Fleet management today is anything but fleet. In fact, keeping hundreds or even thousands of vehicles healthy, fueled and on the road using legacy technology costs fleet management companies millions of dollars, with only incremental improvements in processes. Add rising insurance costs, ever-tightening safety requirements and aging systems that don’t share data across the organization, and companies have a big-rig–sized headache. But there is a way to rule the road again – and the answer lies in the internet of things (IoT).
IoT – with tens of billions of smart devices all capable of collecting and communicating data – is transforming industries such as manufacturing and transportation. In fact, Accenture projects that IoT will add $14 trillion to the economy by 2030.1 And connected transportation vehicles is one of the fastest growing categories for commercial “smart, connected products.”
When fleet managers leverage IoT, they gain actionable fleet data such as location, driver, vehicle, route, traffic and weather information. This is real-time data, and when combined with masses of historic data, it becomes the fuel to drive predictive and highly prescriptive analytics. With this knowledge on board, fleet managers can save money while improving customer service by reducing fuel usage, reducing downtime, automating maintenance planning and improving safety – and better satisfying insurance requirements.
The best IoT fleet management solutions allow companies to blend both historical business data and real-time machine data. For example, a platform can pull vehicle sensor data such as engine temperature, speed and cargo weight, and combine it with data from contextual sources such as vehicle make and model, GPS location, and maintenance history. By then blending this data with enterprise data from the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and repair management systems, and automating predictive analytics by using machine learning, the solution can deliver actionable insights in real time.
By connecting everything from the field to the back office, an IoT fleet management solution delivers five big benefits: new revenue; improved safety; actionable, real-time data; greater efficiency and sustainability; and new, improved customer experiences.
Let’s look at how an IoT solution works in vehicle fleet management. In this example, all vehicles have their tire pressure sensors connected to a system that evaluates data over time to identify drops in pressure and notifies vehicle operators of potential failure. The system then uses GPS technology to recommend the closest service center with immediate availability – and sends necessary parts information to the service center’s back office system so that they know what to have in inventory before the vehicle arrives.
When fleet managers team up with an experienced IoT co-creation partner, they can tailor the fleet management solution to their own unique needs and create a solution that works effectively with their legacy systems – and quickly realize substantial benefits. For example, a leading commercial fleet organization, with more than 250,000 vehicles, had millions of cumulative breakdowns per year. The cost of these breakdowns was in the tens of millions of dollars each year. The company worked closely with a co-creation partner to collect IoT-enabled data and analyze which vehicle parts operated most effectively and which were less effective. This analysis included how quickly brakes and engine parts wore out and which parts were expected to break. By shifting the fleet’s operations to a proactive, predictive maintenance model, the company reduced repair time by 15 minutes per repair, saving more than $18 million annually.
The IoT revolution is impacting how fleet management companies operate – and keeping more trucks on the road. As fleet vehicles are transformed into computers on wheels, IoT will optimize drive cycles and routes, and allow vehicles to share insights for better outcomes.
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