The new generation of fleet management solutions from Linde Material Handling: modular design, wireless data transfer, integration of existing vehicles

Last year, Linde Material Handling established its Connected Solutions business unit, designed to combine their expertise in the fields of fleet management, logistics IT and connectivity in a centre of excellence. At the World of Material Handling, the unit now presents the latest generation of fleet management solutions from Linde. The connect: product family consists of a local database and a cloud-based data portal, new management and analysis software, and a suite of software modules that can be combined to form individual functional packages that are tailored to the specific customer requirements. The key hardware components of the fleet solution are the connect: access management unit and the connect: data unit that interlink forklift trucks or warehouse handling equipment via Bluetooth or wireless with the local database or the servers of the Linde Data Cloud. Linde Material Handling places a special focus on integrating existing vehicles and even third-party vehicles in the connect: fleet management system and is therefore offering the connect: hardware components also as retrofit solutions.
 

The new management and analysis software connect:desk serves to organize and assign drivers to vehicles and manage driver authorization, driving licences and trainings. Maintenance planning, usage analysis, fleet optimisation, shock reports, driver and vehicle reports are also managed via this decentralized platform.

“The ongoing digitisation of industrial processes – keyword Industry 4.0 – requires an ever more flexible and efficient use of machines, and this also goes for the field of intralogistics,” says Maik Manthey, who is in charge of the Connected Solutions unit in his capacity as Vice President New Business & Products. “We have developed our software and server capacities further in order to effectively support our customers in managing their fleets efficiently, and help them to improve the goods flow control in their factories and warehouses and integrate their vehicles into the necessary IT business processes.” The connect: product family includes six functionalities – connect:ac (access) for driver authentication, connect:dt (data) for the collection of vehicle data such as hours of operation, sensor data, error codes, etc., connect:an (analysis) for the creation of reports and evaluations, and connect:in (integration) for interlinking the connect: platforms with higher-level enterprise resource planning systems. Vehicle control systems and solutions for partially autonomous driving are in the planning stages with the connect:tr (tracking) and connect:at (automation) modules. The functionalities are implemented by a combination of various software modules and are continuously being expanded with new software tools.