Spark NZ Wins Best IoT Provider at the 2019 Innovation Awards

Congratulations to one of our New Zealand channel partners, Spark NZ, for winning Best IoT Provider at the 2019 Innovation Awards in the emerging technology category!

Hosted by Reseller News and in its fifth year, the awards night celebrates and rewards excellence in the tech industry and its thriving performers. This year it played host to 160 finalist submissions – spanning 79 businesses across partner, vendor, and distributor organizations.

The basis of the entry was very simple, Spark’s IoT team needed to tell a story about a customer they helped to leverage and embed IoT technology into their business to solve business challenges.

In this instance, they focused on highlighting the extensive work they completed with Mainfreight. Mainfreight was after a solution to make its local network planning more effective. Before IoT, it’s staff were needing to manually locate and report back the location of its segregation bins that are used for transporting hazardous materials. By the time the data was received, it was often inaccurate and this made planning difficult.

Mainfreight had over 400 segregation bins that each cost in excess of $4000 that would previously go missing or be misplaced, and on top of that Mainfreight needed to abide by the stringent policies that are put in place to ensure their people and the public are safe when transporting hazardous goods.

For Mainfreight it faced the time pressure of mitigating imbalances on their asset and infrastructure network. Thanks to Spark’s Asset Tracking IoT solution, Mainfreight now see GPS locations (using our Oyster LoRaWAN® battery-powered asset tracking device) of bins mapped to one dashboard and are alerted in real-time when something is where it shouldn’t be or has been stationary for too long.

Receiving automated alerts means Mainfreight has improved their logistics planning and their asset network can be rebalanced faster, resulting in more productive asset utilization and reduced cost as fewer bins are required in circulation. Mainfreight’s supply chain is in better order thanks to IoT.

About Spark

Spark is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications company providing fixed-line telephone services, a mobile network, an internet service provider, IoT asset tracking, and a major ICT provider to NZ businesses.