Asset Management

GNSS receivers need line of sight to satellites, so positioning degrades or fails inside warehouses, plants and metal containers. The standard indoor answer is Bluetooth Low Energy: a coin cell beacon fixed to each asset broadcasts its identifier for years, and BLE gateways installed around the building report which zone every tag was last seen in. Industrial tags reach 100 to 200 meters line of sight and run 2 to 5 years on a CR2477 cell, with long-life models rated up to 10 years.

Outdoors the roles flip: a battery GNSS tracker gives absolute position with an accuracy of a few meters anywhere under open sky. The two technologies complement each other, and hybrid trackers scan for nearby beacons when satellites are out of reach. The platform merges both sources into a single location history per asset, so operations see one timeline instead of two systems.

The EU Good Distribution Practice guidelines require medicines to be transported within their labelled conditions, typically 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for cold chain products, with temperature monitored and records available to the quality team. In practice that means calibrated dataloggers built to EN 12830:2018, the European standard for temperature recorders in transport and storage, using accuracy class 0.5, which is plus or minus 0.5 degrees, for the positive range common in pharma work.

When an excursion happens, the timestamped record is what qualified persons use to assess whether a batch can be released. The stakes are real: the IQVIA Institute estimates the biopharma industry loses around 35 billion dollars a year to failures in temperature-controlled logistics. Connected loggers turn that record from a USB file read at destination into a live alert raised while the shipment can still be saved.

Mechanical go/no-go indicators are the industry reference: standard labels ship in 25, 37, 50 and 75 g thresholds, with the lower values used on large fragile loads such as machinery and electronics racks and the higher ones on small, robust packages. The heavier and more delicate the item, the lower the g level at which damage starts, so the threshold is chosen from the packaging spec, not guessed.

An IoT impact sensor goes further than a label that turns red: it records the actual peak acceleration per axis with a timestamp, and combined with position data it documents when, where and how hard an asset was hit. That record is what makes a carrier claim stick. Typical devices use MEMS accelerometers in the plus or minus 16 g range for handling events, with dedicated impact recorders reaching 200 g for severe shocks.

Battery life is a direct trade against reporting frequency. Current cellular trackers in the Digital Matter Oyster3 class run on three AA lithium batteries and are rated for more than 10 years at one position per day; reporting every hour brings that down to roughly 3 to 7 years depending on coverage and temperature. BLE tags broadcasting continuously last 2 to 5 years on a coin cell, and up to 10 in long-life models.

The practical middle ground is movement-based reporting: the accelerometer keeps the tracker asleep while the asset sits still and wakes it to report frequently as soon as it moves. Returnable packaging can live with one or two fixes a day, while theft-prone machinery gets near real time updates only when it is actually moving, which is exactly when you need them.

It depends on the size of the fleet, the tracking hardware chosen and the integration work, so most projects are quoted individually. Battery cellular trackers and BLE tags are commodity hardware today, which keeps the per-asset cost low, and the platform side is predictable: our Private Cloud plans are published on the pricing page and start at 49 euros per month for a dedicated instance, which is usually enough to run a first pilot with real assets.

Enterprise and on premise deployments are sized per project, and the same license covers white label branding, so companies reselling asset tracking as their own product do not pay separately for it.

Yes. The built-in claim flow is designed for exactly that: you ship a tracker with a claim code or QR label, the end customer scans it and the device appears in their own account, with no manual provisioning on your side. Combined with user management, each customer sees only their assets, dashboards and alerts.

White label branding is part of the license, so the web console, dashboards and domain carry your brand, not ours. This is how asset management companies run their commercial products on Thinger.io: they own the customer relationship and the platform stays invisible underneath.