What customization can be done for GPS trackers?

If you’re already in the GPS tracker business and want to build your brand locally, you’re probably thinking about how you can talk to suppliers about customizing your product so that you can stand out in front of customers. So what kind of customization can be done for GPS trackers?

GPS tracker is a relatively complex product, which includes hardware and software, so product customization involves hardware customization and software customization. These two aspects refer to a lot of professional knowledge, which we will sort out for you one by one.

1. Customization based on existing GPS tracker or GPS tracking platform.
1) The customization of finished hardware is generally based on the existing product to do some surface technology without changing the shape or mold, such as external label stickers, silk printing or radium carving trademark logo. Or otherwise, to increase the new features based on the existing product firmware, for example, some GPS tracker contains reserved RS232 serial port, these serial ports can be connected to different accessories with RS232 connectors, such as fuel sensor, RFID, camera, scanner and so on. You can imagine when you purchase GPS tracker from supplier A and fuel sensor from supplier B, and later you want to integrate them together which is a kind of customization that the GPS tracker supplier A should program their firmware to compatible with the fuel sensor provided by supplier B.

2) The other situation is that you only request slightly change in the PCBA design of the hardware to achieve the features and the mold has more room so you don’t need to change it, In addition to redesigning the PCBA, this process must also involve rewriting firmware code, which may refer to some researching cost.
3) The customization of the GPS tracking platform is mostly based on the existing platform, such as customizing login interface and domain name, adding reports, integrating maps, integrating protocols, integrating email, integrating SMS API, and other functions that can be triggered by the platform. Some of the customization like data transfer between servers and application development based on the API of the platform, which would request your own engineers and supplier’s to work together.

2. Develop a brand new GPS tracker
1) Generally if you need to change the mold of the product, even it’s small change, it is equivalent to develop a brand new product. In this case, you need to follow the certain procedure as below and ask supplier to offer you quotation accordingly.
a) ID (Industry Design) and MD (Mechanical) design;
b) Hardware (PCBA) and Software (Firmware) design;
c) Project management (Coordinate designers, engineers, mold production and product manufacturing arrangements until finished product comes out);
d) Sourcing (Evaluate and audit suppliers of materials, price negotiating)
e) QA (Ensure product quality)
2) The workload of developing a new tracking software platform is also huge. It usually goes through five stages as following.
a) Software definition and planning. In this stage, it mainly determine the goals and feasibility
b) Requirements analysis. In the case of determining the feasibility of software development, detailed requirements analysis is carried out for each function that the software needs to achieve.
c) Software design. According to the results of demand analysis, the whole software system is designed, such as system framework design, database design and so on
d) Program coding. This stage is to translate the results of software design into computer executable program code.
e) Software testing. After the program coding is completed, rigorous testing should be carried out to find existing problems and correct them.