Scale

KIA Israel processes up to 10,000 cars on two storage yards (indoor and outdoor), using multiple stations in the pipeline with 200-700 vehicles checking in and out daily.

Incremental deployment

After 3 stages of gradual scaling up on KIA Israel compound, ViLOG has successfully deployed around 10000 BLE devices which equals to complete customer inventory vehicles count up to now.

Challenges

The biggest product design challenges were fine-tuning the algorithms to get a high location accuracy in very harsh environments from the radio frequency perspective. Our technical team needed to overcome cases where the phones bluetooth functionality froze due to a large number of beacons being seen at once, the wrong RSSI reading due to reflections from other cars, walls and other obstacles.

In hot climate the conventional beacons' batteries just don't last too long inside of cars. Thanks to extended severe testing, the batteries of a special heat resistance grade were selected for ViLOG, which ensured uninterrupted device working time of 1 year or more. Usually vehicles are not stored for so long, but just in case, the system received an inbuilt protection mechanism that automatically informs users about a device that has become inactive and needs a battery replacement. Anyway, location data remains in the system and always available to users.

Results

ViLOG has proved to be an efficient AI-powered cloud-based tool that addresses bottlenecks and inefficiencies in vehicles importers and processors supply chain, adds a significantly higher level of visibility into operational activities and ensures processes transparency.

System provides inventory turnover analytics based on historical data, supports custom dashboards, alerts and ERP integration.

Read more in the article "Opinion: Kia Israel slashes costs by digitising its finished vehicle logistics".