Trailer Management

Every trailer in the fleet earns its day on one platform. Flatbeds, side tippers, curtain-siders, reefers and tankers each carry their own device, report their own status, and live on the same map the tractor side already runs on. The dispatcher sees coupled-versus-solo, the operations team sees dwell at customer yards, the workshop sees utilisation per unit, and the asset register on 30 June matches what the platform recorded across the year. Recovery is covered alongside on the same dataset.

Direct answer

TG Tracking Trailer Management gives you live GPS, movement and tamper alerts, geofencing, door sensing, reefer temperature and utilisation analytics for every trailer in your fleet. The trailers run on the same platform as your Fleet Tracking and Management, Fuel Monitoring and Temperature and Cold Chain Monitoring, with Wireless Asset Tracking hardware for units without a constant power feed.

What trailer management looks like in practice

A trailer is a powered or unpowered asset that lives most of its life away from your depot, often coupled to a tractor that does not belong to you. The platform turns it back into a known unit with a heartbeat.

Live location for every trailer

Whether the trailer is on a tractor, parked in a customer yard, sitting at a depot, on a backhaul, or hooked up to a third-party rig, the platform shows where it is. The map covers South Africa and the SADC region trailers commonly cross into.

Trailer status, not just dot on a map

Each trailer carries a status: idle, in transit, under maintenance, ready for dispatch, off-route, delayed. Status is set by the platform from the data and overrideable by your team. A dispatcher in Bedfordview opens the map and sees the seven trailers ready for tomorrow's loads without having to phone three yards.

Trailer types covered

Flatbeds, side tippers, drop-side, curtain-side and tautliner units, car carriers, refrigerated trailers, container chassis, fuel tankers and bulk haulage units. The hardware varies by trailer type. The view in TG Online does not.

Security workflow built for the trailer's own pattern

A trailer's security pattern is different from a vehicle's. The trailer is most exposed when separated from its tractor, often at a customer yard or backhaul point. The platform is built around that pattern, with movement, tamper and coupling alerts profiled for the solo-trailer state alongside the in-transit state.

Movement alerts

When a stationary trailer starts to move outside its expected window or geofence, an alert fires immediately. Most trailer thefts get caught in this minute, not in the next morning's stock count.

Tamper, towing and unauthorised coupling alerts

If the device is removed, jammed or damaged, the platform flags it. If a trailer is coupled to an unfamiliar tractor or moves out of the depot in an out-of-pattern direction, the alert escalates. The control room is reachable on every escalation.

Geofencing for yards, depots and customer sites

You set the zones that matter: your own depots, your major customer yards, restricted zones, prohibited zones. The platform applies the rules, the alerts fire on breach, and the trip history shows every entry and exit for audit. With accurate location and the same recovery network that supports Asset Tracking and Recovery, trailer recovery is a workable workflow rather than a hope.

Why TG Tracking for trailer management: the asset-vehicle bridge

Most fleets end up with two parallel systems. One vendor for trucks, a different vendor for trailers, a third tool for spreadsheets that try to reconcile the two at month-end. The reconciliation is where things get lost.

TG Tracking is the platform that runs both sides. Tractors, trailers, drivers and cargo all live on the same map and the same data layer. A flatbed coupled to a tractor in Polokwane shows as a paired unit. The same flatbed dropped at a customer in Tzaneen shows as solo, and the alert rules switch to the unattended-asset profile automatically. Reefer trailers feed temperature into Temperature and Cold Chain Monitoring. Tipper utilisation flows into Business Intelligence Dashboards. When a trailer is fitted with a battery-powered device for a non-powered chassis, that device is part of the same Wireless Asset Tracking family rather than a separate vendor stack. One supplier, one number, one record that matches the asset register on 30 June.

South African context: long routes, third-party tractors, mining tippers

Trailer management in South Africa has to work for the long-haul logistics fleet running between the Durban port and the Highveld, the bulk transporter moving between the Witbank coal corridor and the load-out at Richards Bay, the cold-chain operator running citrus to Cape Town for export, and the mining contractor with side tippers shuttling between pit and stockpile. Each of those use cases has different theft, utilisation and compliance pressures.

The platform handles cross-border moves into Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Eswatini where roaming is configured for the device. Border-post dwell time, fuel-stop dwell time and unauthorised stopovers all show as exceptions rather than as items on a paper diary. For mining contractors, integrating trailer activity with Mining IVMS keeps the trailer fleet inside the same safety reporting frame the mine site already audits.

Frequently asked questions

Talk to our trailer team

A trailer fleet's productivity sits in the picture the operations team carries during the day. Book a trailer demo and we will walk you through the live view, the alert profile and the utilisation reports with your trailer mix in mind, so the dispatcher, the workshop and the QS see the same record.