A few years ago, Wayne Soutter and his family were visiting London when every parent’s biggest fear struck. “We stopped to look at a map,” he recalls, “and when we looked up, my six-year-old little boy had disappeared.” After 45 minutes of frantic searching, they were reunited in a train station a short walk from where they had lost track of him. The heart-wrenching experience set Soutter on a path that eventually led to TrackerSense, the company he launched late last year.
What began as a kernel of an idea—to develop a GPS tracker that parents could place inside children’s clothing so that they could always be quickly found—evolved into a far more workaday product after Soutter found himself discussing it with a seatmate on an airplane, who worked for a courier service. She told him a tracker that could be placed in a parcel and relay both its location and condition, in real time, would be a boon for the logistics industry.
Less than six months after launching TrackerSense, Soutter counts more than five courier services and two postal agencies among his customers.
The company offers two products, TrackerSense Lite and TrackerSense Ultra, available in two configurations based on an end user’s particular needs. TrackerSense Lite is a battery-operated device containing both a GPS receiver and a cellular network modem. The TrackerSense Ultra also includes a sensor module that tracks light, motion, shock, temperature and pressure levels.
The Lite 1 and Ultra 1 models come with a non-rechargeable battery that has a guaranteed lifespan of two weeks (but may last for up to 22 days) and is meant to be used only once. The Lite 365 and Ultra 365 models contain a rechargeable battery that can last for up to 30 days on a single charge.
Soutter has partnered with Aeris, a provider of cellular-based machine-to-machine communication systems, to provide cellular subscription management services to his customers. The SIM card inside each TrackerSense device is programmed for either a short-term contact (in the case of the TrackerSense Lite 1 or Ultra 1 devices) or an ongoing contract (in the case of the Lite 365 or Ultra 365 models).
Customers pay a flat fee $48.15 (£34.20) per unit for the Lite 1 or Ultra 1 devices. The Lite 365 and Ultra 365 devices are leased monthly for $8.12 (£5.77) or $13.51 (£9.60), respectively.
Rather than assigning trackers to specific parcels, some of Soutter’s early customers—including Mark 3 International and ProFS, an e-commerce fulfillment services company that operates globally—place them inside containers of parcels, known as consoles. This enables them to track the containers’ movements and the environment conditions to which they are exposed.
Other customers, including AmWorld, an international courier and logistics services firm, provide the trackers as a value-added service to their customers. AmWorld, Soutter explains, “specializes in shipping music paraphernalia, and they’re using the trackers to ensure that, say, a vintage record is shipped safely” and without being exposed to extreme temperatures or shock.
PostNL, the Netherlands’ national postal service, is using TrackerSense devices to perform quality-of-service checks by attaching trackers to random parcels in order to determine how long it takes for a shipment to reach its destination, and to monitor environmental conditions during transit. The devices are collected and reused continuously.
This winter, Canada Post has been testing TrackerSense devices, but due to the extremely low temperatures to which they are exposed in transit, Soutter explains, he is working with Aeris to designed a new, more rugged version of the tracker that can withstand extreme cold.
TrackerSense devices are set, by default, to report location once an hour, and the sensors record environmental conditions once every five minutes. But the data they collect, along with location information, is transmitted only if the device falls outside parameters set by the customer. TrackerSense’s customers manage the devices via a cloud-based management platform.
While located outdoors or in transit, Soutter says, the devices can generally be pinpointed via GPS, which provides an accuracy of plus or minus 20 meters (66 feet). When the devices are inside a depot or some other building that interferes with the GPS signal, the devices’ location is determined via triangulation of three or more nearby cell towers, thereby providing roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) of accuracy.