Your vans and lorries are some of the best data sources in the business. Every one of them knows where it is, where it has been, how long it stood on site and who was driving. In most companies that knowledge stays locked inside the telematics portal, looked at by one person in the office, while the job system, the timesheets and the invoices carry on without it.

Assemblysoft now supports integration with Webfleet, Bridgestone's fleet management and vehicle telematics platform, used by tens of thousands of fleets across Europe. Here is what that integration makes possible, and how we build it so it stays reliable.

What Webfleet exposes

Webfleet publishes its data through WEBFLEET.connect, an HTTP API secured with an account, a dedicated API user and an API key. Through it a business system can read and act on:

  • Vehicle positions: latest location, speed, ignition state and odometer for every vehicle.
  • Trips and journey logs: start and end points, times and distance, ready for mileage and cost allocation.
  • Drivers: which driver was logged in to which vehicle, and when.
  • Areas (geofences): alerts when a vehicle arrives at or leaves a depot, yard or customer site.
  • Orders and messages: jobs and destinations sent straight to the in-cab driver terminal, with status coming back as the driver works through them.
  • Message queues: a near-real-time feed of events, so systems react quickly without hammering the API.

What we build with it

The value comes from putting that data where decisions are made. Typical uses we design for:

  • Scheduling with live positions. The planner sees which crew is closest, which job is running late and when the lorry will realistically be back at the yard.
  • Proof of attendance. Geofence arrivals and departures become time-stamped site visits, so a disputed call-out is settled by data rather than memory.
  • Hours that check themselves. Time on site from telematics is compared with submitted timesheets, flagging differences for a supervisor instead of paying them blind.
  • Dispatch to the cab. The day's jobs go from the job system to the driver's terminal as orders, with addresses and notes, instead of a phone call and a scribbled postcode.
  • Cost per job. Mileage and vehicle time are allocated to the jobs they served, so pricing reflects what work really costs.
  • Fines and incidents. A penalty charge or a speeding notice is matched to the driver and vehicle at that time and place in seconds.
  • Customer updates. "Your delivery is 20 minutes away" messages triggered by real positions, not estimates.

How we build it so it stays reliable

Telematics integrations fail quietly when they are bolted on. Ours follow the same pattern we use for every integration we maintain:

  • A dedicated integration service, typically Azure Functions, reads the Webfleet message queue on a schedule, respects the per-method rate limits and retries safely, so the main application never waits on a third party.
  • A provider-neutral model. Positions, trips and geofence events are translated into the application's own vehicle-location model. If you change telematics supplier later, only the adapter changes, not every screen that uses the data.
  • Secrets kept out of code. API credentials live in Azure Key Vault and are rotated, never stored in configuration files.
  • Live updates where they matter. Planner and dashboard screens receive new positions over SignalR rather than refreshing.
  • Monitoring. A feed that stops is an alert, not a surprise. Application Insights tracks each poll, its latency and its failures.

Driver location is personal data

Tracking a vehicle usually means tracking a person. Under UK GDPR that needs a clear lawful basis, a data protection impact assessment, transparency with drivers, sensible retention periods and care around private use outside working hours. We build those controls in from the start, including retention limits on position history and role-based access to location data, and we follow the hosting and residency approach described in our Hosting & Data Residency statement.

Where this fits: field-service businesses

Scaffolding, construction, facilities, logistics and service companies get the most from it, because their revenue depends on people and vehicles being in the right place. In ScafTek, the scaffolding management platform we build, the Planner already places jobs on a map, links to the company's vehicle tracker and carries a provider-neutral vehicle-location interface designed for exactly this kind of telematics feed.

Getting started

If you already run Webfleet, you need a WEBFLEET.connect licence and an API user, which Webfleet or your reseller can enable. From there a short discovery session with us maps which events matter to your operation, and the first useful feed, usually live positions on the planner or geofenced site visits, can be running within weeks. Talk to us about connecting your fleet to the systems that run your business.