Trailers, containers, generators, compressors and site plant — tracked on multi-year battery life, with movement alerts, geofences and the utilisation data that tells you whether you need to buy another one.
Unpowered assets are a different engineering problem from vehicles, and the design trade-off is always battery against reporting frequency.
Asset tracking is sold on theft prevention and bought, eventually, for utilisation. The theft case is easy to explain and genuinely real, particularly for generators and small plant that walk off sites. But the number that changes a business is usually the other one: most companies with a hundred unpowered assets discover that a meaningful share of them have not moved in months, and that they were about to purchase more.
The engineering constraint is power. A vehicle tracker draws from the vehicle; a container tracker draws from a battery that has to last years, because nobody will send someone to a port to change it. Everything else follows from that trade-off. Reporting every few minutes gives you a vehicle-like experience and a battery life measured in weeks. Reporting once or twice a day with motion-triggered wake gives you years. For a trailer that sits still for days at a time, the second is obviously right, and expecting live-map behaviour from it is a misunderstanding rather than a fault.
Mounting matters more than people expect. An asset tracker is a theft deterrent only if it is not the first thing a thief removes, which argues for concealment, and it is a reliable reporter only if it has some view of the sky, which argues against burying it in steel. On containers the usual answer is a magnetic or bolted unit in a position that is awkward to reach and not obvious from outside. We will advise on placement per asset type because getting this wrong quietly halves the value.
For rental and leasing businesses the strongest case is neither theft nor utilisation but billing. If you hire out plant by the day or by run hours, a tracker that records exactly when an asset arrived, how long it ran and when it came back converts an argument into an invoice line. That is the same data that settles the dispute when a client insists the generator was returned a week earlier than your paperwork says.
Where cargo security is the concern, electronic seals are the adjacent product: a unit that reports position and also whether a door or lock has been opened, which is what customs-sensitive and high-value movements usually need. Support varies by device, so tell us what you are moving and what evidence you are expected to produce.
It depends almost entirely on how often you ask it to report. A unit reporting once or twice a day with motion-triggered wake commonly lasts several years; the same unit reporting every few minutes lasts weeks. There is no way around that trade-off, so the right approach is to decide what question you are answering — where is it, versus watch it move — and set the interval to match.
Yes, subject to roaming on the device SIM and to the usual caveat that coverage at sea is not cellular. For cross-border land movement within the GCC this works normally. For sea freight, a cellular tracker reports at origin and destination and goes quiet in between unless you are using a satellite-capable unit, which is a different and more expensive class of device.
Yes, by pairing the asset tracker with the vehicle tracker so the platform knows which tractor is currently moving which trailer. That gives you trailer-level trip history, which is what you need to attribute mileage, tolls and dwell time to the right asset and the right contract rather than to the tractor alone.
Concealment and alerting, rather than physical invulnerability. A sealed unit mounted somewhere awkward is not obvious to a casual thief, and the platform raises an alert on tamper or on an unexpected loss of signal, so removal becomes an event rather than a silence. No tracker is unremovable by someone determined and informed, and any vendor claiming otherwise is overselling.
Yes, and run hours are usually more valuable there than position. For a generator or compressor the useful outputs are how many hours it ran, whether it is on the site it was allocated to, when it needs servicing, and whether it has moved outside working hours. All of that works on a battery unit with no connection to the machine, and more is available where the equipment exposes data directly.
Tell us the asset types and how often you need to hear from them. We will specify the devices and the realistic battery life.
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