Delivery improvement for transport companies

In this paper we propose a solution that improves the synchronization and effectiveness of sending and receiving of goods and merchandise by transport companies. We use a service-oriented architecture for the exchange of information related to the reception of products, such as the predicted time when the delivery should take place or the delay in the arrival. Our solution is based on fleet management systems widely used in the transport companies. The main objective of this paper is to improve the interoperability between providers and consumers, thereby creating a communication environment versed in delivery plans. Another feature revised here is the analysis of vehicle tracking information to obtain accurate knowledge of the movement pattern followed by drivers and usefulness for the companies.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TSI2006-13390-C02-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-214

EVALUATION OF BUSINESS EFFECTS OF MACHINE-TO-MACHINE SYSTEM

The tightening competition and pressure in the project schedules often leave no time or space for the assessment of business impacts of different investments and projects. In addition, in many cases the assessment may be challenging and there is no experience available to undertake it. Therefore, companies often commit to different projects and investments without careful planning and vision of the costs it may cause. The goal in this thesis is to present and clarify the possible applications for the designed platform. The different benefits and its scope of use are also evaluated. Its potential market size is also assessed and its payback period calculated. Moreover, the investment eligibility from customer point of view is evaluated using several investment decision methods. In order to enable the practical business impact assessment, the designed platform is applied to fleet management business. In order to facilitate and increase the assessment of business impacts, a decision support system is also created. It is built on the understanding gained from the cost-benefit analysis conducted in the fleet management case and three other cases from the machine-to-machine business. As a background for the thesis, an overview of the existing solutions is presented and few well-known service models are described. Also an introduction to three sales forecasting methods is given. In order to build a basis for the decision support system, few investment decision methods are presented. As a result, a good understanding of different applications of the platform was gained. It was found to be suitable for any business in which vehicles are involved as they share several common properties such as location information, fuel consumption, speed, and status information. Its potential market size was assessed very promising despite low market share assumption. The payback period was found as very appealing and the investment strongly eligible. The created decision support system was found to be successful. It can be seen as a reliable tool as it consists of several investment decision methods. However, experience from the business area is still needed because any system cannot provide thorough means to identify all the crucial cost factors involved in an investment.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format