asset Visibility (ITAV) Solution, with the support of the BIRD Foundation. The companies say the ITAV solution culminates the successful completion of a $2 million multiyear development project that demonstrated the ability to track the location and condition of assets while in transit.
The companies say the solution integrated GE Asset Intelligence’s VeriWise Asset Tracking Service and SandLinks’ Ultra Wide Band (UWB) RFID technology. GE’s telematics systems are designed to 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 ITAV,” says Dr. Joe Salvo, manager of GE Global Research’s Pervasive Decisioning Systems Laboratory. “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. 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, according to the companies. GE and SandLinks have plans to offer this new integrated ITAV service, with commercial pilots available in Q3 2009.
