We have another informative podcast for those of you looking to learn more about vehicle telematics and how vehicle telematics technology can impact your business. This podcast will provide listeners with a comprehensive overview of how a vehicle telematics solution can increase efficiency, scheduling flexibility, customer service, and fleet transparency while saving your organization money.
Also discussed in this podcast are common money-draining issues of monitoring speed and idling, hard braking and rapid acceleration, as well as engine diagnostics, vehicle maintenance, route optimization, vehicle location and minimizing unauthorized use.
Gain greater insight into how these technologies combine to help fleets reduce empty mileage, minimize fuel consumption, and optimize vehicle use to save money.
The second in our series with MyWebinars, on August 24th at 3pm EST, don’t miss Vehicle Telematics 101: How the Right Solution Can Impact Your Bottom Line. Continue your learning by digging deeper into how fleet managers can benefit from mobile technology. Hear about a variety of topics including:
- Monitoring speed, idling and other driver behaviors
- Engine data and diagnostics integration
- Ideal vehicle maintenance
- Route optimization and closest vehicle routing
- Vehicle location and tracking
- Minimizing unauthorized use
Don’t miss this chance to learn how telematics technologies work, as well as how these technologies combine to help fleets reduce empty mileage, minimize fuel consumption, and optimize vehicle use to save money.
Mentor Engineering and MyWebinars are partnering to present three expert-led, fleet management webinars in August and September. These educational programs will inform attendees about best practices, current issues and recent trends in the fleet industry. The webinars will cover topics such as mobile workforce management, vehicle telematics technology and fleet safety strategies. Detailed descriptions and session times follow below:
Top 10 Strategies for Resolving Key Mobile Workforce and Fleet Management Challenges August 16, 2011, 3PM EST
This webinar will provide a comprehensive overview of how the right technology solution can help organizations tackle common mobile workforce and fleet management challenges such as inefficient data management, poor communication, lone worker safety, and wasteful driving habits. Attendees will learn new ways to better manage these common challenges while increasing revenue and reducing costs at the same time. Get solutions to key industry issues and find out how similar companies have improved their bottom lines.
Vehicle Telematics 101: How the Right Solution Can Impact Your Bottom Line August 24, 2011, 3PM EST
This webinar will provide a comprehensive overview of how a vehicle telematics solution can increase efficiency, scheduling flexibility, customer service, and fleet transparency while saving your organization money. The speaker will discuss telematics topics such as monitoring speed and idling, instances of hard braking and rapid acceleration, as well asengine diagnostics, vehicle maintenance, route optimization, vehicle location and minimizing unauthorized use. Attendees will learn how these technologies combine to help fleets reduce empty mileage, minimize fuel consumption, and optimize vehicle use to save money.
Strategies for Managing a Safer, More Efficient Fleet September 14, 2011, 3PM EST
This webinar will provide essential information on strategies that can be put to use to make fleets and drivers safer, while improving efficiency. The speaker will discuss major fleet safety issues including the cost of driver distraction and corporate liability in the event of an accident, strategies for keeping lone or remote workers safe, new legislation requirements pertaining to EOBRs (Electronic On-Board Recorders) and Hours of Service (HOS) compliance as well as how to manage unsafe driver behaviors in an effective manner.
To get more information about the MyWebinars complete fleet management series, visit the MyWebinars website. To learn more about Mentor Engingeering, click here.
Here is a great article from GreenBiz.com about the many benefits of telematics. Vehicle telematics data can directly influence how much time and fuel is used, and helps companies operate a lot safer. The article discusses how telematics can monitor things like seat belt use and vehicle speed, which improve fleet safety. Also of importance is the fact that government mandates related to driver performance reporting is the main factor driving telematics adoption.
How can vehicle telematics make such significant improvements to your business, you ask? Well take the case of UPS, for example. The article states that UPS has used telematics to cut nearly 29 million miles out of how far its trucks drive every year. This reduction is owed to both better route planning and reducing truck idling. UPS’s drivers have reduced idle time on average about 15 minutes per day, which adds up to a potential 1.4 million gallons of fuel saved per year. These factors and more are discussed in the entire article here. To watch a short demo on how technology lets you analyze driver behaviors and track idling costs to eliminate wasteful driving habits, go here.
If someone were to ask you where a specific vehicle in your fleet is right this moment, would you have the answer? What if they asked you how fast that vehicle was traveling last Thursday? Do you know? If you don’t know, a mobile workforce management solution can make sure you have those answers, and more. Here is a useful demo that shows you how this technology puts Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL/GPS), vehicle telematics, driver behavior monitoring, reporting and maintenance capabilities at your fingertips to help streamline operations and increase efficiency.
It’s a well-known fact that as technology evolves and hardware capabilities improve, prices drop. This is why consumer electronics like home computers depreciate in value so quickly.
Unlike consumer electronics, because fleet-based technologies are not available for public consumption, they have a much longer shelf-life and retain their value well beyond their everyday counterparts. But mobile computers benefit from improving hardware just as much as the home market and an article on Field Technologies Online.com outlines this.
As Brian Albright writes, “Systems now have a greater capability to collect telemetry and other data from the vehicle, and thanks to increased bandwidth from wireless carriers, in-vehicle computer systems with 3G capabilities can also support richer applications.”
For more information on how improving hardware will provide new functionalities for in-vehicle mobile computers, view the entire article here.
Click here to read about Mentor Ranger’s versatile functionalities.
The results are in. Monitoring your fleet’s activities is one of the easiest ways to lower your operating costs. With the release of Mentor Fleet Monitor early in 2010, we’ve been running pilot projects with a variety of clients. Here are some of their preliminary findings:
Idling Monitoring
A major utility company piloting idling monitoring on seven vehicles identified that between $45 and $134 was wasted in fuel each month from unnecessary idling. When extended to their 4500 vehicle fleet, unnecessary idling would cost the company over $86,000 in wasted fuel per month. A 50% reduction in idling, accomplished by identifying negative driver behaviors with the information provided in the idling monitoring reports, would result in a cost savings of more than $500,000 a year.
Speed Monitoring
Using speed monitoring on a nine vehicle subset of their fleet, a major urban paratransit agency identified over 1400 speed threshold violations in one week. Their reports showed that drivers reached a top speed of 87 miles per hour, 32 miles per hour over the pre-set limit. Drivers travelling at these speeds would cost the agency anadditional $1.28 per gallon of gas, not to mention significantly increasing the risk of an accident. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each five miles per hour above the speed limit has the net effect of increasing the cost of a gallon of gas by twenty cents.
Automatic Vehicle Location
A Canadian paratransit agency implemented AVL technology to monitor a twelve vehicle subset of their fleet and optimize driving behaviors. The agency eliminated over 140 unnecessary miles each month. Projected to the 17 vehicle fleet, using AVL to optimize routing will save the agency over 2400 miles or 173 gallons of fuel over a year.
Curious about engine diagnostics monitoring and data collection, but unsure how it will benefit your company? One of Mentor Engineering’s Senior Project Managers, Shubh Sidhu, sat down to talk with us about the many possibilities engine diagnostics brings to fleets. Here’s what he had to say:
Q: What is engine diagnostics exactly?
A: Basically, engine diagnostics is the ability to pull information from the vehicle’s built-in on-board computer. This real-time data lets you diagnose vehicle issues. The data collected can supplement your vehicle monitoring program or it can be standalone data. Another important piece of information that engine diagnostics delivers is engine hours, or the amount of time the engine has been running. This data is crucial for things like maintenance and repairs.
To sum it up, engine diagnostics is the interface to your vehicle’s built-in computer that gives you access to vehicle monitoring and maintenance data that you couldn’t ordinarily get.
Q: What are the benefits of engine diagnostics monitoring?
A: The ability to monitor engine diagnostics remotely saves staff time and company resources. You can collect all the engine diagnostic information, pull it out of whichever back-end software application you are using, and you now have direct access to mileage reports, or hours run, whenever you want them. This allows you to better schedule vehicle maintenance, and gives you a clear view of what vehicles are up to.
From a cost standpoint, the maintenance piece is a big advantage. By integrating engine diagnostics monitoring with your maintenance program, you can collect vehicle Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), which can greatly improve the efficiency of maintenance staff. For example, if your maintenance team knows there is a faulty component on a vehicle in advance, they can have the parts ready when that vehicle comes into the shop. Downtime is significantly reduced and the vehicle is back on the road a lot quicker. In addition, the ability to know that there’s something wrong with one of your vehicles before it becomes a major problem equalsbig savings.
There is also a safety benefit. Engine diagnostics can send certain pieces of information to show the safe or unsafe use of a vehicle, like airbag sensors, or seatbelts being fastened/unfastened. You have the necessary information to let drivers know when equipment on their vehicle isn’t properly fastened.
Q: Do you have any real-life examples to help illustrate the benefits?
A: Let’s look at American Electric Power (AEP). One of the diagnostic pieces AEP collects is Boom Up/Down status.
With engine diagnostics, they know Boom and PTO (Power Take Off) activity relative to the total mileage of their trucks. A truck might have half a million miles on it and need to be replaced, but the boom has only been used twice. They can just take the boom off the old vehicle and put it on the new vehicle. A lot of money is saved by not replacing lightly used equipment.
Q: Are there any challenges that go along with engine diagnostics monitoring?
A: Regular commercial vehicles, pickup trucks, and even paratransit vehicles all use an interface called OBDII, or On-Board Diagnostics, which makes it relatively easy to collect engine diagnostics. Heavier duty vehicles and transit buses, on the other hand, use two interfaces: J1708 and J1939. The information on the interfaces of this latter group is more detailed. There are literally hundreds of pieces of information that can be retrieved, from the hydraulic oil temperature to the oil pressure. It’s challenging because it’s harder to predict what pieces of information you can get from your fleet as it changes based on vehicle make, model and year.
Q: Without engine diagnostics monitoring, what kind of business problems might companies run into?
A: Well, they would definitely experience more vehicle downtime, their maintenance department won’t be able to use their resources as efficiently, and if they do run into situations where a vehicle breaks down because the maintenance data wasn’t available, they’ll likely see money lost in both repair costs and lost productivity.
When implementing technologies that have a significant impact on workers, like vehicle tracking and telematics, it can be challenging to convince them of the benefits. Here are some useful tips that can help you prepare your workers for these technologies. Click here to read the story.
Driver behavior monitoring systems give you the ability to enforce safety standards of your mobile fleet from the office. This kind of system uses vehicle telematic data to track information such as vehicle speed and instances of hard braking. Managers can use this information as corrective tools to alert drivers to unsafe behaviors and to ensure drivers are meeting your company’s safety standards.
A blog for those of us who live and work in fleet management. Topics include engine diagnostics, driver safety, mobile workforce management, CAD/AVL, vehicle maintenance, truck distribution, global computing, work order management, and field services.
Free White Paper: Decreasing Driver Distraction
With driver distraction being a leading cause of vehicle accidents, selecting an in-vehicle computer for your fleet that lets you control when drivers/device interaction is crucial to your fleet’s safety, as well as your bottom line.
We have another informative podcast for those of you looking to learn more about vehicle telematics and how vehicle telematics technology can impact your business. This podcast will provide listeners with a comprehensive overview of how a vehicle telematics solution can increase efficiency, scheduling flexibility, customer service, and fleet transparency while saving your organization money.
