CUTOMER PROFILE

KIA Israel holds a big local market share of new passenger cars and solely responsible for vehicles import, PDI (Pre-Delivery inspection), vehicles distribution to dealerships across the country. The company puts a lot of efforts, attention and resources to ensure smooth and uninterrupted operation of the entire supply chain for providing the best service to consumers.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

One of the most labor-intensive procedures in vehicle processing centers is locating volumes of vehicles across one or several lots, necessary for fuel level checks, accessory installations or shipping to customers.

Taking into consideration a massive stock of 10,000 cars on several compounds, KIA Israel decided to implement an innovative vehicle storage yard management system that would provide a necessary level of visibility into operational activities, eliminate human errors, allow for accurate vehicle tracking and inventory turnover increase, but didn’t require expensive maintenance and infrastructure deployment on site.

Making long story short KIA Israel executives wanted to automate as many vehicle logistics related business processes as possible, reduce OPEX (operational expenses) while putting productivity at higher level.

SOGO RESPONSIBILITIES

Sogo’s team worked closely with various Kia Israel stakeholders, including company executives, logistics personnel and storage yard operators to get a detailed understanding of company business processes and key objectives.

The initial phase required research to understand the most suitable technologies stack that will allow vehicle tracking without any manual intervention of employees and without deploying costly infrastructure on site.

Several different approaches were tested, till the most suitable one was selected and the Sogo team provided a limited POC to validate the feasibility of the solution.

THE RESULTS

Following the successful POC, the solution was developed into a product, which was successfully deployed and then gradually ramped up to track 10,000 vehicles on both yards (complete customer inventory up to now).

Our engineering team has gone to great lengths to come up with just the optimal technology stack that would enable maximum efficiency without deploying complex hardware infrastructure or compromising performance.

Positioning and tracking powered by a combination of top-notch technologies:

• BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) devices;

• AI-enhanced detection mechanism to calculate precise positioning of the vehicles in real time without user intervention;

• Sensor fusion – combining data from multiple sensors to correct for the deficiencies of the individual sensors to achieve higher system accuracy and performance;

• RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) fingerprinting – use of radio frequency signals to estimate the distance between the transmitting and receiving devices.

The successfully delivered AI-powered cloud-based vehicle storage yard management solution tracks in real time vehicle inventory movements using BLE beacons coupled to vehicles VIN numbers and a mobile app. The system provides inventory turnover analytics based on historical data, supports custom dashboards, alerts and integration with ERP.