HERE Technologies

HERE Technologies is a location data and technology company that created the first digital map over 35 years ago. They are the world's leading location platform company with a global footprint across 52 countries. They have a strong presence in the automotive industry, and also work with leading companies across a wide range of industries, including transport and logistics, mobility, manufacturing and retail and the public sector. Their mission is to enable a digital representation of reality to radically improve the way the world moves, lives and interacts.

HERE Technologies' Professional Services Division provide their customers with development support and help to accelerate the implementation of mapping solutions. When they took on a large development project with one of their logistics and transport customers, they reached out to Fitzroy IT - a HERE development partner - to assist.

The project involved creating a generic turn-by-turn navigation application based on the HERE Mobile SDK 4.0. Specifically, HERE’s customer wanted a library developed that sat on top of the SDK, and abstracted away the complexity, so that they could produce multiple navigation applications, each with custom skinning and a customisable feature set.

Fitzroy IT worked closely with HERE to deliver the project on time and for a fixed budget, while delivering a feature set significantly greater than the scope of the original Statement of Work.

Customer Challenge

HERE’s Professional Services Division needed additional resources to assist them with a large development project for a customer. This required resources who had experience with HERE SDK development, and development for Android devices.

The project has an aggressive timeline, which was at risk without those additional expert resources.

Fitzroy IT - The Perfect Partner

In the past Fitzroy IT has used the HERE SDK for a variety of applications, including transport of athletes and dignitaries at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, and more recently working to direct bus replacement services for PTV and TfNSW. Working with guidance code for heavy vehicles was of particular relevance to HERE who needed truck routing expertise for this project.

Other key factors were Fitzroy IT’s experience delivering Android apps with Kotlin and Jetpack Compse, and our in-house Graphic Design and UX experts, as well as our Project Managers with a proven track-record delivering large, time-critical projects.

Fitzroy IT were also chosen because of their flexibility and ability to quickly get started on the project, which had very tight timelines.

Solution

Working in a close collaboration with HERE’s team, Fitzroy IT utilised the HERE mobile SDK v4 to build:

an AAR (Android Archive) containing functions to enable:
- general mapping
- turn-by-turn navigation
- voice assistance
- vehicle routing (car, light truck and truck)
- truck parameters (size, weight, height, number of axles etc.)
- vehicle restriction display on map (e.g. roads with height or weight restrictions, or time restrictions for trucks)
- real-time traffic
- scene setting and map control (pinch to zoom, rotate, recentre etc.)
- configurable units (imperial, metric, auto based on system)
- configurable language
- support for light and dark mode
- speed limit display
- vehicle current speed display
- address and POI lookup
- navigate to lat/long
- ETA display
- route preview
- route recalculation (on wrong turn)
- alternative routes displayed (when faster route found)
- map caching
- offline navigation and operation
a reference application that utilised the AAR
a test harness android app that sent intents to the reference application to alter its configuration at launch

Results and Benefits

The project took approximately six months and was ultimately successful. Indeed it ended up delivering far more than the original scope. As well as the AAR and the Reference Application, changing customer needs also saw Fitzroy IT and HERE deliver a customer-ready application.

That application was taken by the customer and deployed to over 10,000 trucks, being used in day-to-day delivery operations.

The foundation that was delivered ultimately allows the customer to build similar apps rapidly in the future, focusing their efforts on UX refinements for each deployment. Without that foundation, building such apps from scratch each time would take hundreds and hundreds of hours.

Next Steps

Fitzroy IT remains a HERE Technologies development partner and is always available to help with consulting work and software development projects large and small.

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