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#BuiltWithHERE 4 min read

How We’re Making a Move with HERE APIs

How We’re Making a Move with HERE APIs

Looking to strengthen our offerings, Abax recently switched to the HERE platform. We also plan to take advantage of HERE’s partner ecosystem to add potential new services. We believe in HERE’s position as a leader in the automotive industry and like the quality of services, especially reverse geocoding, which is a very important to us.

As a telematics company with 40,000 customers and 440,000 connected assets, Abax depends on location data for tracking assets, monitoring driving behavior, delivering tax compliance and fleet management services.

API Overview

Reverse geocoding allows our customers to understand trip journeys — the start and stop addresses of the trips. We also use HERE Route Matching to fill in gaps between trips in our fleet map and tax compliance service. We apply HERE distance matrix to visualize the nearest assets to a location, for example. If a user clicks on an asset, they can see the distance in kilometers and in terms of time.

Geocoding search allows different lookups so manual trips can also be created. For matters of safety, we use speed limits for our Automile brand to highlight speeding drivers, plus there’s driving behavior related service on top of that data.

Our biggest customer group is construction companies and contractors like plumbers, electricians, smaller- to medium-sized businesses that have work vehicles or equipment. Admins use the fleet map to supervise the system, while drivers manage their logbooks through our services.

The legal logbooks are tied to tax compliance — one of our biggest services along with mileage claims. Logbooks must be compliant with the legal requirements in each and every country we serve.

Different vehicle types and the range of governing rules and regulations make this a complex task. Our system automatically calculates all sections and reimbursements using trip input via fleet management tools and also tax compliance mileage claims on the equipment side.

Knowing how many miles were driven or hours used also helps with knowing when maintenance is required.

How we use route matching

HERE Route Matching is a standout feature for us. We can send extra attributes and ask for extra data points to be returned. When you consider the 1,000s of messages coming in every second from our units, it’s very beneficial for scale.

So instead of making two or three requests to get the data set we need in an incoming message, we only have to do one request to get all the responses, or all the data points back. This saves us time, and latency is crucial when you're working with event driven systems. They must keep up with incoming data.

Future use cases

While we are not yet using HERE EV Charge Points yet, we may look to in the future. In Norway, electric fleets are growing quicky. Sweden is also progressing fast. We’ll evolve our services to keep up with the change and best support our customers’ needs.

At some point, we may also use drag coefficient data for our driving behavior service. Many other data points will likely help us create new services or heighten the quality of existing ones as well.

We’ll leverage HERE services as much as possible for all its great features, and we’re also considering combining with local map suppliers by country. That information is typically supplied by governments free of charge and could help build more regionalized services for our customers.

Kjetil Lassen

Kjetil Lassen

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