Indoor mapping and RFID tracking in Africa

Most of what Africa imports and exports passes through a small number of large ports. Durban is South Africa’s busiest container port; Mombasa is the main gateway for Kenya and the landlocked countries along the Northern Corridor; Lagos handles much of Nigeria’s trade, now joined by the deep-sea port at Lekki; Tema is Ghana’s main port; and Tanger Med, on the Strait of Gibraltar, has become one of the largest container ports on the Mediterranean. Egypt’s ports along the Suez Canal are covered on our Egypt page.

Behind each port sit container freight stations, bonded warehouses and cross-docks where cargo is unpacked, stored and sent inland. Spatial Map draws their dock doors, yard slots, gates and staging lanes and colours them from your yard or warehouse data; RFID-tagged pallets appear at the reader that last saw them. The Eastport Cross-Dock demo shows 50 dock doors, 44 yard slots and 1,180 RFID pallets in one view. Spatial Map does not connect to port community or customs systems.

Several of the continent’s best-known exports are perishable. Kenya ships cut flowers to Europe by air; South Africa is one of the world’s largest citrus exporters; Egypt sends oranges and fresh produce to several continents; Morocco supplies European markets with fruit and vegetables. Between the farm and the aircraft or reefer container, the product waits in packhouses, pre-cooling rooms and cold stores where a door left open costs shelf life.

On the map, each cold room takes the colour of its latest sensor reading, pallets on hold show where they stand, and the History player replays a night shift. An alert rule can flag a room that stays out of range for a set number of minutes, or a sensor that has stopped reporting; alerts arrive in the app — bell, toast and Alerts page — with Show on map. The Polar Pharma demo shows the pattern in a pharmaceutical cold store with 1,140 rack locations.

Mining shapes supply chains from South Africa’s platinum and gold to Ghana’s gold and Morocco’s phosphates, and every operation depends on stores of spares, tools and calibrated equipment that are expensive and slow to replace. Manufacturing is growing too: Morocco has built an automotive industry around Tangier and Kenitra that exports mainly to Europe, and Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa all have large industrial bases.

RFID or BLE tags on tools and spares, read at the store door or reported by your RTLS, place each item on the store plan with its check-out history. On a plant, lines, work-in-progress buffers and racks are coloured from your ERP or MES, as in the Summit Assembly demo with 867 rack locations. See RFID tool tracking for the store side.

Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Casablanca and Cairo all have large multi-level malls, and national retail chains run distribution centres that feed hundreds of stores. Spatial Map maps the DC rack by rack and the store floor by floor: shelf and department stock, RFID reads at the doors, fridge temperatures and footfall as a heatmap that stops at walls. The Retail Mart demo shows three floors with 85 RFID readers.

For visitors and new staff, wayfinding builds walking routes across floors through stairs, lifts and escalators, with a Step-free option, on read-only share links that open in any phone browser.

Power cuts and unreliable connections are a fact of life at many African sites. Spatial Map runs in the cloud, so viewing the map needs a connection; reads and readings are usually buffered by your middleware or a small local relay and posted in batches with the table write API when the link is back. Row history keeps the gap visible, and a “not updated for N minutes” alert rule tells you which gateway went quiet.

Pricing is the same worldwide, in US dollars. Teams that would rather run everything on their own server can use the open-source edition, released under the MIT licence and installed with Docker.

Many African countries now have data protection laws, among them South Africa’s POPIA, Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 and Nigeria’s Data Protection Act 2023, with their own laws in Ghana, Morocco and Egypt. They matter when location data can be linked to a person, such as a staff badge; tags on pallets, tools and stock do not identify anyone. Your legal advisers decide what applies. A data processing agreement is available and the security page explains how data is protected.

The interface is available in English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German and Chinese, so a francophone team in Casablanca and an English-speaking team in Accra can work in the same workspace. Spatial Map is sold online, and our team works with customers remotely, by video call and through the contact form.