TeleNav Track API

We are working on closing another auto-transport project, and part of the specifications required that we pull orders from the PDA devices registered to all the truckers who work for our client.  They use TeleNav with form data entry, and we are going to use the TeleNav API to pull the scanned VINs and geo-data into their dispatching system.  Sounds cool in theory, right?   Well, the TeleNav API doesn’t support pulling address lists from its Web Forms, and it took them a good couple of weeks to admit this.   We can get the ID, but when we use that ID to pull the address from the meta-data, it turns out there’s a different ID associated with it.  

Finding this out involved talking to literally four different people.   My project lead and I have been down this path before.   It’s not in his job description to pound his fist and sometimes I have to step in.   Don’t get me wrong.  He’s good at tracking down info and is very results-oriented, but I’m the company owner and once in a while I have to play the role of a–hole and get on the phone and make a big stink.

We can still use the API.  We can code the ID lookups one time and maintain the list as our client’s customer list grows.  If this becomes too cumbersome, we can use web automation to “scrape” the lists from the web forms.  It’s an interesting project because of the API and the client also wants a VIN Decoder, so we had to source a VIN database. 

We’ve put a lot of hours into the “proof of concept” but it will be a nice project to add to our portfolio once it’s complete.   We’ve done mobile-technology, and we’ve done VIN decoding, but we’ve never incorporated those features into an auto-transport system of this size.

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