Our product updates

We are enhancing our platform to account for road closures. The Control Tower calculates and displays the rerouted (proposed) route, improving estimated arrival times (ETAs) and visualizing route changes compared to the original plan.

Simacan users gain more insight into trips scheduled on roads affected by closures, enabling them to proactively address disruptions. The Control Tower’s trip details screen now shows both the original route (without closures) and the rerouted (proposed) route. The closures causing the detours are clearly highlighted. Additionally, users can see the impact of the reroute on travel time from location A to B.

Improvements are also implemented in the overviews ‘Trips’ and ‘Exceptions’: users can easily filter trips impacted by road closures. These are now marked as ‘Trips with detours’. These enhancements provide users with greater control over their transport processes, allowing proactive responses to changes. This leads to more efficient planning and improved communication with customers.

Simacan users can now 'pin' specific trips in their overviews ‘Trips’ and ‘Exceptions’. This feature is especially useful for trips you want to continuously monitor and quickly locate. Pinned trips are prominently displayed at the top of the trip overview, regardless of any applied filters or exceptions. This ensures a more efficient and time-saving workflow.

We are evaluating how to calculate actual (measured) mileage as accurately as possible. This involves accounting for varying input from different Fleet Management Systems (FMS). A key focus is precise monitoring of stops, as the calculation of driven miles directly depends on this. Stay tuned for updates.

With the improved 'snooze' functionality in the Simacan Control Tower, managing exceptions has never been easier. If you want to temporarily hide an exception, you can now remove it from view with a single click. Choose from preset snooze durations (30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, or indefinitely) or set a custom end time. As noted in the previous product update, collaborating organisations can now independently snooze exceptions, ensuring each team remains focused on the most urgent transport issues.

All emission zones (ZEZ and LEZ) currently enforced in the Netherlands are now displayed on the map in our Control Tower. Simacan users can instantly see the applicable emission classes (such as Euro standards) and access restrictions for each zone.

With our technology, these environmental zones are integrated into the map data. Vehicles will soon automatically follow permitted routes, avoiding restricted zones, whether the destination is inside or outside an environmental zone. Legislation evolves quickly, but our platform adapts seamlessly and stays up-to-date. This functionality will soon be available for multiple European countries, further enhancing cross-border transport efficiency and compliance. Stay tuned for updates.

Temporarily pausing exception or alert notifications within the transport process is what we refer to as "snoozing" in our logistics Control Tower. By snoozing an exception, you are not constantly interrupted by the same notification. This can be useful if the situation is already being handled or if the notification is not immediately relevant but needs to be reviewed later. In this way, the Control Tower user can better focus on the most urgent matters without ignoring important notifications altogether.

📫 Each organisation can now snooze exception notifications independently from one another, improving the overall clarity between supply chain partners! When two organisations collaborate on the same trip and one organisation snoozes the trip, it does not affect the other organisation. This means that each organisation can decide when and how to manage exception notifications. This improvement ensures that exception alerts in the notification bar are more specific and better tailored to the needs of each organisation involved.

With Simacan, you are always informed about all road closures – even short-term ones – and what they mean for your logistics operations. Before you even get started, this ensures you can create reliable transport plans based on both planned and real-time road closures. Simacan can reroute at lightning speed, ensuring that short-term closures are swiftly processed in our Control Tower. During execution, any detours caused by closures are automatically incorporated into the routes and ETAs, providing your customers with accurate arrival times. This way, you are always prepared, and your deliveries stay on track!

We are always exploring ways to achieve even more realistic and attainable travel times. Currently, we are investigating the potential of comprehensive post-trip analyses in this regard. For example, analyses of standstill data can provide valuable insights. Information about unexpected (unplanned) stops can be used to adjust planned travel times more accurately in advance (pre-trip). This helps to ease the pressure on drivers during the execution (on-trip). Additionally, the transport operation becomes more predictable, improving efficiency and enhancing customer satisfaction.

By recording location data (GPS points) during transport, a breadcrumb trail is created. Such a trail provides valuable and detailed insights into the route of a vehicle. Control Tower users can now analyse trips more quickly thanks to the smart grouping and navigation of these GPS points, using a new collection icon. This makes various moments of inactivity and multiple stops around the same location more noticeable. Providing quick insight into the time spent at a specific location. Not only does this improve the overview and analysis of trip execution, but it also contributes to a more efficient assessment of transport lead times. Leading to the optimisation of the entire logistics process.

To help Control Tower, Arrival Display, and Masterdata users resume their work, these applications can remember user preferences – even after logging out. This includes the status of the filter bar (open or closed), preferred filter settings, and window sizes. For Control Tower users, additional preferences such as map type (satellite, topographic, etc.) and enabled map layers are also remembered. As a result, users can easily pick up where they left off when logging back in, without having to reset their preferences.

We have improved the design of our Control Tower to optimise your user experience. Here are the main changes we have made: 🔎 Faster searching and filtering with a new filter column on the left. To make room for the filters, the map has been moved to the right side of the screen. 🚚 When zoomed-in on a location, it is now faster and easier to gain insight into nearby vehicles. Turning on a filter immediately shows all nearby vehicles. 📌 The display of the breadcrumb trail has been improved. It is now easy to view the exact trajectory of a vehicle. The arrow keys can be used to quickly navigate through the breadcrumb trail.🚦Traffic information is now visible on the map by default, including insight into the duration and distance of delays. This information can be switched off via the map layers. ℹ️ One-click information on stops and locations such as address, phone number and geofence. This provides the ability to call a location directly and change the virtual demarcation, the geofence, of the location. 🔗 The coupling of vehicles to trips has been simplified. The couple icon in the trip list takes you directly to the ‘couple trips’ screen. 📶 Faster insight into data, reports and dashboards are readily available via the navigation menu. And clicking on the date field provides you instant access to trips from the recent past or next day.

The sharing of digital waybills such as e-CMRs has been optimised. These digital consignment notes are now more visible, not only within different applications, but also for chain partners. Whether they are generated by Simacan or come from an external system, everything is displayed consistently. This adjustment significantly improves the experience of drivers and ensures a clear administrative handling of the trip. These optimisations have been successfully implemented with Transfollow, Logi-App and App2Track and are now available to all Simacan users.

New possibilities for managing vehicles and trips! With our latest extensions, you can now easily link multiple vehicles and associated background information to trips. Including solving individual coupling problems and creating devices directly. Moreover, the options via the API for customising locations have been improved. For example, it is now easier to make a location inactive, Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) of locations are propagated, and more types of locations are supported. Also experience support for enrichment of trip planning, including dwell times and break activities, and monitoring of e-CMRs.

The login flow for our SaaS service has been upgraded, with the implementation of single sign-on. This change has not only improved usability, but also strengthened security. Now it is possible for all users to access different environments with just one account. Whether you only know one environment or several, we will make sure you are directed to the desired environment. This means it's time to update your bookmarks! If you only use one environment, you can have your link start with the name of your organisation. But if you're familiar with multiple environments, we recommend starting your bookmark with 'goto', so that a drop-down menu takes you exactly where you need to be!
 

Personnel at large locations such as distribution centres can use displays and screens to see which vehicles are expected (ETA) and the expected sequence of arrivals. For these arrival displays, in addition to being able to see what is coming in on shipment level (serving cross-dock activities), it is now possible to see what is coming in on truck level (returning from their store replenish activities).

Arrival display UI improvement sorting filter
For all users of the arrival display, the layout and sorting has been improved. All available data fields can now be displayed, filtered and sorted in accordance with your wishes.

A GPS update does not just consist of location information but also contains information on speed, heading, time stamp, etc. Sometimes one or more of these fields has inconsistent or illogical information, for instance a truck doing 200 MpH. In those cases that GPS point is not processed in our ETA calculation. To facilitate easy analysis, transparency and quality improvements in the tracking data we now distinguish in the visualisation of GPS points between processed and unprocessed GPS points. An unprocessed breadcrumb is displayed in light grey and clicking the breadcrumb shows the reason for not processing.

Simacan keeps everyone handling deliveries informed. On top of arrival and shop displays, track-and-trace portals or text messages to end customers, it is now possible to send a SMS to multiple phone numbers for a stop or at a location. Key triggers for such a text message are - for example - the moment of departure or delay of a trip. This SMS text message can contain detailed information about delivery, location, pick-up or drop-off time all while matching the time zone of the location.

The eCMR process in Simacan has been improved. On top of creating, assigning and monitoring a digital consignment note via Simacan, you can now also specify when a digital CMR document is created outside of Simacan. Simacans federated capabilities make it possible to connect to different source systems, so you can collaborate in the same eCMR document with all your supply chain partners.Everyone with their own system and software.

This is particularly relevant when input for the document and distribution is done through different flows and timing, than the creation of the eCMR. This allows you to share information with other systems and stakeholders, while warehouse details remain separate, or are enriched later.

When collaborating with your supply chain partners you can now easily share links to trips, routes, stops or shipments with them. Each link address is unique across operations, thus making sure your supply chain partners end up with the correct and intended information when sharing an url.

Public website Lastmile.info
The first locations with their first and last miles are synchronised in data model OTM5 via DefLog to the test environment of the website Lastmile.info. This is currently not publicly available yet.

Do you want to publicise the best last mile for your location(s)?
You can! Via Lastmile.info, it will soon be possible to share the safest, most sustainable and most efficient last-mile access routes with all your supply chain partners. So, if you are a retailer with locations in areas with many restrictions, window times and/or routes with obstacles? Then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us via +31 33 887 4000 or info@simacan.com.

Internal tests with App2track and Trimble are in full swing. The focus is on improvements for smooth handovers to achieve the most user-friendly and integrated experience, from last mile entries by your chain partners to navigation.

In addition to the specific last mile approach route in a trip planning, you can now configure your application in such a way your chain partners gain insights into your locations with all their associated first and last miles. In doing so, editing rights will remain yours but your chain partners are able to see the nuances and latest status of your Master Data.