Telematics Integration for European Road Freight

The hard part is coverage, not the interface

Any telematics provider can hand over a position. The question that decides whether a visibility programme works is what share of your loads have a usable feed from loading to unloading, and that number is set by your carrier base rather than by technology.

Connecting carrier by carrier does not reach the end of that base. Connecting to the providers does, because one integration inherits every haulier who subscribes to that provider. The box is already in the cab for fleet management and tachograph reasons, so nothing has to be fitted and no driver has to be trained.

What crosses the boundary

How it connects

Provider APIs are read over REST with credentials your carrier authorises, which matters legally as much as technically: the carrier owns the feed and grants access to their loads, rather than you acquiring a fleet-wide trace you have no basis to hold. Where a provider offers push, we take the push and fall back to a scheduled pull as the reconciliation path.

Position is pulled rather than pushed per event on purpose. A fleet of five hundred trucks reporting every two minutes generates around 360,000 updates a day, each one superseded minutes later, and turning that into individual deliveries with retries and acknowledgements costs more than it returns. Status changes go the other way, on webhooks, because they are rare and each one matters. The reasoning is set out in webhooks against polling for freight tracking.

The failure nobody scopes for: the wrong truck

Subcontracting is normal in European road freight. The carrier who accepted the tender is often not the carrier who moved the load, and the plate on the transport order becomes wrong somewhere between acceptance and departure. A trailer swap at a hub breaks the link again.

The result is a load tracked against a vehicle that went somewhere else, which is worse than no tracking because it is confidently wrong. Three controls fix it: confirm the plate at loading rather than at tender, because that is when it becomes true; consistency-check reported position against the planned route so a vehicle heading the wrong way raises an exception; and treat a subcontracting notification as a mandatory event on the transport order rather than a courtesy.

What you need from your carriers

• The name of each carrier’s telematics provider. In a typical European network of forty carriers this resolves to a handful of providers.
• The carrier’s authorisation for the feed, per carrier, covering your loads.
• A minimum reporting interval in the contract, stated in minutes while in motion.
• An obligation to notify hardware failure or vehicle substitution within a defined window.
• Plate confirmation at loading, including after subcontracting.

Carriers with no telematics at all are covered by the driver app as a fallback. Expect materially lower coverage there, because it depends on the driver granting background location permission and the phone staying charged, and set the target accordingly rather than pretending the two sources are equivalent. How to measure any of this is set out in the guide to telematics data quality

The seven weeks

GO LIVE is guaranteed in seven weeks, and the schedule is the same on every integration because the platform side never changes. What varies is how quickly your side can supply a test system and a named contact.

1. Weeks 1–2, scoping. We agree the field list, the direction of each field and which system is authoritative for it. This is the meeting that decides whether the project is easy, and skipping it is why integrations drift.
2. Weeks 3–4, connection. Credentials, endpoints and a first message moving in a test environment. Nothing is mapped yet, we are proving the pipe.
3. Week 5, mapping and events. Your fields onto our event model, including the definition of arrival, which is the single most disputed one.
4. Week 6, parallel run. Both systems live, event counts compared daily. Any gap is a mapping bug found before anybody depends on it.
5. Week 7, cutover and handover. Downstream consumers switch, monitoring is handed to your team with the reconciliation report that tells you when a feed goes quiet.

Data residency, GDPR and ISO 27001

Freight data is operational data about identifiable drivers and vehicles, so it falls under GDPR whichever way it reaches us. Three things are usually asked in a European security review, and the answers do not change per integration.

• Where the data sits. Processing and storage stay within the EU.
• Who can see it. Your freight data stays inside your trusted carrier network. A carrier sees the loads they are assigned, not your wider network.
• How it is governed. TrucksOnTheMap is ISO 27001 certified, and the controls that matter to a transport integration are access control, retention and the audit trail on every event.

Position data has a retention question of its own. Decide up front how long raw pings are kept as against derived events, because the derived events are what your KPIs need and the raw trace is what a works council will ask about.

Common questions

What is telematics integration in a TMS context?

It is the connection that brings vehicle position, ignition state and, where fitted, reefer temperature from a carrier’s telematics provider into the system that plans and tracks the load. The integration is made with the provider rather than with each haulier, so one connection covers every carrier subscribing to that provider.

Do our carriers have to install anything?

No. The telematics box is already in the cab for fleet management and tachograph purposes. What the carrier does is authorise access to the feed for the loads they carry for you, which is a permission rather than an installation. Carriers running no telematics at all use the driver app instead, at lower expected coverage.

How often does position data arrive?

Every one to fifteen minutes while the vehicle is in motion, depending on the provider, the carrier’s contract and whether the ignition is on. Size geofences against that interval rather than against the site: a two hundred metre geofence combined with a ten-minute feed will miss arrivals routinely, and each missed arrival becomes a status somebody keys in later.

What happens when a carrier subcontracts the load?

The link between load and vehicle breaks, and the positions you receive are accurate but belong to a different truck. Three controls handle it: confirm the plate at the point of loading rather than at tender, consistency-check reported position against the planned route so a wrong-direction vehicle raises an exception, and make subcontracting a mandatory notification event on the transport order.

Can you integrate more than one telematics provider at once?

Yes, and in practice every European network needs it. Feeds from different providers are normalised into one event model, each event carrying its source and whether its timestamp was machine-generated or keyed, so downstream reporting does not need to know which provider a position came from.

Send us your carrier list

We will tell you which telematics providers it resolves to and what coverage you can expect before you commit to anything.