How to find mobile assets quickly

You are on a flight; you are thirsty,  you find the flight attendant…  to be told they lost the drinks trolley.

They waste valuable time looking for the trolley, possibly neglecting other passengers who might need something more urgent.

Many jobs depend on using certain tools or materials, and both time and money are wasted looking for them – especially if they are mobile. Mobile assets, like trolleys and carts, are used widely in hospitals, manufacturing facilities, services industries and by airlines. Keeping track of them is a challenge, which is why many are focusing on efficiency and automation.

The airline industry, heavily affected by the pandemic and currently struggling to increase traffic again, has a particularly heavy inventory of mobile assets. On a single flight you can find up to 75 trolleys for food, beverages and other articles, and a medium-sized airline operates around 200 airplanes. If a trolley is misplaced and the flight delayed, every minute of delay costs on average $38.

Off your trolley

If this type of occurrence is common, as a result of non-optimal processing of trolleys or other mobile assets, it can represent significant additional costs to an airline – especially when calculated across the whole fleet over a period. And these mobile assets don’t come cheap; replacement of a trolley on average costs $250.

Trolley management means ensuring that the right trolleys, with the right content, and under the right conditions (for instance temperature for perishable items like food) are loaded onto the right airplanes at the right time. And, once the flight is over, are replenished quickly and correctly for the next flight.

What if an airline could have a real-time view on the current locations of their trolleys? What if they knew their current status and condition? And could tell when they were replenished? This would give an airline the power to optimize utilization of its trolleys and ultimately fully automate the replenishment process.

This capability is only possible with the unique combination of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud integration capabilities – to not only capture all internal/external data, but also present the data to the right decision-makers in a timely manner so that they can act on it.

Watch the Mobile Asset Management demo here to learn how your airline can connect your mobile assets and integrate all data to enable real-time tracking and decisions. And, you can take a closer look in this video. 

Learn how to:

• Connect your mobile assets and start collecting key operational data
• Create a dashboard with an up-to-date overview of the key parameters of your mobile assets
• Have a real-time view of your different mobile asset types and their status
• Monitor and automate the mobile asset replenishment process

Then get started immediately with a free trial of Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform.