Until the turn of the millennium, transportation and logistics companies had difficulty traveling the roads of Guatemala. Back then, only around 30 percent of the country’s roads were paved. That percentage has since doubled. Central American food producer Alimentos is one company benefitting from this new infrastructure, according to Deutsche Telekom.

Alimentos has 300 trucks that supply more than 50,000 business customers with food and beverages. To ensure that goods reach their destination swiftly and safely, the company’s fleet managers use a positioning solution based on machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology, according to the communications company. The system integrator and software as a service (SaaS) provider Control y Monitoreo fitted the entire Alimentos fleet with Deutsche Telekom partner Tramigo’s T23 tracker.

The T23 has a GPS module and a mobile wireless unit with a SIM card, which is used to relay data such as the vehicle’s current position and speed to a Control y Monitoreo server. To make fleet management as simple as possible for customers such as Alimentos, Control y Monitoreo has set up a special Web portal. On a digital map, the Alimentos dispatcher can see at a glance where the vehicles and goods are at any given time.

“Thanks to the system, we know which route can save the most time and fuel,” said Ivan Solano Roca, logistics and security manager at Alimentos.
In the event of theft, Alimentos can locate the vehicle and find it with the help of the police. “If the thieves try to make a getaway, we can even switch off their engine remotely,” Roca said.

National borders once posed a challenge for the use of Tramigo’s T23 tracking solution. Central America is not very large. Trucks from Guatemala regularly cross the borders of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. “We needed a suitable hardware platform and a mobile data service,” said Luis Toledo, President of Control y Monitoreo.

Deutsche Telekom said that the main factors Alimentos considered in making its choice of a hardware platform were precision, size, battery life and versatility.