When we started around 2008 the price for a mining IVMS unit was around $1,675 plus installation, which at the time could have cost some $500 per unit. This was in the heyday of mining in Australia and times were good indeed.

Rolling the clock some 10 years further, the need for IVMS is still there, but the money no longer is. Mining has become a far less lucrative business and costs are being cut, including what mine owners have available to spend on IVMS. Fortunately IVMS technology, as is the case with most computer-based technologies, have become cheaper and better.

Today $250 will buy you a plug-and-play IVMS system with the same, if not better functionality that a 2008 system would have given. Position, speed, duress and driving style are all covered by the new cheaper and better IVMS system and the only aspect that needs to be hard-wired in nowadays is seatbelt usage – even that can (and really should) be picked up through a CANBUS adaptor. A new IVMS unit even carries geozones in its memory, so local decisions based on position can be made and drivers can be warned of pending violation notifications.

With the cost of IVMS reducing to the price of electrical components, our view is that it should simply be made part of a new vehicle by the manufacturers. Of course not all implementations are identical, but it has been standardised enough to bring matters to the point where simply activating an already installed SIM card will provide very accurate IVMS information that can be processed and interpreted. IVMS hardware has, as with TVs and mobile phones, become purely a commodity to deliver information – the skill in a business like Digicore’s lies in how this information is processed and delivered to the end-user, not in how it is collected by what has become a cheap piece of electronics.