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