“Schmitz Cargobull’s telematics system has established itself on the market”

The fleet of the Hilden-based vehicle hire company and dealer Yourtrucks comprises 500 vehicles. These include tractor units, lorries and a wide variety of semi-trailers – box, tarpaulin, refrigerated and tipper. There is one thing that all the company’s vehicles have in common: telematics from Schmitz Cargobull. “We work exclusively with the TrailerConnect telematics system from Schmitz Cargobull,” says Konstantin Harke, managing director and CEO of Yourtrucks.

The history of Yourtrucks began in 2004, Alexander Harke, the brother of the current CEO, opened a successful commercial vehicle dealership. “In the years from the company’s foundation until 2019, telematics played absolutely no role for us,” recalls Harke. However, this changed fundamentally when the company entered the rental business. “For 98 per cent of our rental customers, the availability of telematics is important when hiring a vehicle,” reports Konstantin Harke. “Without telematics, hardly anything works in the rental business.”

Yourtrucks initially took small steps towards using telematics. “For us, in 2019, when we launched the hire business, the only aspect of telematics that mattered was the tracking function,” said Harke. Yourtrucks simply wanted to know where its hire vehicles were. And, in doing so, protect itself against fraud and theft.

Today, Yourtrucks specialises as a rental company in temperature-controlled transport. “Telematics plays an absolutely vital role in ensuring seamless monitoring of the cold chain,” says Harke. And a wide range of telematics applications are used to ensure end-to-end documentation of the cold chain. These include not only integrated temperature monitoring and control, but also the monitoring of loading and door-opening times, as well as maintenance and fault monitoring for both the vehicle and the refrigeration unit.

Gartner KG, a logistics and freight forwarding company based in Upper Austria, also relies on TrailerConnect for cold chain monitoring. The company, with over 1,200 refrigerated semi-trailers and a total of over 2,300 vehicles in its own fleet, operates 22 sites across ten countries and is one of the “early adopters” of Schmitz Cargobull’s TrailerConnect, according to René Söllinger, who is responsible at Gartner for ensuring the smooth execution of refrigerated transport operations. “Our company has been using TrailerConnect, Schmitz Cargobull’s central telematics system, since its market launch.”

In doing so, the logistics company Gartner ensures, above all, the seamless monitoring and documentation of the cold chain with the help of Schmitz Cargobull telematics. “This includes door closure times, operating hours of the refrigeration units and, of course, continuous monitoring of the transport temperature,” says Söllinger.

From Söllinger’s point of view, the use of Schmitz Cargobull telematics brings his company several benefits at once. A key advantage is the provision of real-time data. “This is essential for being able to monitor the cold chain seamlessly and react immediately in the event of problems,” says Söllinger. Another key benefit lies in the ability to plan effectively and, consequently, to reduce downtime. “We use the telematics system to monitor the maintenance and service intervals for both semi-trailers and refrigeration units,” explains Söllinger. Every week, the company’s dispatch department receives the relevant data and coordinates vehicle deployment accordingly. “Telematics makes it much easier to keep our vehicle fleet in perfect condition,” says Söllinger.

Yourtrucks, a Hilden-based rental company, provides its customers with access to the telematics data relevant to them. “It only takes a few clicks in the Schmitz Cargobull beSmart app and our rental customers immediately have access to the telematics data for the rental vehicle,” explains Yourtrucks CEO Harke. For customers carrying out refrigerated transport, access to the telematics data is essential for the correct and verifiable performance of their business operations.

However, certain telematics data is sent solely to Yourtrucks, not directly to its rental customers. Harke cites tyre pressure data as an example. “As soon as the tyre pressure in a trailer is no longer correct, we receive an error message. We then pass this on to the hirer,” explains Harke.

This approach is in both parties’ interests: if tyre pressure is too low, fuel consumption increases – to the renter’s detriment – and vehicle damage and wear and tear occur more quickly. It is clearly in the rental company’s interest to prevent this. “So, both sides benefit from the use of Schmitz Cargobull telematics,” says Harke. “And we, as a rental company, become problem-solvers for our customers thanks to telematics.”