Incorporating satellite navigation technology from suppliers who provide open programming interfaces, such as that available in ALK’s CoPilot product make it possible to call up turn-by-turn directions on demand.  CoPilot is capable of calculating all the delivery and service times on a route, including allowances for traffic conditions. This makes the time taken to complete work more predictable, which in turn makes a timed service more reliable so that customers can be offered tight service windows

The ability to react to real-world events as they unfold during a delivery day can dramatically improve the performance of a solution, helping to further reduce the number of carded deliveries, reducing cost and targeting the main source of customer dissatisfaction.  In addition, the ability to change the priority and order of tasks, even for a driver with a full day’s manifest can open up new service possibilities, such as the booking of returns from existing delivery points, or the addition of an ad-hoc service.  Dynamic Scheduling also informs estimated delivery and service times with a far higher degree of accuracy that can be communicated in real time to customers.

Dynamic schedulers require accurate capture of business rules in order to make good scheduling decisions.  Blackbay’s deep domain knowledge and experience means customers can achieve highly optimised real-time scheduling decisions.  Blackbay’s experience in interface design allows the rapid development of the interface between back end systems and the Dynamic Scheduling Engine.

The location and vehicle status information supplied by in-vehicle telematics can be combined with Blackbay’s Delivery and Service Connect information to provide powerful new business tools based on the blended information.  Dashboards can integrate graphical displays of vehicle location with ‘mouse over’ drill down into job and other delivery information.  Geofencing and other telematics tools can further enrich the availability of round progression and likely delivery times.  In addition, the combination of location and route planning information can support more ad hoc activities, creating new products and services.

Mobile device management (MDM) is a rapidly evolving area of mobility solutions with companies like SOTI and Motorola providing innovations such as remote scanner control, group policy views and software updates, the management of multiple hardware and software platforms, with equal levels of functionality, and mapping of scanner locations.



MDM is vital in the control of software images on scanners as well as managing them to reduce unwanted or unauthorised network usage, and to keep non-standard applications and malware from running on the scanners.  Scanner lockdown and remote wipe are other examples of MDM that make sure that the expensive asset (the scanner) is only used as intended and does not attract theft or misuse.



Blackbay understands the complexities of successful MDM, and as such has invested in its own suite of tools to enable targeted deployment of scanners in the field; this suite of tools is referred to as the Blackbay Deployment Server.  Blackbay’s solution is proven to support the largest of mobile fleets and is currently the preferred MDM platform for the management of software deployments to a single fleet of more than 40,000 scanners at Royal Mail.

Blackbay has experience integrating with both Google and Bing maps within various components that makeup Blackbay solutions; this includes, but is not limited to:

• Scanner, for displaying a point-in-time map highlighting the courier’s intended work
• Advanced online geocoding and tracking of assets in the field
• Online display of detailed user information with each point plotted on the map
• Reporting Services for rich visually appealing geographical drill-down reports

Blackbay’s preferred mapping solution is Google, with its simple licensing and support model  that allows for usage of global maps for thousands of concurrent users, covering the entire globe and with a rich and well supported development environment.