Asset Tracking for Everything the Truck Leaves Behind — Trailers, Containers, Tools, and the Rest of the Balance Sheet Nobody Watches
Most businesses track the vehicle and trust the rest to padlocks: the trailer worth more than the horse pulling it, the container of stock at a client’s yard, the compressor that has been “on Site B, probably” for three weeks, the ploughs and breakers that vanish from fence lines one piece at a time. Kendaall’s asset tracking service extends the platform past the ignition key — long-life battery trackers on the assets with no power of their own, movement alarms on the assets that should never move, and a whole-inventory map that answers the question every yard manager asks daily: where, exactly, is our stuff?
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Vehicles Get Stolen. Assets Just “Go Missing.” The Second One Costs More Because Nobody Counts It.
Asset tracking is vehicle tracking rebuilt for a harder problem: things with no engine, no battery, no driver, and — crucially — no one whose job it is to notice them gone. A stolen truck is discovered within hours because someone needed it; a stolen trailer, a missing container, or a walked-off welding set is discovered at stocktake, weeks later, cold, with no last-seen and no suspect list. The two loss patterns are so different that the industry gave them different names: vehicles are stolen, assets shrink — and shrinkage, being uncounted, unpoliced, and priced into budgets as a mystery, is quietly the larger number in many operations we instrument.
It helps to be precise about what sits inside this category and what sits outside it, because the word “asset” is used loosely across the industry and precision is what makes a tracking programme actually work. A vehicle — a truck, a car, a matatu, a motorcycle — has its own engine, its own battery, and, almost always, a driver who reports it missing within the hour. An asset, in the sense this page uses the word, is everything else of value that moves around a business without any of those three things: a trailer with no engine of its own, a shipping container with no battery, a compressor or tower light with no driver, a bundle of scaffold poles with no one assigned to watch it. The distinction is not academic — it is the reason asset trackers are built differently from vehicle trackers, and it is the reason the monitoring posture, the alert logic, and even the pricing model differ between the two services on this site. If your fleet is entirely self-powered vehicles, our GPS vehicle tracking service is the correct starting point; if your loss exposure sits in the things those vehicles pull, carry, or leave behind, this page is where the conversation should start.
The engineering answer is a different class of hardware and a different posture of monitoring. Where a vehicle tracker lives on the vehicle’s power and reports every few seconds, an asset tracker carries its own multi-year battery and reports on a rhythm matched to the asset’s life: a daily heartbeat position while at rest — enough to keep the inventory map true for years on one charge — snapping instantly into live pursuit mode the moment its motion sensor feels the asset move without authorisation. Fitting requires no wiring at all: high-strength magnetic mounts and concealed bolt-on housings go onto trailers, containers, implements, and equipment in minutes, while powered-but-parked assets like generators and trailers with lighting circuits can take wired units with battery backup for richer, faster reporting.
No engine, no wiring, no problem: the tracker brings its own power and sleeps until the asset moves. (Replace with your yard photo.)
The value concentrates in two places most balance sheets never connect. The first is loss: trailers and containers are prime theft targets precisely because they sit unattended by design, and attachments, tools, and portable plant walk off sites at a rate every contractor knows and few can quote. The second is quieter — finding your own things. Operations lose real money to internal invisibility: the delivery delayed because no one knew which yard held an empty trailer, the compressor re-hired externally while an identical one idled at Site C, the stocktake that takes a week of phone calls. The whole-inventory map dissolves both problems with the same data, and it lands in the same account as everything else you run with us — beside the trucks, the machines, and the farm fleet in one fleet management view, from a single container to an estate of thousands of tagged items across East Africa’s corridors.
It also matters what an asset tracker is not confused with. It is not an RFID tag, which needs a reader within a few metres to say anything at all; it is not a barcode label, which records identity but says nothing about location; and it is not a SIM-only cellular locator with no battery management, which will die in weeks on an unpowered item. The GPS-and-cellular asset tracker sits at the intersection of three older technologies — satellite positioning, low-power wide-area radio, and inventory management software — combined specifically to answer the question a barcode and an RFID tag cannot: where is it right now, and has it moved since anyone last looked?
The asset itself also moves through a lifecycle, and a tracking programme that only watches the “in transit” stage misses most of the value. A trailer’s life runs from purchase and registration, through years of loaded and unloaded moves, scheduled maintenance, occasional hire-out, and eventually disposal or resale — and at every one of those stages, the same question recurs in a different form: is it where it should be, is it doing what it should be doing, and is its condition consistent with its declared status? A tracked asset answers all three continuously rather than only at the moments someone remembers to check. Purchase-to-disposal visibility is what turns asset tracking from a theft-prevention add-on into a genuine capital-management tool: utilisation data collected over months tells a fleet owner which trailers are earning their keep and which are quietly becoming yard furniture, long before a formal asset audit would surface the same conclusion.
An Asset Doesn’t Travel Alone — It Travels With a Truck, a Site, a Client, and a Contract
No tagged asset exists in isolation, and the tracking record is only useful when it reflects that. A trailer is meaningless without the tractor unit pulling it and the dispatch order authorising the trip. A container is meaningless without the vessel or truck that moved it last, the port or depot it cleared through, and the client site it is currently sitting at. A hired-out compressor is meaningless without the hire contract, the client name, and the site geofence that defines where it is allowed to be. This is why Kendaall’s asset tracking module does not treat an asset as a lone dot on a map — it links every tagged item to the vehicle that last carried it, the site it currently occupies, the custody record that explains why it’s there, and the broader fleet account it belongs to, so that a single query — “where is asset #4471, and is it supposed to be there?” — returns a complete answer instead of a coordinate.
That linkage also explains why asset tracking sits so naturally beside our other services rather than as a bolted-on afterthought. A logistics company running trucks between Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kampala cares about trailers for the same reason it cares about the trucks: both determine whether a delivery lands on time. A construction contractor running excavators and graders cares about attachments for the same reason it cares about the machines: both represent capital sitting on an exposed site overnight. A farm running tractors across scattered blocks cares about implements for the same reason it cares about the tractors: both are needed at the same time in planting season, and both are targets when the compound gate is unattended. Asset tracking is the module that completes the picture these other services start.
| Attribute | Vehicle Tracking | Asset Tracking |
|---|---|---|
| Power source | Vehicle battery / ignition circuit | Internal sealed battery, 3+ years, or wired with battery backup |
| Reporting rhythm | Continuous, every few seconds while moving | Daily heartbeat at rest; live mode triggered by motion |
| Typical loss pattern | Theft — discovered within hours | Shrinkage — discovered at stocktake, weeks later |
| Fitting method | Wired into vehicle electrics by a technician | Magnetic, bolt-on, or concealed — no wiring required |
| Primary question answered | Where is the vehicle, and how is it being driven? | Where is the item, has it moved, and who has custody? |
| Companion service | GPS Vehicle Tracking | Fleet Management |
Search engines and industry bodies increasingly draw the same distinction. Global standards bodies such as GS1 maintain identification standards specifically for tracking physical assets and shipments through supply chains — separate from vehicle telematics standards — because the two problems (identifying and locating a self-powered vehicle versus identifying and locating an unpowered item moving through custody changes) genuinely require different data models. Container tracking in particular follows the ISO 6346 container coding standard, which is why our container tracking records the ISO owner code and check digit alongside the GPS position — it lets custody, ownership, and location resolve to the same physical box without ambiguity.
The relationship between an asset and its environment is worth spelling out further, because most of the value in a tracking programme comes from context rather than the raw coordinate itself. A single GPS position — a latitude and longitude with a timestamp — tells you almost nothing on its own; it becomes useful only once it’s read against a geofence boundary, a dispatch order, a hire contract, or a site’s operating hours. This is why every module on this page pairs a location signal with a business rule: a trailer’s position matters against the question “is this an authorised move,” a container’s position matters against “is this the site the client named,” and a compressor’s position matters against “is this within the hire period.” The tracker supplies the fact; the platform supplies the meaning, and it is the combination — never the bare coordinate — that turns into an alarm, a report, or a piece of evidence in a dispute.
That same layered relationship extends outward to the people and systems around the asset: the driver who authorises a trailer’s move, the yard manager who reconciles the daily heartbeat map against a physical walk-through, the finance team that reads utilisation reports to decide whether to buy another compressor or simply redeploy an idle one, and the insurer who reads the custody chain after a claim. Asset tracking, properly built, is less a single device on a single trailer and more a web of linked facts — device, site, contract, custody, vehicle, client — each strengthening the reliability of the others.
Six Ways Unpowered Assets Bleed Value — and the Tracker Posture That Stops Each
The Trailer That Left With the Wrong Truck
Trailer theft is a coupling and twenty minutes — and trailer swap fraud is subtler still: your trailer working someone else’s loads between your jobs. Movement alarms fire the instant an at-rest trailer moves without a dispatch order, live tracking follows it, and truck-to-trailer pairing (Module 04) means the platform knows which horse is lawfully pulling which trailer at all times. The unlawful coupling announces itself the moment the fifth wheel locks, not the moment someone finally asks where the trailer went.
Containers That Become Buildings, Stores & Rumors
Containers live long, travel far, and change purpose without asking — cargo box, site store, someone’s kiosk two counties away. A magnetic tracker with a multi-year heartbeat keeps each unit on the map through every life stage, geofences flag departures from assigned sites, and the demurrage conversation with the client who “returned it weeks ago” ends with a timestamped position history rather than a dispute over whose word to trust.
The Site Shrinkage Nobody Files a Report For
Breakers, buckets, welding sets, tower lights, scaffold loads — the equipment that leaves construction sites in pickups at dusk, one plausible trip at a time. Tagged assets answer roll call daily, after-hours movement alarms catch the dusk pickup in the act, and — the deterrent our plant clients report most — sites where tagging is known simply stop shrinking. Thieves audit risk faster than accountants audit stock, and a known tracker changes their arithmetic before it changes yours.
“It’s at Site B, Probably”
Internal invisibility is shrinkage’s respectable twin: nothing stolen, everything unfindable. The inventory map replaces the phone-around — every tagged asset’s live location, last movement, and current site on one screen — so dispatch stops sending trucks to collect trailers that aren’t there, idle equipment gets deployed instead of duplicated, and stocktake becomes a report you export rather than a week you lose to phone calls and guesswork.
Hired-Out Equipment in Custody Limbo
Equipment hire firms live the custody problem daily: which client holds which asset, since when, and is it where the contract says? Per-asset custody records tie each unit to its hire, site geofences verify it stayed put, movement outside the agreement alerts immediately, and returns are confirmed by position rather than paperwork — the same telemetry-backed billing logic our car hire and plant hire clients run, extended to everything without an engine.
Cargo That Travels Blind Between Handovers
High-value consignments spend their riskiest hours in gaps — transloading yards, border queues, third-party depots — where your truck’s tracker no longer speaks for them. A portable tracker travelling inside the consignment keeps the cargo itself reporting through every handover, with route-corridor alerts and, where fitted, door and temperature sensing for sealed and cold-chain loads — visibility that follows the goods, not the vehicle, across the same corridors as our rail freight deployments.
Five Modules for the Assets Without Ignition Keys
MODULE 01 · Long-Life & Wired Asset Hardware
The hardware layer is chosen per asset, not per catalogue: sealed magnetic and bolt-on units with multi-year batteries for the truly unpowered (trailers without lighting feeds, containers, implements, tools), wired units with battery backup where any power exists (trailer lighting circuits, gensets, reefer units) for faster reporting, and compact portable units for consignments and short deployments. All hardware ships from the asset tracker range, is fitted — concealed where theft is the threat, accessible where inventory is — by the installation team in minutes per unit, and is battery-managed by the platform so replacements are scheduled, never discovered.
Hardware selection follows the asset’s own physical profile rather than a one-size default. A steel shipping container with no internal power draws a heavy-duty magnetic unit rated for years of outdoor exposure; a canvas-sided trailer with a 12-volt lighting loop takes a wired unit that trickle-charges off that circuit and reports far more frequently as a result; a hand tool crate that moves between three sites in a week takes a compact portable unit designed to be relocated by a foreman without a technician’s visit. This asset-first hardware logic — matching the tracker’s power source, housing, and reporting profile to what the asset actually is and how it actually behaves — is the same design principle that runs through GPS asset-tracking standards more broadly, and it is why a single “asset tracker” SKU rarely serves an entire mixed inventory well.
- Magnetic, bolt-on, wired, and portable formats per asset class
- 3+ year battery life on heartbeat mode, platform-monitored
- IP-rated sealed housings for outdoor and washdown life
- Concealed or accessible fitting matched to the threat model
MODULE 02 · Rest-and-Pursuit Monitoring
The posture that makes multi-year batteries possible: at rest, the tracker heartbeats its position daily and sleeps; at motion, its accelerometer wakes it into live mode — frequent positions, instant alarms, full pursuit telemetry — until the movement is authorised or resolved. Authorised moves are one tap (dispatch order, hire delivery, site transfer, each with an expected corridor); everything else escalates: asset owner, yard manager, and, where a theft is running, the recovery team with live coordinates.
This two-state model — long dormancy punctuated by immediate, high-fidelity alertness — mirrors how motion-sensing IoT devices are designed across the wider tracking industry: an accelerometer costs almost nothing in stored energy to sample continuously, while the cellular radio and GPS receiver are the components that actually draw the battery down. By keeping the radio and satellite receiver asleep until the accelerometer detects genuine motion, the unit spends its finite battery budget almost entirely on the minutes that matter, which is the same underlying principle that lets a smoke detector run on one battery for a decade while still reacting to smoke within seconds.
- Daily heartbeat at rest; automatic live mode on motion
- Unauthorised-movement alarms within moments of the first metre
- Transit authorisations with route corridors and ETAs
- Recovery escalation with pursuit-grade positioning
MODULE 03 · Inventory-on-a-Map & Custody Records
Every tagged asset, one map: filtered by type, site, client, or status, with per-asset pages holding identity, photos, location history, and custody chain — checked out to which site, crew, or hire client, since when, returned when. Stocktakes export in minutes with exceptions (assets not where their record says) flagged automatically, and utilisation views show which equipment earns and which merely occupies the yard, informing hire-out, redeploy, and disposal decisions.
The custody record is, in effect, the digital chain of evidence for a physical item — the same concept that underpins supply-chain traceability frameworks and, at a smaller scale, the evidence chains used in legal and insurance disputes. Each entry (who took custody, when, at what site, under what authorisation) is timestamped and position-verified, so a custody claim is never just a name in a spreadsheet; it is a name attached to a place and a moment that the GPS record either confirms or contradicts.
- Whole-inventory live map with type, site, and client filters
- Check-in/check-out custody chains per asset
- One-click stocktake exports with exception flagging
- Utilisation views: earning assets vs yard furniture
MODULE 04 · Trailer & Container Logistics
The logistics-specific layer: truck-to-trailer pairing that records which tractor lawfully coupled which trailer and alarms the unlawful coupling; drop-yard geofences confirming trailers and boxes are where dispatch believes; dwell reports exposing the trailer that has “waited for a load” for eleven days; and client-site tracking that settles container return and demurrage disputes with position history instead of correspondence. For mixed fleets this module runs beside the trucks’ own tracking in the logistics platform, so the horse and its trailer are one story on one screen.
Dwell time in particular is a metric borrowed directly from port and terminal operations, where a container sitting idle in a yard is treated as a cost centre in its own right — tying up yard space, attracting demurrage, and signalling a planning failure somewhere upstream. Applying the same dwell logic to trailers and containers on Kenyan and regional corridors turns an invisible inefficiency (equipment quietly not earning) into a visible, rankable report that a fleet manager can act on weekly rather than discover at year-end.
- Truck-to-trailer pairing with unlawful-coupling alarms
- Drop-yard and client-site geofences with dwell reporting
- Container return verification and demurrage evidence
- Unified horse-and-trailer views for dispatch
MODULE 05 · Consignment & Condition Monitoring
For cargo whose value justifies its own witness: portable trackers travelling inside consignments through every handover, gap, and mode change; door-open sensing on sealed loads with position-stamped events; and temperature logging for cold-chain goods — the flowers, pharmaceuticals, and fresh produce whose condition is their value — alarmed in transit rather than discovered at delivery. Consignment records export as the delivery-condition evidence that ends receiver disputes.
Cold-chain monitoring in particular connects asset tracking to a well-established discipline in food safety and pharmaceutical logistics, where temperature excursions are treated as compliance events, not just quality issues. Kenya’s cut-flower and horticultural export sector, along with pharmaceutical distributors, already operate under cold-chain expectations set by international buyers and regulators; a portable tracker with temperature logging turns those expectations from a paper declaration at dispatch into a continuous, evidence-backed record that travels with the goods themselves.
- In-consignment portable trackers across handovers and modes
- Door and seal events with time and position
- Cold-chain temperature logging with breach alarms
- Delivery-condition evidence packs per consignment
Roll call, answered: every trailer, container, and compressor on one map, with the two that moved last night flagged. (Replace with a dashboard screenshot.)
If It’s Worth Stealing, Losing, or Phoning Around For — It’s Worth a Tracker
Trailers & Containers
Flatbeds, skeletals, tankers, boxes, and site stores — the highest-value unpowered assets in the country, and the most-targeted.
Machinery Attachments
Buckets, breakers, augers, compaction plates — the plant fleet’s loose change, which stops being loose once tagged.
Site & Event Equipment
Compressors, tower lights, pumps, scaffolding loads, staging and sound gear deployed to fields and venues for days at a time.
Farm Implements
Ploughs, harrows, planters, and trailers across the blocks — the farm platform’s off-season watch list.
Generators & Static Plant
Towable and skid sets on movement watch alongside their runtime and fuel monitoring.
High-Value Consignments
Export cargo, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and cold-chain loads — tracked as goods, not as whichever vehicle happens to carry them.
Why Asset Records Need to Speak the Same Language as Your Auditors and Your Insurer
A tracked asset is only as useful as the identity attached to it, and identity in logistics and equipment management follows established conventions for good reason: they let an insurer, a client, a port authority, or an auditor confirm that the item in the GPS record is the same item named in the contract. Container identity follows the ISO 6346 standard, a four-letter owner prefix and check-digit system recognised at every port and border in the world; recording that code against the tracker’s device ID means a container’s GPS history and its shipping documents always resolve to the same physical box, with no room for the “which container do you mean?” conversation that costs hours during a dispute.
For equipment, tools, and hired-out plant, the equivalent discipline comes from asset identification frameworks such as those published by GS1, whose Global Returnable Asset Identifier conventions are built specifically for exactly this category: reusable, non-consumable items — trailers, containers, crates, pallets, hired plant — that move between custodians repeatedly over years. Kendaall’s per-asset records follow the same logic even where a formal GRAI code is not in use: a stable, permanent identifier per physical item, independent of whichever driver, site, or client currently has it, so the location history and custody chain stay attached to the asset itself for its entire operating life rather than resetting with every handover.
This matters commercially as much as operationally. Insurers assessing theft or loss claims for trailers, containers, and hired plant increasingly expect a documented location and custody history rather than a verbal account, and a GPS-backed record with timestamped movement events is materially stronger evidence than a stock register updated monthly. The same record set doubles as the compliance trail cold-chain exporters need to satisfy buyer audits, and as the usage evidence that turns a disputed hire invoice into an undisputed one.
None of this requires the asset owner to become a standards expert. The point of building identity conventions into the platform from the start is precisely so that nobody on your team has to think about ISO codes, GRAI numbering, or audit-trail formatting day to day — you tag the asset, name it, and use it; the underlying record simply happens to be structured in a way that will hold up the day an insurer, auditor, or client asks a hard question about a specific item’s history.
Three Kenyan Operations, Three Different Assets, the Same Underlying Problem
A Logistics Firm’s Trailer Fleet Outnumbers Its Trucks Three to One
Transport companies running the Nairobi–Mombasa and Northern Corridor routes typically own more trailers than tractor units, because trailers sit loading and offloading far longer than the trucks that pull them — a truck can drop one trailer and hitch another within minutes, while the dropped trailer might wait days for its next load. That ratio is exactly why trailer visibility matters more than truck visibility in this sector: with three trailers per truck, a fleet manager who only tracks the powered vehicle is blind to roughly two-thirds of the fleet’s capital at any given moment. Truck-to-trailer pairing under Module 04 closes that gap by keeping every trailer’s status — loaded, empty, in transit, dwelling at a drop yard — visible on the same map as the trucks, with dwell reports surfacing the trailers quietly costing money by sitting unused.
A Construction Contractor’s Site Loses Tools Faster Than It Loses Fuel
On active construction sites, fuel theft gets the security budget because it’s measured and reconciled weekly; tool and attachment shrinkage rarely gets the same attention because nobody reconciles a bucket or a breaker with the same discipline they reconcile a fuel tank. Yet the resale value of a stolen compaction plate or a set of scaffold couplers, multiplied across a site over a project’s lifetime, frequently exceeds the fuel loss that gets all the attention. Tagging the attachment and tool inventory — not just the machines — brings the same reconciliation discipline to the category that has historically escaped it, and site managers running tagged inventories consistently report that the shrinkage drops within the first month, often before a single theft is actually caught in progress: the presence of tracking changes behaviour on-site as much as it catches incidents after the fact.
An Equipment Hire Firm’s Biggest Risk Is a Client Who Simply Doesn’t Give the Generator Back
Plant and generator hire businesses face a specific version of the custody problem: the asset leaves the yard legitimately, under a signed contract, and the risk isn’t theft in the conventional sense — it’s a client who quietly extends their use past the agreed return date, moves the unit to a second site without informing the hire firm, or disputes the return date entirely when the invoice arrives. A geofence tied to the hired site, combined with a custody record that timestamps every check-out and check-in against GPS position, removes the ambiguity from all three scenarios: an overdue asset surfaces automatically, an off-site move triggers an alert the moment it happens rather than at the next physical inspection, and a disputed return date is settled by the position log rather than by whoever argues more persuasively.
What Yards, Sites and Hire Firms Ask Before Tagging the Inventory
How can a battery last three years — and what happens when it runs out?
The rest-and-pursuit posture is the whole trick: at rest the tracker wakes once a day, reports its position, and sleeps again — a rhythm a sealed battery sustains for years — and it spends power freely only during movement events, which are rare by definition for assets that shouldn’t move. The platform tracks every unit’s battery level and schedules replacements in planned batches, so the fleet of tags never dies quietly; you’ll be told which units need attention months ahead, and swaps take minutes per asset.
Won’t a thief just find the magnetic tracker and throw it off?
The threat model shapes the fitting. Where theft is the concern, units are concealed — inside chassis members, within housings, under structures — placed by technicians who fit these for a living, and removal or tamper itself raises the alarm while the asset’s movement is already alerting in parallel. The thief’s problem is time: the first alarm fires within moments of the first metre, so even a found-and-discarded tracker has usually done its job — named the moment, the place, and the direction while the trail is hot.
How fast do I know if a trailer or container moves when it shouldn’t?
Within moments of the movement starting: the motion sensor wakes the unit immediately regardless of the heartbeat schedule, and the alarm — app and SMS — carries the position, time, and asset identity. Authorised moves never alarm because dispatch marks them first (one tap, with an expected corridor); everything unmarked escalates through the chain you define. The daily heartbeat is for the inventory map; the motion wake-up is for the theft.
We hire out equipment. Can the tracking tie into our hire paperwork?
That’s Module 03’s home use: each hire checks the asset out to a client and site, the geofence verifies it stayed where contracted, movement outside the agreement alerts you (not the client), and the return is confirmed by position with the custody chain closing automatically. Overdue and off-site assets surface on one exception screen, and the per-asset history — every hire, every site, every incident — becomes the record disputes are settled from.
What does it cost per asset — we’d be tagging dozens of items, not three trucks.
Asset trackers are priced for exactly that scale: hardware sits well below vehicle-tracker cost, subscriptions are lighter (a daily heartbeat consumes a fraction of a live vehicle feed), and volume tiers apply from small batches — details on the pricing page. The practical approach most clients take: tag the top value tier first (trailers, containers, generators), measure the shrinkage change for a quarter, then extend down the register as the numbers argue for it. The quote form prices your actual asset list.
Does asset tracking share the account with our vehicle tracking?
Yes — one login, one map, one alert stream. Tagged assets appear beside your trucks, cars, and machines with their own data layers (heartbeat, custody, battery state), pairing logic connects trailers to the tractors pulling them, and reports consolidate across everything. Mixed estates also stack into combined volume pricing, and takeovers from other providers run through the usual audit process.
How is a container’s identity kept accurate across GPS records and shipping paperwork?
Each container’s device is registered against its ISO 6346 owner code and check digit at fitting time, so the GPS position history, the shipping line’s bill of lading, and Kendaall’s custody record all resolve to the same physical unit. That matters most during demurrage or return disputes, where the question is rarely “where is a container” but “where is this container, specifically” — and an identity mismatch is the easiest way for a dispute to drag on unnecessarily.
Can the same tracker monitor temperature for cold-chain cargo, or is that separate hardware?
Temperature and door sensing are add-on modules on the same portable and wired units used for position — no separate device is required. A single consignment tracker reports location, records door-open events, and logs temperature on the interval you set, with breach alarms firing the moment a cold-chain load drifts outside its set range rather than waiting for delivery to find out the flowers wilted or the vaccines warmed.
How many assets do we need before a tracking programme makes financial sense?
There’s no hard minimum, but the maths tends to favour tagging once an asset class has three properties: it’s individually valuable enough that one loss stings, it moves between sites or custodians often enough that “where is it” is a recurring question rather than a rare one, and it’s numerous enough that manual reconciliation has already become a burden. A single trailer might not justify a formal programme; twelve trailers almost always do. The quote form will price a small pilot batch if you want to test the case on your top-value tier before extending further.
Do you tag assets that already have a tracker from another provider, or only new equipment?
Both. Mixed inventories — some assets already tagged by a previous provider, others untagged — are common, and the onboarding audit (the same process used for vehicle tracker takeovers) verifies which existing units are functional, which need replacement, and which assets have no coverage at all, so the inventory map is complete and accurate from day one rather than showing confident positions for devices that quietly stopped reporting months ago.
What happens to the tracking record if we sell or retire an asset?
The asset’s full history — location log, custody chain, utilisation data — can be exported as a record at the point of sale or retirement, which is useful both for a buyer wanting proof of usage and condition, and for your own books when writing the item off. The device itself is either transferred to the new owner’s account (with their consent) or removed and redeployed to a replacement asset, so the hardware investment isn’t lost when an individual item reaches the end of its working life.
Take Roll Call Once. Then Never Phone Around for a Trailer Again.
Send us the asset list — trailers, containers, equipment, implements, consignment types — and we’ll return the hardware mix, the fitting plan, and per-asset pricing tiered to your volumes. Yard surveys are free for inventories of twenty tagged assets and above.
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