Haulage tracking in Malta, from depot gate to Freeport gate
Where a haulage week leaks money
A container has to clear the Freeport gate by 14:00. At 13:20 nobody in the office can say whether the truck is on the Coast Road or still loading at Ħal Far, so someone starts ringing drivers. A slot missed by 20 minutes becomes a half-day delay and a storage charge, and the first sign of trouble is the phone call after it happened. Four more come up every time we sit down with a haulier in Malta.
Subcontractors you cannot see
Half the fleet on a busy week is not yours. You are accountable to the customer for loads you have no visibility of, and the only status you can give is whatever the subcontractor told you an hour ago.
Trailers nobody can find
Tractors are tracked because they have ignition and power. Trailers, swap bodies and cages get dropped at a yard and become somebody's memory problem, usually the memory of the one driver who is off that week.
Waiting time you cannot evidence
The driver says he waited two hours at the depot. The customer says forty minutes. Nobody has a record, so the demurrage line comes off the invoice and the argument gets repeated next month.
Empty running
A truck returns from Gozo empty because dispatch did not know it was free. The job it could have picked up went to a unit sent out from the depot instead, and both trips get paid for.
From the 05:50 trunking run to Monday billing
The same working day, from the depot gate to the report that goes out with the invoices. Put your own clock times against it. The order of events is the part that holds.
- 105:50
Out of Marsa depot
The trunking run leaves and the unit passes out of the depot geofence. That exit starts the clock, so the day's timeline builds itself and nobody writes a start time on a sheet.
- 207:10
Into the Freeport
The unit enters the Freeport geofence and dispatch sees the arrival without asking anyone. A port or an industrial estate wants a zone of 800 to 1,000 m. A single yard or gate wants 100 to 250 m.
- 309:35
Still inside, two hours on
Nobody gets pinged, because there is no dwell alert in Yipii. What there is, is a point-visits report for that customer that already carries the arrival time and will carry the departure. When the invoice is queried next month, the two hours are in writing.
- 411:00
A same-day job for Mosta
Instead of sending a unit out from the depot, dispatch opens the live map and looks for the nearest free vehicle. The one already coming back through Birżebbuġa takes it, and the empty leg gets paid for.
- 516:40
Trailer T-14 goes down at Ħal Far
The tractor that moved it read the trailer's beacon on the way, so the yard sheet is right without anyone writing it down. That answers who moved it and where it went. It does not watch the trailer while it stands there on its own.
- 6Monday
The weekly pack arrives
Distance, trips, idle time and site dwell per unit, scheduled by email so it turns up without being asked for. Export to PDF or Excel and it goes straight into customer billing.
What you pay depends on how many vehicles you run and what you fit to them. Tell our Malta team both and we will quote it.
Ask for a quoteWhat haulage tracking in Malta runs on
One account and one map for the tractors, the rigids, the vans and the trailers, so the yard is not a separate system from the road.
- Asset TrackingTrailers, cages and plant in the same account as the vehicles, each with a last-seen position and the unit that read it.Yipii IoT
- Live Share TrackingA link per load, opened in any browser with nothing to install. Three are active on every account.Yipii IoT add-on
- Live MapEvery tractor, rigid and van on one screen, with a nearest-vehicle lookup when a same-day job lands.Yipii IoT
- Driver ScoringA score out of 100 per unit. It belongs to the vehicle unless drivers identify themselves with an iButton or a driver beacon.Yipii IoT
- AlertsPower Cut, Tampering, Tow Detection, Unauthorised Movement, Signal Jamming and Tracker Offline, each a notification with no acknowledge button behind it.Yipii IoT
- MaintenanceService intervals, work orders and parts, in the Yipii Mobility app rather than in the tracking account.Yipii Mobility
Geofencing, reporting, beacons, asset tracking, the live map, driver scoring and alerts are part of Yipii IoT, the core tracking account. Sharing links are an IoT add-on: three are active on every account and a haulier running more gets them quoted in with the rest. Clock-in and clock-out sit behind the Driver add-on, which is a separate line again.
Included with Yipii Mobility, the add-on that extends your IoT account. One subscription covers everything in the app, so no feature here is sold on its own. What Yipii Mobility includes
Hardwired on the units, beacons on the trailers
A tractor unit or a heavy rigid has no OBD port you would want to hang a business on, so the tracker goes in hardwired by an auto-electrician and stays there. We fit Teltonika hardware, which has the fullest feature set on the platform. One thing to know before you plan around it: engine and OBD data only comes off the FMC003 and FMB003 units, and a heavy rigid is normally not running one, so position, ignition, movement and driving behaviour are what you get. Subcontractors will not appear on your map at all unless they are carrying your trackers.
- Hardwired install by an auto-electrician, on tractors and rigids alike
- Teltonika units throughout, configured and tested before they leave us
- Bluetooth beacons on trailers, swap bodies and cages, read within about 10 m
- Geofences drawn once: 800 to 1,000 m for a port, 100 to 250 m for a yard gate
- A Yipii multi-network SIM that switches between GO, Melita and Epic
The arithmetic, with the day count printed
The sum below assumes a six-unit fleet and a 250-day working year. The first two rows are money you stop losing to somebody else's clock, and the last two are fuel and kilometres.
The four rows below added together, on a six-unit fleet at 250 working days a year.
The empty-running row is the softest. Check that one against your own week.
| Lever | Assumption | Over a year |
|---|---|---|
| Demurrage you can evidence | 2 disputed waits a month, evidenced from the report, at €180 each | €4,320 |
| A missed port window avoided | 1 a month, at €250 in storage and rework | €3,000 |
| Less empty running | 15 km a day saved across 6 units at €0.45 a km, over 250 working days | €10,125 |
| Idling cut back | 20 minutes a day per unit across 6 units, 2.5 litres an hour at €1.55 a litre, over 250 working days | €1,938 |
The last two rows live or die on the day count, which is why it is printed next to them: on a 365-day basis the same assumptions give €14,782 and €2,829. Run the sums on your own tonnage before you believe any of it. Illustrative arithmetic, not a measured customer outcome.
Frequently asked
From the report, after the fact. Draw a geofence around the site and every visit gets an arrival and a departure timestamp in the point-visits report, so two hours becomes a line you attach to an invoice instead of your driver's word against the customer's. One thing to be clear about: there is no dwell-time alert in Yipii. Nobody is pinged at the two-hour mark. The evidence is in the report you pull or schedule, not in a message while the truck is still standing there.
Only if they are running your trackers. A tracker reports into the account it belongs to, so a subcontractor's unit stays invisible to you until there is a Yipii device in it. Where fitting one is not on the table, the workable answer is a tracking link per load: whoever holds the tracker shares a link, and anyone with that URL follows the load in a browser with nothing to install. That is load-level visibility rather than fleet-level, and on a week where half the fleet is hired in, it is usually the trade you make.
Yes, within limits worth knowing before you buy. A Bluetooth beacon on the trailer, swap body or cage is read by the tracker on whatever vehicle comes within about 10 m of it. So the trailer is visible when it is with a tracked vehicle, and at the point it was dropped. It is dark while it sits alone in a yard. What that buys you is the answer to who moved it and where it went, which is the question that actually costs money on a Monday morning. Beacon batteries run one to two years in daily use, healthy above 2.8 V and due for replacement below 2.0 V.
800 to 1,000 m for a port or an industrial estate, and 100 to 250 m for a single yard or gate. Too tight and a unit parked at the far end of the estate reads as outside the zone. Too loose and half the Coast Road counts as arrival, which makes the waiting-time evidence useless. We draw the first set with you at install and you can redraw any of them later.
Yes. Every report exports to PDF or Excel, and to HTML or JSON if something downstream needs to read it. One report covers a maximum of 31 days, so a monthly billing pull is a single report. You can also put a report on a schedule and have it arrive by email or land on a webhook, which is how most hauliers run the Monday pack of distance, trips, idle time and site dwell per unit.
The unpowered assets, and the waiting time behind a billing dispute, are written up under Trailer, container & skip tracking and Proof of service & site hours.
The full setup, from registering the first tracker to scheduling the billing report, is written out in the logistics and distribution guide in the Yipii IoT docs.