Monday, March 22nd, 2010
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 an additional $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.
Monday, September 14th, 2009
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.
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
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.
Monday, July 27th, 2009
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.
