The logistics industry has a visibility problem. Somewhere between the warehouse and the customer, things go missing, get delayed, or arrive in the wrong condition. The numbers are staggering: billions lost every year to misplaced assets, theft, and inefficient routing.
Traditional tracking methods are partly to blame. Manual barcode scans and periodic check-ins create a series of snapshots rather than a continuous picture. Between those snapshots, you are flying blind. A container could be sitting in the wrong yard for two days before anyone notices.
What changes with IoT
IoT-enabled trackers flip this on its head. Instead of waiting for someone to scan an asset, small LoRaWAN, GPS, or cellular devices report their location, movement, and environmental conditions automatically. You get a live view of where everything is, all the time.
That means you know instantly if a shipment leaves its planned route, if a cold chain pallet drifts above its temperature threshold, or if a container door gets opened unexpectedly. You can set up geofences so the system alerts you when assets enter or leave specific zones, and you get timestamped proof of delivery without anyone having to remember to scan anything.
Beyond the immediate visibility, the historical data becomes genuinely useful. Route patterns, dwell times, utilisation rates: once you have continuous data flowing in, you start spotting inefficiencies you never knew were there.
Why we built Trackpac
There are plenty of IoT platforms out there, but most of them treat location tracking as an afterthought. Trackpac puts it front and centre. The live map view with historical playback is built for fleet managers who need to trace where an asset has been over the past week. The alerting system understands that a temperature breach on a pharmaceutical shipment has a completely different urgency to a pallet sitting idle for 48 hours. Fleet-level dashboards aggregate the KPIs that operations people actually care about, not generic graphs.
We also built it to play nicely with existing systems. The API integrates with warehouse management and ERP platforms, so IoT data flows into the tools your team already uses rather than creating another dashboard to check.
The hardware side
One thing we learned early on is that tracking hardware needs to just work. If a logistics manager has to spend time configuring devices or dealing with connectivity issues, adoption falls apart fast.
Because Trackpac sits within the Connect IoT Group, the hardware comes through Hexaspot, connects via Chirpcloud's network servers, and is managed through EdgePilot gateways. All of that is coordinated internally so devices arrive ready to go, with minimal configuration needed on site.
Is it worth it?
The honest answer is that IoT tracking pays for itself quickly, often within the first few months. The ROI comes from fewer lost assets, lower insurance claims, better route planning, and the hours saved chasing things manually. The cost of LoRaWAN hardware has come down significantly, and Trackpac is priced to be accessible for organisations of any size, not just enterprise operations.
See how Trackpac can give you real-time visibility across your assets.
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