MachineQ, the IoT unit of broadband service provider Comcast, and IoT hardware firm CoreKinect announced this week that they are collaborating to offer a LoRaWAN-based outdoor asset tracking solution for inventory management.
Plus, they already have a customer: ADESA, unit of global wholesale used vehicle digital marketplace operator KAR Auction Services, recently said it is using the the solution as the basis for its own mobile app capability to help customers and employees to more quickly locate vehicles at ADESA's more than 70 North America locations.
In all, that use case involved the deployment of 160 MachineQ Field16C IoT gateways and 325,000 CoreKinect tracking devices. MachineQ provides the gateways and LoRaWAN clod connectivity for the data collected and transmitted by CoreKinect devices, which support up to seven years of continuous use on a single battery.
Being able to provide automated, near real-time visibility into vehicle inventory is a pretty timely application for IoT. Russ Richardson, executive director of sales at MachineQ, told Fierce Electronics, “With the shortage of cars in the market today, it’s important to track vehicles quickly and accurately so that they can be sent to the right location and ready for sale as soon as possible. With this solution in place, the customer can do just that.”
The deployment also can be a critical proof point for advancing enterprise IoT use cases and showing there are scalable solutions to address them. Many enterprise IoT projects continue to stumble due to scope and complexity.
Jacob Wharton, director of operations at MachineQ, said, “Complexity and scale are two things that can keep organizations from successful implementation of a large IoT deployment. Time invested in advance planning and end-to-end project management can drastically accelerate successful delivery. “ This project took about 60 days to get up and running despite the challenges of work on-site amid the pandemic.
Richardson added this deployment is one of MachineQ’s largest by a number of different measures-geographic size, number of gateways and devices, payloads sent, for example–and called it “a great proof point” for the ability of LoRaWAN to scale.
The MachineQ officials said the company is working with CoreKinect to pursue other deployment opportunities in different vertical markets and for a variety of use cases.
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