Swiss logistics provider EMIL EGGER offers its customers groupage freight, heavy haulage and warehouse logistics. For transport, the company uses swap bodies, which it rents out to customers - and which sometimes stay with those customers for years.
The challenge: Lack of transparency over the locations of the swap bodies in the rental business
With a fleet of several hundred swap bodies and other assets, tracking the location and actual use of each individual unit is close to impossible without technology.
One everyday example shows what this meant in practice: for just 5 to 10 transport jobs, the team spent at least an hour a day simply working out where a rented swap body actually was.
EMIL EGGER first tried to solve this with a solution from another tracking provider, but the system did not meet their requirements. Three points drove the search for an alternative:
- Unreliable tracking: the previous system delivered inaccurate, inconsistent GPS signals.
- Unsuitable hardware: the trackers were too large to mount on swap bodies, and battery life was too short.
- No visibility: neither the company nor its dispatch team could see where a swap body was or whether it was in use.
The solution: real-time data on rented swap bodies with SmartMakers GPS Asset Tracking
Looking for a reliable alternative, EMIL EGGER found SmartMakers GPS Asset Tracking. After a three-month pilot with 25 low-power GPS trackers, an initial 330 swap bodies in active service were fitted with trackers.
The trackers send GPS signals to the SmartMakers Real-Time Operations Platform at regular intervals. Via APIs, that data flows straight into EMIL EGGER's internal systems, so every dispatcher sees it directly in their transport management system.
The tracking is reliable and secure. The battery-powered trackers mount in minutes and run virtually maintenance-free for up to ten years.
Once the solution had proven itself on rented swap bodies, EMIL EGGER extended it well beyond them. Counterweights, mini cranes and mobile site tanks - previously tracked only in Excel spreadsheets - are now covered too. Today the company sees the location of more than 650 assets in real time.
"We didn't know where our customers were using the swap bodies and when they would return. We could only say which customer they were currently with. Sometimes we didn't see the swap bodies for years.”
Wolfgang Vlk, Logistics Coordinator, EMIL EGGER
The result: control over every rented swap body in circulation
EMIL EGGER's rental business only works if the company knows where its assets are and whether they're being used. That's exactly what SmartMakers GPS Asset Tracking provides: assets sitting at a customer's site for years stay visible and manageable. The payoff runs both ways - customers get faster, more reliable answers, while internally the company actively manages returns, frees up tied-up capital and cuts search time.
- Full transparency: the location and availability of every swap body can be checked at any time.
- Far less searching: what used to take about an hour of phone calls a day now takes a few clicks.
- Efficient fleet management: arrivals and departures at the company site and at destination sites are recorded automatically in the TMS.
- Data they can trust: the dispatch team relies on the data, so no one has to double-check by hand.
- No more backup spreadsheet: the parallel Excel list is gone - the data is always there in the TMS.
- Rolling inventory instead of a year-end count: stock figures are always current, so there's no year-end scramble.
- Proactive customer contact: when a swap body stays out longer than expected, the dispatch team can ask whether it's still needed. Material comes back faster and less capital sits idle at the customer's site.
- Low-maintenance operation: low transmission frequency and long battery life mean no extra maintenance in day-to-day use.
SmartMakers has supported EMIL EGGER for several years - from requirements analysis through implementation and beyond. GPS Asset Tracking is more than a tracking solution for the swap body fleet; it's the foundation for future digital collaboration. More assets and use cases are already planned, and the partnership will continue beyond the current projects.
