French company Safecube, born from a joint venture between Michelin, Sigfox and Argon in 2019, has launched an asset tracker using IoT technology and Microsoft Azure services.

Safecube continues its development in the supply chain ecosystem by providing visibility on transport flows and now assets by leveraging digital innovations such as the IoT.

Its initial offering proposed real-time visibility on multimodal flows with an IoT approach. Michelin was the first to use Safecube’s IoT service.

Now the company is diversifying by creating an asset tracker, LocaTrack. This will track and monitor assets, while the first Safecube offering provides visibility over supply chain flows.

Almost two years after the launch of its first flow tracker, Safecube expertise has expanded to include asset tracking. The purpose is to offer a global view of the fleet using an interface for monitoring assets activity.

Thanks to trackers positioned on assets and connected to the Sigfox 0G network, it is possible to know in real time the exact location of a trailer, a pallet or an industrial tool for geolocation, asset tracking and fleet maintenance management.

This platform integrates directly into the user’s information system. It lets users track assets, monitor their condition (full, empty, cold, hot and so on) and optimise their management. The objective is to make asset tracking and monitoring more accessible and affordable.

“This is the logical next step in our goods tracking,” said Waël Cheaib, CEO of Safecube. “By democratising asset tracking, especially for non-motorised assets, we are enabling logistics and industrial players to better exploit their assets.”

The Sigfox 0G network is one of the key differentiators for Safecube, offering low bandwidth to retrieve just the data needed for the visibility issues specific to the supply chain. It allows low energy consumption, a tracker life up to several years and a low cost.

“How can IoT be a game-changer in supply chain applications?” said Patrick Cason, general manager of Sigfox France. “Firstly, by providing visibility beyond company borders. In the past, end-to-end visibility was limited by the cost needed to capture relevant and valuable data. The return on investment was simply not achievable. Technology like Sigfox is a game-changer because it captures relevant data at minimum cost. Secondly, by making it possible to capture this significant data, in the right place and at the right time, in a simple way, without impacting the declared infrastructures or installing a new one. You cannot handle what you cannot measure. LocaTrack allows companies to detect the reality of their business to take informed and relevant decisions.”

Safecube has chosen to increase the security of the entire data recovery process. The architecture of the Sigfox 0G network and its data transmission protocol from the trackers to the platform has reinforced security.

The company has chosen Microsoft Azure services including Azure IoT Hub for its platform. Azure is not only a flexible and highly available infrastructure, it is also strongly secured: each data centre is physically protected by a multi-layered protection, with end-to-end security, from network, servers and applications, to data encryption. Therefore, this infrastructure secures the data transmitted to the end-user.

LocaTrack is already being deployed with several large industrial companies.