AREALCONTROL’s mission is to supply and support telematics, IoT, GPS positioning, as well as tracking products & services for transportation, logistics, commerce, trade, craft and industrial companies.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
AREALCONTROL: Our mission is performance-oriented telematics, IT and IoT solutions for digitalization, automation, optimization and simplification. Our users save costs, improve efficiency and become more successful.
Companies with or in transport/logistics activities and service fleets such as craftsmen and facility management are the main markets. Construction industry comes on top and industrial supply-chain tracking is catching up.
E.E: What’s the news for 2021 about new products?
AREALCONTROL: We just launched a very generic telematics device for all kind of vehicles to read and analyze OBD and CAN data, e.g. MIL (mal indication lamp) or service due or any important parameter for vehicle health status.
Especially in large mixed fleets it is a challenge for the fleet management to keep an overview and each vehicle under control. That’s the point where we can help with a GDPR (General Data Protection Rules) compliant solution.
Exception based messaging and alerts helps to keep legal rules about vehicle safety and accident prevention rules.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
AREALCONTROL: We can visualize a construction company with all kind of vehicles from passenger cars to trucks including Remote Tachodata Download and from machines to assets like container, expensive tools, measurement devices, generators etc.
Pending on customer needs and wishes the features or let say the parameter and information can be set. The whole mobile equipment can be shown, analyzed and controlled in one platform, e.g. with regular reports in common formats for financial controlling purposes.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
AREALCONTROL: We are mainly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands active. The German spoken market is behind the European average and far behind The Netherlands. Market penetration is around 27%+/- in DE and 45%+ in NL.
In other countries we work with IT partnerships which sell and support our solutions under their label.
For international expansion we’re looking for IT / franchise partners which can gain on quick jump start for an own sustainable business and completion of their existing business.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
AREALCONTROL: The actual pandemic situation is an accelerator for digitalization generally. In the first moment all investments were stopped until the people realize the earth keeps spinning. Now there is regular market growth again.
All car manufacturers are trying to offer OEM telematics to their customer base. This was foreseeable for years, but these solutions usually don’t fit the SME (Small Medium Enterprises) market needs due to mixed fleets and often specific requests.
As we’re based in Stuttgart (Germany) which is the HQ of major car manufactures we follow the trends very closely. We’re integrating OEM telematics into our platform to give the end-user, mainly SME the possibility to gain on a generic designed web platform and optimize their business processes.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
AREALCONTROL: I would say we’ve three most innovative products.
The first is the ArealPilot 360° App for Android in combination with the web-platform’s “PlanBoard”. While planning transport logistic routes the complex order structure is translated into the Driver’s App as “step by step” sequence which makes it really easy.
The second is our new generic telematics hardware with an embedded SIM chip which can read the OBD as well CAN data from any common vehicle.
And the third is a completely new algorithm for auto-dispatching of transport orders. The algorithm is calculating an optimized routing cost-based over mixed vehicle fleets. Means, it gives the answer to the question if it is better to send 2 transporter 3,5to or a 7,5to truck.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2021?
AREALCONTROL: Well, 2021 is still running under pandemic conditions and it is hard to estimate. My personal estimation is that it will be anyway better than 2020. Digitization and visualization have shown its value already. It’s not just another fancy digital feature or device, it’s a basic to survive, optimize and run any business in situation we all never faced before.