Netstar unveils largest real-time vehicle telematics bureau in Africa.

Netstar, a subsidiary of Altron, has launched a cutting-edge Global Fleet Bureau to provide improved driver and vehicle safety levels and reduce costs for commercial fleet customers. The centre is the largest and most technologically advanced bureau for vehicle telematics on the African continent. It will provide services and standards that fleet managers increasingly demand from world-class vehicle telematics companies.

The Global Fleet Bureau, launched on 23 April 2024, will service Netstar’s growing commercial fleet customer base, emergency contact centre, and vehicle recovery operation. In addition to offering Netstar’s traditional managed services, including asset tracking, driver behaviour management, automated incident alerts, reporting and analytics, the Global Fleet Bureau will facilitate and manage live monitoring through known and geofenced hotspots, real-time fleet manager notifications, and live video monitoring through Netstar’s AI on-board cameras. 

Netstar’s Group Managing Director Grant Fraser says: “The Netstar Global Fleet  Bureau allows us to deliver unprecedented functionality and service levels to our customers. It will enhance driver and vehicle safety through, for example, a detailed event occurrence book to fleet managers facilitating preventative and immediate remedial action, including live video monitoring of incidents from dispatch to door.  The 52-seater centre, constructed in late 2023 is expected to improve Netstar’s industry-leading vehicle recovery rate, improve responsiveness by 90%, reduce false positive alerts by 50%, and enable quicker dispatch responses. Looking forward,  Netstar will enable automated dispatches when anomalies occur.” 

The Global Fleet Bureau combines Netstar’s advanced telematics with its recently commissioned artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, ensuring a proactive approach to protecting the safety of commercial fleet drivers and vehicles and, to continually improve service and response times as more data is gathered and analysed. Netstar monitors over 2 million connected devices, analyses over 181  billion data points and downloads over 170k hours of video per month and currently tracks over 100 million km’s per day, which is set to increase significantly with the  Global Fleet Bureau scale and capabilities, improving its service levels and incident response times – a true flywheel effect. 

“We have a big responsibility at Netstar to manage and continually improve the safety of our customers’ drivers, their vehicles and cargo, as well as to create cost efficiencies within their businesses. The Global Fleet Bureau provides highly trained and skilled agents, to offer customers exceptional service and equips fleet operators to maintain or improve their standard service level agreements with their customers. 
Our facilities will continue to evolve with our data, AI, and machine learning technologies.” added Fraser.
 
The Global Fleet Bureau is geared up to service international fleets and already provides monitoring and optimal routing services to customers in Sydney. Utilising its technology and its hardware-agnostic IoT platform, Netstar can offer fleet managers around the globe world-class managed services at highly competitive price points. 

The Global Fleet Bureau will also support Netstar’s role in Business for South Africa  (“B4SA”). Netstar’s involvement in this initiative is to create a safe corridor on the critical N4 transport route, which is currently plagued by trucking safety incidents.  “The N4 corridor is critical to South Africa’s ability to grow and create jobs. The  Global Fleet Bureau will assist us to improve safety on this route and deliver on our  B4SA commitments” says Fraser. 

“Netstar’s new Global Fleet Bureau is a game-changer for fleet owners, fleet  operators and managers. The Global Fleet Bureau offers standard fleet services for  our light fleet markets and can also be customised for our commercial fleet  customers. Each sector will have its own unique set of key fleet priorities” concludes  Fraser. 

The new bureau is already delivering value to Netstar’s customers. Blink Logic’s  Managing Director Bernardus Bouwer says the new monitoring capabilities have been transformative for his business: “Netstar is backed by the Altron Group, and they’ve got the latest and greatest technology. Their camera system gives me alerts so that I can understand what is happening on the ground. This is impacting our insurance premiums because we have much more visibility. We can proactively  manage our field force and we can proactively change our driver behaviour to  minimise risk and accidents.”  

After recently visiting the bureau Hertz SA CEO Julian Visagie added: “The Global  Fleet Bureau is extremely impressive. I didn’t know what to expect and with this, it  just shows the commitment from Netstar to say that we are a technology partner and  not just a tracking company.” 
As customer demand increases, Netstar plans to expand and roll out additional command centres, ultimately separating the Bureaus into dedicated vehicle recovery and fleet-managed services. A second centre is scheduled for later in 2024.