Indoor mapping and RFID tracking in Kenya

The port of Mombasa is one of the largest in East Africa and the start of the Northern Corridor, the trade route that carries goods to Nairobi and on to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since the Standard Gauge Railway opened, a large share of that cargo travels by rail to inland container depots in Nairobi and Naivasha, and the rest by truck.

Container freight stations and warehouses in Mombasa unpack, store and stage that cargo. Spatial Map draws their dock doors, yard slots, gates and weighbridges and colours them from your yard or WMS data, and RFID pallets show where the last reader saw them, as in the Eastport Cross-Dock demo. Customs and port systems stay where they are.

Many companies run their East African business from Nairobi, with regional distribution centres that supply Kenya and neighbouring countries, and Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) is one of the region’s busiest for passengers and cargo. The city has its own page: indoor mapping and tracking in Nairobi covers JKIA’s fresh-produce cargo, the Inland Container Depot and the warehouse corridor along Mombasa Road.

Kenya is one of the world’s largest exporters of cut flowers, grown largely around Lake Naivasha and in the highlands and flown to Europe, and it exports fresh vegetables, avocados and — through Mombasa’s auction — large volumes of black tea. Flowers and vegetables move fast, from the farm’s pack house and cold room to the airport; avocados go by reefer container through Mombasa.

On a Spatial Map floor plan, each pre-cooling room and cold store takes the colour of its latest reading, pallets waiting for collection show at their bay, and in-app alerts flag a room that stays warm or a sensor that stops reporting. The Polar Pharma demo shows the same pattern in a pharmaceutical cold store with 1,140 rack locations.

Kenya’s supermarket chains, malls and FMCG distributors serve a fast-growing urban market in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru and Eldoret. A distributor’s warehouse is mapped rack by rack, with stock by bin from the WMS; a multi-floor store or mall carries shelf stock, RFID reads at the doors, fridge temperatures and footfall heatmaps, as in the Retail Mart demo with 85 RFID readers on three floors.

Most Kenyan supervisors, drivers and contractors carry a smartphone, and many work from it rather than a desktop. Spatial Map has no app to install: a read-only share link opens the map in the phone’s browser, with only the floors and layers you choose, an expiry date and a view cap. Wayfinding gives turn-by-turn routes across floors on the same link, so a new driver can find the right dock or a visitor the right lift.

Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 is overseen by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC), which also registers data controllers and processors. It becomes relevant when location data can be linked to a person, such as a driver’s or picker’s badge; tags on pallets, crates 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.