Much attention focuses on the difficulty of making cars. But finished vehicle logistics (FVL) — the process of getting completed units from factory to dealer — is nearly as challenging.

The delivery of just one finished vehicle to the consumer requires an elaborate orchestration between original equipment manufacturers, vehicle yards and vehicle transporters.

Finished vehicle yards, in particular, are highly intricate hubs that span hundreds of acres, where thousands of vehicles are staged for transportation to local dealerships. This critical step in the supply chain — the handoff between the yard and the truck driver — is complicated and entails multiple challenges. 

Vehicles in a yard never sit still. They’re constantly moving to different locations. It’s common for yards to rely on manual tracking processes like printed lists and colored tags, which are insufficient for locating vehicles quickly. If a driver stashes a car in haste because they’re behind schedule, the vehicle’s location might not get properly recorded. 

If vehicles aren’t ready (and in the right spot) when transportation arrives, congestion and bottlenecks will occur, grinding the supply chain to an unceremonious halt. Wait times can be costly — not only for the yard, but also for the OEMs and dealerships who have their own quotas to meet, and supplier relations to maintain. In addition, a misplaced car is subject to "lot rot," resulting in a depleted battery, low tire pressure and nicks and scrapes that need remediation.

Other challenges arise from unpredictable conditions in the form of inclement weather and labor shortages due to employees quitting unexpectedly or calling out sick. 

These challenges highlight the need for systems that transcend manual processes by automatically tracking vehicle movements in real time. One option is real-time location intelligence, supported by technologies such as GPS-enabled tags, radio frequency identification (RFID) and Bluetooth.

This medley of applications allows finished-vehicle yard operators to receive updated information on the location of their vehicles with each move, eliminating the need for manual yard checks. At the same time, this greater visibility provides valuable insights into the productivity and performance of workers and other processes, helping managers identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies to streamline the implementation of improvements and the allocation of resources.  

Of course, even real-time location intelligence technologies run into their own challenges. Battery life, for example, becomes an issue when GPS tags are continuously pinged. To solve this issue, some best-in-class systems utilize accelerometers to wake up the tag only when the car moves to conserve power.

Managing connectivity can also be an issue. The use of Wi-Fi or cellular networks each comes with its own set of problems, such as congestion and coverage. Using an easy-to-setup, software-defined radio network can drive down the cost of connectivity for enterprise IoT applications.

Perhaps the most impactful benefit of real-time location intelligence is its ability to modernize legacy processes through automation. Before adopting real-time vehicle tracking technology, for example, one North American vehicle manufacturer’s truck assembly plant faced inefficiencies because of manual processes that extended search times. 

At any given time, the manufacturer had more than a hundred vehicles awaiting repair. Productivity took a hit, with “time to locate” and “mean time to repair” metrics suffering. This hurt the company’s financials and took it longer to convert cars to cash. Operational disruptions were also common. Fed up with these issues, the manufacturer turned to real-time location intelligence technology to streamline and enhance the process.

Equipment implementation included several gateways that communicated with some two thousand GPS tracker tags. Additionally, the provider supplied advanced software via a portal for dashboard access, a cloud data repository, web-based reporting applications and REST application programming interfaces for seamless data exchange. These enhancements resulted in an estimated $500,000 in savings, a 20% reduction in vehicle moves per repair, and a 5% to 10% reduction in dwell time.

While world-spanning conflicts, pandemics and other unknown factors are out of the control of FVL companies, they can still use real-time location intelligence to address the challenges in their own yards. After all, having just one vehicle out of place is enough to snowball into something much more severe.

Adrian Jennings is chief product officer with Cognosos.