Creating a Beacon Campaign for Asset Tracking at your Warehouse using Beaconstac

ABI Research lately asserted that there is a “huge opportunity” for beacons in an array of non-retail verticals, such as smart homes, vending machines, enterprises, and so on. ABI analyst Patrick Connolly reinstated the same by stating that many of these markets are forecasted to deploy BLE Beacons in much larger volumes than retail“. One of the emerging markets among others in this context is Asset Management.

Of recent, iBeacon technology is being widely leveraged to maintain and manage assets in inventories or warehouses. Beacons tremendously aid in streamlining inventory management by offering a number of advantages such as helping in locating critical equipments, reducing inventory time, achieving real-time physical inventory of assets, enhancing productivity by remotely monitoring assets and infrastructure, delivering more timely information for decision making, and improving security by preventing assets from leaving premises.

In this blog post, we will explain how you can successfully set up a beacon campaign to track the assets at your warehouse, using Beaconstac.

Campaign Objective

The objective of this campaign is to track a vehicle, ‘Truck 1’, leaving a warehouse XYZ from Location A for another unit of the same cargo company situated at Location B. When the vehicle leaves Location A for Location B, the logistics manager at Location B will get a notification informing him that the vehicle has left its starting point. Similarly, once the vehicle reaches Location B, the logistics manager at Location A will get a notification informing him that the vehicle has reached its destination point.

Now let’s take a look at how you can set up this campaign on the Beaconstac dashboard:

Step 1: Add a beacon to the dashboard and attach it to the vehicle

Before we begin, the first thing to do is to purchase a beacon. Also take a look at our Beaconstac platform, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!

Once you have your beacon in place, add its details such as UUID, major and minor numbers to the Beaconstac dashboard. You can also name the beacon for easy identification. For the purpose of this campaign, I have named the beacon as ‘Truck 1’. Attach the beacon to the vehicle once you have added it to the dashboard.

Step 2: Create Webhooks

Webhooks are “user defined HTTP, URI callbacks”. They are usually triggered by the occurrence of some event. Once it occurs, the source app makes an HTTP request to the URI (also known as URL) configured for the webhook.

We will now create webhooks, a feature that has been integrated into the Beaconstac platform, to initiate push notifications for the managers at Location A and Location B.

For instance, when the app in the manager’s phone detects the ‘Truck 1’ beacon at Location A, it will trigger a webhook that will further initiate a push notification to be sent to the manager at Location B.

I will name the first webhook as ‘Send Push via Parse to Location B’. Add the identity of the device at Location B in the url section as shown in the image below. Further add ‘Key value pairs’ that would form a relevant lock screen notification for the manager at Location B. For this webhook, I have added vital information such as details about the vehicle, location, and whether the vehicle has left for Location B or not.

In a similar manner, when the app in the manager’s phone detects ‘Truck 1’ beacon at Location B, it will trigger a webhook that will further initiate a push notification to be sent to the manager at Location A.

I will name the second webhook as ‘Send Push via Parse to Location A’. Add the identity of the device present at Location A in the url section as shown in the image below. Further add ‘Key value pairs’ that would form a relevant lock screen notification for the manager at Location A.

Step 3: Add Rules

Now we add rules for the beacon ‘Truck 1’ placed on the vehicle such that it triggers the appropriate action after being detected at both the locations.

For Location A, I will create a rule named ‘Notification for the manager at Location B’. Select ‘Truck 1’ as the beacon by clicking on the drop down arrow.

When the vehicle reaches the gate of Location A to leave for Location B, beacon ‘Truck 1’ will be in the proximity of the app on the manager’s phone. As soon as the beacon is detected by the app, it will trigger the webhook call named ‘Send Push via Parse to Location B’. Now you need to choose the time at which the webhook needs to be triggered. Here we choose to trigger it 2 seconds after having entered the beacon zone.

For Location B, I will create a rule named ‘Notification for the manager at Location A’. When the vehicle reaches the gate of Location B, beacon ‘Truck 1’ will be detected by the app installed on the manager’s phone. Upon detection, it will trigger the webhook call named ‘Send Push via Parse to Location A’ after 2 seconds.



Step 4 : Add custom attributes

To make sure that the action, which in this case is the webhook call, for the rule named ‘Notification for the manager at Location B’ gets triggered only when the ‘Truck 1’ beacon reaches the gate of Location A, a custom attribute is added. This attribute will check the location of the beacon before triggering the action.

Similarly, the action for the rule named ‘Notification for the manager at Location A’ should get triggered after the ‘Truck 1’ beacon is detected at Location B. Hence, we include a custom attribute that checks the location of the beacon.

Step 5: Add Actions

After this, we’ll select the action to be triggered when the rule attached to ‘Truck 1’ is met. Since, the actions that need to be triggered at both the locations are webhook calls, we will select the action type as ‘Webhook’ and then go on to add the appropriate webhook name.

For example, if the rule named ‘Notification for the manager at Location B’ is true, the webhook to be triggered would be ‘Send Push via Parse to Location B’.

For Location B, if the rule named ‘Notification for the manager at Location A’ is true, the webhook to be triggered would be  ‘Send Push via Parse to Location A’.

And we are all set!  Now the managers at both the locations, A and B will be able to track vehicle ‘Truck 1’.

Try out this beacon pilot project and let me know your thoughts about this campaign. If you have any questions with regards to this campaign or if there is a specific campaign you would like to read about, I’ll be more than happy to share how you can get it done using Beaconstac.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!

• Author Details

Author Details

Shubhi Mittal

Check out other posts by Shubhi on Beaconstac! You can also explore the related posts below to help you maximize your ROI.

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