North Pole Inc: a Migration success with innovative telematics

If you think Christmas, you can’t go past the successful North Pole Inc team who have long held the contract for present delivery. Director of operations, Santa, and fleet manager Mrs Claus have always been there behind the scenes to ensure that the elves and reindeer fleet meet the logistics required to deliver presents worldwide on the most important day of the year.

Times change and the need to stay competitive and on time is important for the high expectations that team is held to – any wrong turn can lead to seconds of delays and with millions of kids to deliver to, that can mean an entire country could miss out on Christmas gifts on Christmas day.

Challenge

As the team is busy year-round, they needed to ensure the business will continue to operate efficiently as more regions, including Australia and New Zealand, around the world migrate away from 3G technologies and make the switch to 4G-enabled telematics. As Australia said goodbye in 2024 to decade old 3G communications, New Zealand is close to the cutoff date. The North Pole Inc team needed to ensure there were no black spots left while Santa and the entire team blast through the Christmas period and package delivery.

They rely on the information for the safety and efficiency, meaning that they needed the same great analytics but were looking to improve their safety to improve on behavioural concerns and provide better coaching. With so many presents to deliver to so many kids across the world in a short amount of time, they needed all the help they can get to ensure everyone opens a present on Christmas morning.

With that in mind, they were also looking to implement video telematics alongside newer in-vehicle units for a fleet that no longer relied on the 3G network for communication.

Solution

There were several upgrades that North Pole Inc integrated alongside the switch to 4G-powered telematics. First came the upgrade away from 3G-enabled telematics devices that were initially installed across the general fleet found about the depot and the Sleigh in which Santa delivers presents every year. The VT202, a recently released telematics device, was implemented across their vehicles and equipment to allow for increased bandwidth of analytics and insights, including integration with third party applications.

• Asset Tracking devices were also implemented across secure cargo to keep an eye on its movements during the manufacturing process and storage to ensure they’re not lost and can always be found at a moment’s notice when packing Santa’s sleigh for delivery.
• Multi IQ Cameras, the latest in Video Telematics, was installed on delivery vehicles to provide a means for safety of the operating team by keeping an eye on driving behaviours and help provide an extra eye on the flight path for when incidents or events are detected to provide context to what happened.
• Integration with third party freight management systems where jobs are directly managed and information is then available via the all-in-one in-vehicle driver device, providing task information, delivery details and directions.

Results

North Pole Inc smoothly migrated its telematics in trials across 2024, positioning it critically in time to make a successful Christmas delivery. “We had great communication with the Teletrac Navman team who provided everything we needed to get started with the newer technologies,” said Mrs Claus.

Last year’s Christmas present delivery was one of the fastest we’ve ever done. 2024 reached the top 25 of KPI’d deliveries since record-keeping started, something that hasn’t been achieved in the last century, according to Mrs Claus. The elves in the logistics team were able to pre-emptively avoid issues before they arose from learnings in the trial period and keeping an eye on footage as events occurred. Behaviour amongst drivers, especially Santa, improved tenfold, and an approximate 10% saving in overall operational costs and 14% saving in fuel/energy costs has been seen in the year since implementation.

While the team are still working on transitioning the complete operation, the delivery team is well underway on seeing further benefits as they continue to implement more segments of the system, including TN360’s insights module to make more changes to see further cost reductions. Since 2024’s trials successfully showed the team what they can expect, North Pole Inc’s team is excited for 2025’s holiday period.