The ATC700 mini tracker inside the parcel
A Teltonika use case for delivery companies: the ATC700 mini tracker from the ATx70 series is placed inside a parcel or attached to a pallet, and over LTE it reports where the consignment is, when it stopped and when it started moving again.
A Teltonika use case for delivery companies: the ATC700 mini tracker from the ATx70 series is placed inside a parcel or attached to a pallet, and over LTE it reports where the consignment is, when it stopped and when it started moving again. Parcels travel through long chains: the seller's warehouse, a sorting centre, a trunk lorry, another warehouse, a courier. At every handover the consignment can be delayed, mislaid or disappear. Scanning a barcode shows where the parcel was at the moment of the scan, but not where it is now. A tracker inside the consignment closes that gap. For an ordinary inexpensive parcel it is overkill, but for expensive, urgent and returnable goods it is entirely justified.
What this scenario solves
Every day more than 1.7 million parcels go missing worldwide.
The customer wants to know where their consignment is, and the delivery company can often only say where it was last scanned.
Parcels get stolen: by some estimates, 120.5 million consignments were stolen in the United States alone in 2023.
Searching for lost parcels, fielding customer calls and replacing goods eat into a delivery company's margin.
Every day more than 1.7 million parcels go missing worldwide.
The customer wants to know where their consignment is, and the delivery company can often only say where it was last scanned.
Parcels get stolen: by some estimates, 120.5 million consignments were stolen in the United States alone in 2023.
Searching for lost parcels, fielding customer calls and replacing goods eat into a delivery company's margin.
The scale of the industry is enormous: billions of parcels a year, from online shop orders to corporate shipments of components and documents. Even a small percentage of losses at those volumes turns into millions of vanished consignments. On an estimate cited by Teltonika, worldwide losses from lost freight exceed 50 billion dollars a year.
The first problem is visibility. The customer opens the tracking page and sees "Handed over to sorting centre" three days ago. He calls support, support writes to the warehouse, the warehouse starts looking. All that time the company's costs are rising and so is the customer's irritation. Delivery firms that can show where a consignment actually is win that argument.
The second is theft and loss. When a parcel has gone missing between two scans, finding it is next to impossible: nobody even knows on which leg of the journey it happened. The company reimburses the value, sends a replacement and never does find out where the hole in its process is.
The third is operating costs. Manual searches, support tickets, repeat shipments. Every one of those processes costs money and adds no value either for the company or for the customer.
What Teltonika offers
Teltonika suggests putting an ATC700 mini tracker with LTE Cat 1 into the parcel: it sends coordinates on a schedule or on a movement event, runs on a built-in battery that can be recharged, and withstands water and dust to IP68.
Installation and setup
Fitting the device and configuring it for the fleet scenario at hand.
Data transfer
The device collects data and sends it to the monitoring platform; how often depends on the model and its settings.
Analysis and control
The person in charge gets reports and alerts and looks into what stands out.
The ATC700 is a model in the ATx70 series with a 4G LTE Cat 1 connection. The device is small, and it is placed inside the box or attached to the pallet. From that point the tracker works on its own.
Periodic reports. The tracker comes online at a set interval and reports its coordinates. The interval is chosen to suit the job: more often for an urgent shipment, less often for a long haul, to save battery and data. The logistics coordinator sees the position of every consignment on the map, without ringing warehouses.
Movement-based tracking. The second option is to work on events. In on-stop mode the tracker notices that the parcel has stopped moving, waits for a set time, fixes its coordinates and sends a record. That shows where the consignment is sitting and for how long. In moving mode the ATC700 detects the start of movement and creates an event immediately. If a parcel that is supposed to sit in a warehouse until morning sets off during the night, that is grounds for concern.
The button. The housing has a multifunction button. Before putting the tracker into the box, the warehouse worker presses it, and the tracker starts tracking, sends a notification or switches its operating mode. The action on the press is configured in advance. This is handy when trackers sit switched off in the warehouse and are activated only at dispatch.
Housing and power. IP68 protection lets the tracker survive rain during loading, container washing and warehouse dust. The battery is rechargeable: when the tracker comes back from a run it is charged and sent out with the next parcel. For long journeys, international runs for instance, a power bank can be connected to the tracker so that it does not switch off halfway.
What the logistics coordinator sees. All the data goes over the mobile network to the monitoring platform server. There you can see the current position of every parcel, the history of its movements, its stops and its status. The customer can be given a link showing where the consignment really is, rather than only the last scan.
An example. A pallet of electronics leaves a warehouse in Istanbul for Baku. The tracker inside it is switched on with the button during loading. Two days later the logistics coordinator sees that the pallet has been standing for six hours at a yard that is not in the route plan. He rings the haulier while the load can still be found, rather than a week later when the customer reports non-delivery.
A cargo tracker and a vehicle tracker. A tracker on the lorry shows the lorry, and its history ends where the cargo was transferred to another haulier. The ATC700 travels with the pallet through the warehouse, the ferry and someone else's lorry, so it is most useful precisely at the handovers, which is where consignments usually go missing. If the haulier has monitoring of its own, the two sources complement each other rather than duplicating each other.
Battery and return. The tracker is charged before dispatch, and the reporting interval is chosen to suit the length of the journey with something in reserve: for an Istanbul to Baku run it will be less frequent than for a delivery around town. The charge level is visible in the data, and if it will not last to the end of the journey the interval is changed remotely. Trackers are tracked by serial number, and it is agreed with the recipient in advance how the device will get back to the sender.
What to bear in mind. The ATC700 works over mobile networks, so inside a metal container or deep within a stack the signal can weaken and positions will arrive late. The tracker has to come back for the economics to work, so the scheme is used for expensive and returnable consignments rather than for every box.
What you get
You can see where the parcel is now
The tracker reports its coordinates on a schedule, and the logistics coordinator does not have to wait for the next scan.
Suspicious movement shows up at once
On-stop and moving modes show where a consignment is standing and when it unexpectedly set off.
Started with one button
The warehouse worker switches tracking on at dispatch, so trackers do not waste battery on the shelf.
Charge it and send it out again
A rechargeable battery and power bank support let the tracker be used many times and on long journeys.
Not afraid of water or dust
The IP68 housing stands up to loading in the rain, warehouses and the back of a lorry.
Fewer calls to support
The customer can be shown where the consignment actually is.
Why this solution
Teltonika developed the ATx70 series specifically for logistics: a small housing, water protection, a rechargeable battery, operation on a schedule and on events. There is no need to pick a general-purpose tracker and then live with the fact that it is too big or runs flat too quickly.
LTE Cat 1 in the ATC700 gives the device solid connectivity on modern networks, while configuration through the Configurator and remotely allows intervals and scenarios to be changed for each individual customer.
One more argument is the ecosystem. The same warehouses and vehicles can be equipped with other Teltonika trackers, and all the data arrives in one monitoring platform.
How this works in Azerbaijan. Logistics here increasingly runs through the Middle Corridor: freight from Turkey, China and Central Asia passes through the port of Alat, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway and the M-2 and M-3 highways. For high-value consignments — electronics, spare parts, pharmaceuticals, documents — a tracker inside the load shows where the pallet is stuck: at customs, at the ferry crossing in Aktau or in a warehouse in Baku. Within the country it is useful for deliveries between Baku, Ganja and the regions. Things to bear in mind: coverage is unstable at border crossings and inside ferry containers, so the tracker has to be configured to store positions and send them once the network appears; international routes need a SIM with roaming. GPS.az selects ATx70 series trackers to suit the route, configures the modes and puts consignments on the map of the Wialon platform.
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