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Eleven forty, in the lorry holding area. Dock five has just come free, and the driver who has been waiting since nine is parked three hundred metres from the gate and doesn’t know it is their turn. Someone has to tell them. The dispatcher can ring, for the twentieth time that day, or the system can send a text at the very moment the approval is given.
SMS notifications for drivers and other outgoing messages
Most of the traffic comes from handling drivers: entry approval with the dock number and the time allowed for driving in, a dock change, a cancellation, a call to the dock when the transport moves to its next stage, a link to the site map. Messages go out in the driver’s language, chosen once at registration or at the kiosk from the eighteen supported. The kiosk also sends a one-time code to verify the phone number, valid for a few minutes.
The rest is the everyday traffic of individual modules: initial passwords and codes for the external portals, reminders about company vehicle inspections and insurance, room booking notifications, alerts from rules.
Receiving SMS: check-ins, mileage readings and alarm panels
SMS also works in the other direction. Lone working posts send back check-in codes, company car drivers reply with mileage readings and confirmations, and alarm panels report arming and alarms. Receiving needs the variant with your own modem, because only then do messages go out from a number that the driver or the post can reply to.
Your own modem or a sending server
Sending comes in two variants, chosen at implementation. The first is a hardware gateway on site: a device with a modem and a SIM card that polls the server for messages to send. Texts then go out from a local number, with no external sending service in between. The second variant is sending through the vendor’s SMS server, with no hardware on site and no receiving of incoming messages.
The outgoing queue has several safeguards. The same text to the same number won’t go out twice within a minute, so a double click doesn’t produce two messages. A send that the modem hasn’t confirmed is retried. Each message is also linked to its booking, so the history stays with the event even if the driver changes phone number.
The SMS gateway is a device and, like all hardware, is priced separately from the licence. You can price the licence for your own configuration in the configurator.
What an SMS gateway does not guarantee
TraxSystem records that a message was sent, not that it was delivered. SMS is not a guaranteed channel, and critical processes cannot rely on it alone.
When the gateway loses its connection for a longer period, messages older than a few minutes are dropped. This is deliberate, because an entry approval delivered an hour after it was given misleads the driver instead of helping. The text is also reduced to characters that get through on every network, so Polish diacritics and non-Latin alphabets are converted to plain Latin script.
See also: ‘What time should I be there?’ calls: how to stop taking them · Post check-ins: how monitoring a lone worker works in practice · Drivers check themselves in: how a gate kiosk works