UK-based vehicle and asset data supplier HPI and Datatag, the pan-European consumer and commercial vehicle ID company, have begun work under the official Construction & Agricultural Equipment Security and Registration scheme (Cesar) to protect commercial assets against theft.
Darren Greenyer, finance and insurance director at HPI, explained the partnership would empower those holding assets with more information regarding vehicles, greater ability to identify assets and the ability to check machinery against the Cesar register.
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"At the moment, registering finance interest against a piece of plant machinery, whether it’s road-registered or not, generally it will have a serial number," said Greenyer.
"Serial numbers can be replicated, whether a single manufacturer or across other manufacturers.
"So when you come to pin-point a specific vehicle, it becomes a challenge.
"If you look for serial number 12345, what you’re going to find is probably 100 assets. So which is the true asset you’re looking to perform a provenance check on in terms of finance?"
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By GlobalDataUnder Cesar, plant machinery is given a unique and tamper-proof number plate which the police can scan to identify it.
Data from this is fed to HPI’s database, which is shared on the Cesar Register of non-road registered vehicles to pinpoint assets.
Greenyer estimated plant machinery theft in the UK was currently worth around £1m (1.17m) a week but noted a particular challenge in the industry was the calculation of the worth of machinery which was insured without the assets being visited.
This, in turn, created an issue around accurate values used to establish finance and meant funders in contact with HPI were keen to improve security.
Greenyer said many in the industry, including manufacturer JCB, were "excited" about the scheme and working with HPI to register machinery.
The scheme was "soft launched" in April, starting with a "test and learn phase" with finance companies, and
followed by a bigger launch in June at the JCB factory in Staffordshire.
The scheme will be extended globally if successful, leveraging the "wider opportunities" presented by Solera, the parent firm to HPI which is active in 56 nations.
