Monitoring for the textile and light industry

During the season a ginning mill works with two or three times as many vehicles as during the rest of the year. Most of them are hired: farmers' lorries, tractors with trailers, private hauliers' vehicles. The mill has no control over them at all beyond the weighbridge at the gate.

A typical situation: a vehicle loads in a field in Sabirabad and then takes four hours to reach the mill instead of an hour and a half. On the way there are two stops at a private yard. On the weighbridge the weight is lower than the farmer expected, and an argument starts between the farmer, the driver and the mill, in which everyone has their own version of the truth.

For a seasonal fleet we suggest removable self-contained trackers. They are issued to the driver for the period he works and collected at the end of the season. The tracker is fixed with a magnet or placed in the cab and runs for several weeks without being wired in. On the map you can see where the vehicle set off from, where it stopped and when it reached the weighbridge.

If the cotton is carried by agricultural holdings with their own fleet, their trackers can be connected to the mill's system — more in the agricultural logistics monitoring section.

Garment manufacturing has a flow that an ordinary haulier does not: semi-finished goods go out and have to come back. Cut pieces are taken to subcontract sewing workshops in Mingachevir, Sheki or districts where there are machinists, and finished garments come back. Fabric and trimmings may be passed to the subcontractor on a tolling basis.

Here the question is not where the vehicle is but whether what left matches what came back. Monitoring covers its own part of that:

• the factory — subcontractor's workshop — factory trip with the time spent at each point;
• body openings only inside the factory and subcontractor geofences, the rest to be looked into;
• the vehicle calling at points that are not on the route, at a market or a private warehouse for instance.

How many bundles of cut pieces went out and how many garments came back is not something the tracker counts. That is accounting in your own system: transfer notes and return records. The trip report helps to find the stage at which the discrepancy appeared, but it does not replace counting and labelling.

The second particularity is the collection season. Before the spring and autumn deliveries to the shops, the delivery round works at its peak, and arriving late at a shopping centre before the weekend costs sales. For that period it is worth agreeing delivery windows with the shops in advance and setting up notifications when a vehicle falls behind schedule.

Over several seasons we have seen the same mistakes. They are easy to avoid if you know about them in advance.

• Trackers handed out on the first day of picking. A queue of vehicles at the gate, drivers in a hurry, half the devices not activated. It is better to start issuing them a week before the start and to check each device on the map with the driver present.
• No rule that nothing is accepted without a tracker. If a vehicle with no data is weighed and accepted anyway, within two weeks the trackers start being left at home.
• The weighbridge and the dispatcher work separately. The weighbridge operator sees the weight, the dispatcher sees the track, but nobody compares the two. What is needed is one report for both, where the trip and the weight sit on the same line.
• The fields are not mapped. Without field geofences the system only sees that the vehicle was standing, not that it was loading. We do the mapping before the season, from the list of contracts with the farmers.

For clothing delivery rounds the main mistake is a different one: the door sensor is fitted but the shop locations are never entered into the system. The report then shows dozens of body openings, with no way of telling which of them are out of place.