VietNamNet Bridge – Postal and express service providers complain that the lack of the detailed standards on the GPS tracker, or black box--positioning equipment; and the lack of a digital map which serves as the basis for building up software for service vehicle management has caused difficulties for them.

 

Which ones to choose?

 

A representative from Viettel Post said that right in 2008, the company began learning the possibility of applying technology solutions to support the management and supervision over the service vehicles of the company.

 

Since March 2009, Viettel Post has installed positioning chips on vehicles which allow supervising the statuses and itineraries of long haul vehicles with a camera system at tracking.vn.

 

Currently, Viettel Post is considering applying in a trial basis, equipment and software which allows to position and supervise vehicles designed by the Information Technology Science Institute under the Ministry of National Defense, in managing the statuses of the vehicles running on 10 key routes.

 

According to Tran Tuan Dung, a senior executive of Viettel Post, the biggest problem for express firms is choosing black boxes. There are too many kinds of black boxes from different sources now available on the market. Meanwhile, to date, management agencies have not released any legal document stipulating the required technical standards of black box. There is also no agency which supports enterprises in examining and testing black boxes to find out how long the black boxes can work and which environment would be most suitable to them.

 

Agreeing with Dung, Do Tien Viet from VNPost Express, the enterprise has installed GPS tracker at 250 vehicles, also said that there are a lot of products available on the market, but it is very difficult to decide which ones to choose.

 

If typing “thiet bi dinh vi o to” (auto positioning device) on Google, one would see 8 million results. The equipment proves to be relatively cheap if compared with the values of transport vehicles. However, it took the company too much time to try the equipment and find out the most suitable products. Established in 2006, but only since 2009, the company has been using black boxes.

 

The representative from TTC Express related that at first, black boxes were installed at 10 vehicles running on the areas of inner HCM City. However, the company has later found out that the equipment would be more suitable to long haul vehicles. To date, all container vehicles of TTC Express have been installed with GPS equipments which account for ¼ of its fleet.

 

No standardized digital map

 

Both Viettel Post and VNPost Express think that the building up of the software to supervise the itineraries of vehicles depends a lot on the accuracy of the based digital map and the partners who provide digital maps.

 

While there are many digital map providers, no map has been standardized and recognized by the government as the national geographical database. While big changes regularly occur in reality, the map providers do not regularly update information for their maps.

 

“If some state management agencies come forward and give certificates on the accuracy of the digital maps, it would be better to use GPS equipments and apply the online management method,” Viet said.

 

How to budget the building up and running of the vehicle management systems is also a headache to enterprises. It is estimated that it is relatively costly to build up and maintain such a system. Enterprises would have to pay 20,000 dollars for the software, 10,000 dollars for the server and 250 dollars for every GPS tracker.

 

Buu Dien