Dethleffs Tracks Parking Lots Without Trackers
Campervan business is booming – a good reason for caravan and mobile home manufacturer Dethleffs to digitize its fleet management with an app.
It wasn’t quite like looking for a needle in a haystack, but locating one of up to 4,000 vehicles on mobile home specialist Dethleffs’ 280,000 square meter factory site in Isny, Baden-Württemberg, was time-consuming and cost-intensive. Depending on the model, employees move vehicles – from the chassis to the finished RV – 10 to 15 times around a site the size of 40 soccer pitches. Finding one can be especially difficult in the winter months when the fleet is snowed under and a chassis can often no longer be seen by the naked eye.
Until a year ago Dethleffs used outmoded offline handheld scanners to locate and register the right RV on the fleet’s factory site. That only worked because experienced employees knew their fleet and the approximate location of individual vehicles. Using paper lists with information about the vehicle in question they knew where to look for it in rows several hundred meters long. Once they had found it they entered it and its location into the scanner and then transferred the data via a USB cable to a computer. It was an extremely cumbersome procedure that at times led to production stoppages during inventories.
