LocationSmart GSID Prioritizing Package Security During COVID-19

Since the initial outbreak in late December 2019, COVID-19 has reached pandemic proportions. The outbreak began in Wuhan, China, but has since wreaked havoc across the world. We are being tested like never before, but thankfully, a number of industries and companies are stepping up to meet the challenge and keep our society in working order, despite the costly effects of the Coronavirus.

Ecommerce has emerged as a transformative cure for the pre-COVID-19 waning retail industry. We are all familiar with delivery now and most of us have had everything from books and electronics to our groceries and essentials delivered straight to our homes. This comfortability with delivery has ended up incredibly useful and practical in the face of COVID-19. And because social distancing is the best thing we can do as individuals to slow the spread of the disease, delivery has become a crucial component to how we live, and perhaps how we could live for the foreseeable future.

The traditional "supply and demand" model has been disrupted, and has subsequently led to many in the shipping and transportation industry to adapt and meet the changing needs of people who are increasingly under shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders.

We can already see the benefits and profitability of delivery and ecommerce at work. According to the Emarsys/GoodData tracker, the number of online orders from store-based retailers in the U.S. and Canada were up 56% year over year for the 2 weeks of March 22 through April 4. Additionally, online sales for that group during that period grew 43% compared with March and April of 2019.

Studies also show that, in the U.S. and Canada, web orders for online-only retailers increased a staggering 52% compared to the same time period of March 22 through April 4 last year. Generally speaking, web-only retailers have largely reported that their revenue in the U.S. and Canada was up 30% year over year for the period of the outbreak.

As we can readily see, flexibility is key in our modern world. The coronavirus outbreak that continues to affect the U.S. and the world at large has placed new, unforeseen demands on the shipping and transportation industry. Thankfully, there is technology available that is easing some of these challenges. It isn't just groceries and retail items that we need delivered. Due to the medical crisis at hand, it's more important than ever to transport lab samples, sensitive equipment and other care items with delicacy, safety and efficiency. It's not a simple task to transport such materials, which often requires strict monitoring, which in turn means tracking the location of the transport vehicle as well as the contents themselves. Detailed monitoring at such a high level demands advanced technology and service providers. The necessary adaptation of the shipping industry may be a challenge, but companies are far from unprepared.

In today's world, machine-to-machine communication is sometimes an even more critical factor than the humans involved in transportation, and the transportation process often involves signal loss where GPS is obstructed or otherwise lost. GSID is a technology that provides location intelligence when GPS location is challenged. GSID Can be used to provide assistance data to aid in obtaining first-fix GPS location information or as a stand-alone back-up when GPS is completely unavailable or inaccessible. GSID works as a kind of insurance to keep the monitoring process alive and well by working around the given limitations of GPS technology. It can also be used locate devices that have no GPS capability at all.

LocationSmart is a service provider for top-performing location-based services for tracking materials and ensuring their delivery is monitored at each step of the shipping process. But it's not just the shipping process that poses a significant challenge to packing monitoring. Storage facilities where packages are housed en route to their final destination are often constructed in such a way as to GPS block signals from getting in or out of the building as well. When a shipping company attempts to access location information on a package or device with an obstructed signal, GSID acts as an automatic fall back for giving device insights. To achieve this, the LocationSmart platform enables developers to access GSID information via web services APIs (short for "application program interfaces") for 2G, 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi devices.

LocationSmart is also a provider of location intelligence for customers throughout the transit lifecycle from a shipment’s departure to its arrival via the use of GPS-agnostic solutions. The term "device agnosticism" means simply the capacity of a computing component to work with various systems without requiring any special adaptations. Essentially, flexibility for their clients is the goal of service providers like LocationSmart.

LocationSmart clients, including prominent global shipping companies and leading logistics technology suppliers, rely heavily on LocationSmart's cloud-based APIs to enhance their supply chain visibility. Why is this so crucial? It highlights that API-based solutions that do not require software or applications to be downloaded before use can provide actionable data without needlessly taxing device performance. Generally speaking, API-based location insights facilitate more efficient monitoring and tracking of shipments.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, we were already well on our way to adopting a primarily digital way of shopping. This pandemic is truly changing how we live and thereby is ushering in a new way of shipping and handling that brings greater shipping traffic and packages in transit. These items and vehicles that carry them need to be monitored, and LocationSmart is a provider businesses can rely on to protect their integral cargo.