Tag: Telematics

Cut fuel costs, promote safer driving behaviors and improve storm response – these are just a few examples of how fleet telematics that captures and tracks vehicle data can help you run your department more effectively.

But deploying telematics across hundreds or even thousands of fleet assets can be a daunting task if you don’t know what to expect.

UFP spoke with Paul Jefferson, fleet manager at Oklahoma City-based Oklahoma Gas & Electric, who oversees about 2,000 fleet assets, to learn about the utility’s experience with telematics.

Jefferson and his team began working with the benchmarking and telematics provider Utilimarc (https://utilimarc.com) in 2015 with a pilot program that included 30 vehicles. To date, the company has installed telematics on about 1,200 vehicles.

What advice does Jefferson have for other utility fleet professionals when it comes to a telematics deployment? Here are five tips.

1. Define your objectives.
Why do you want telematics? What exactly do you want to track? How will you use that data?

For OG&E, their initial objective was to lower the number of commuters – those who would use business vehicles for personal use – to reduce fuel costs as well as unnecessary miles and wear and tear on the vehicles.

“We had data from our Utilimarc benchmarking study to see how we benchmarked against other similar companies as far as the number of commuters per class of vehicle,” Jefferson said. “We realized that we needed to make a change – that we had a culture where supervisors and managers were giving people vehicles to drive home as compensation instead of there being a real business need for that vehicle’s use. Telematics would help us track that.”

Over time, OG&E’s objectives have evolved.

“We’ve linked our telematics to the [geographic information system] maps, so when we have outages, we can see where our trucks are relative to the outage,” Jefferson said. “We overlay that over our GIS map to help with dispatch. It also helps us keep the mobile mechanics in the right spot.”

Another project Jefferson and his team are working on is integrating telematics with a new fuel management system.

“We’re going to track our off-site fuel purchases on a map where we overlay the telematics to see, ‘Hey, was this asset near where the fuel was purchased?’” he said.

2. Get buy-in.
When you’re attempting to make a cultural change – like what a telematics deployment will bring – expect pushback from various people in the organization who feel threatened by the change. That means you’ll need to work to get buy-in from key stakeholders to help you sell the program to their teams.

“The transmission, distribution and power supply vice presidents all report to an operations vice president. So, we had to go to that upper-level senior VP to get buy-in [for the telematics deployment] from all three of the business unit groups at OG&E,” Jefferson said.

How did Jefferson and his team get that buy-in? They presented a business case.

“The business unit groups are always looking for [overhead and maintenance] reductions, so we presented telematics as a tool that can reduce our O&M,” Jefferson said. “After all, it’s not right to offer commuter vehicles as compensation. If someone needs a raise or more salary, the vehicle shouldn’t be part of their compensation.”

But even when you get buy-in from senior leadership, not everyone is going to like it. The key to working through that resistance is a lot of communication.

“We’ve had a lot of meetings and presented some webinars talking about the benefits [of telematics] – to reduce cost, improve driver safety, recover stolen vehicles. We laid it all out there,” Jefferson said.

3. Avoid surprises.
“If you’re selecting a telematics system, you want to know upfront what it costs to do any custom software because that can add up,” Jefferson said. “We thought about that ahead of time, and that’s one of the main reasons why we selected our provider because they don’t charge us extra for customer reporting unless it gets really wild. Everything we’ve done so far, we’ve never been charged extra.”

4. Determine your rollout strategy.
Work with your telematics provider to determine the optimal rollout cadence for your situation.

“We determined that it would be too much to bite off all at once to do everything at once, so we’ve been adding telematics at a pace of 300 to 400 vehicles a year since 2015,” Jefferson said.

5. Plan for maintenance.
Don’t expect your telematics deployment to be a one-time set-it-and-forget-it project.

“Our rollout took more manpower than I originally thought it would,” Jefferson said. “And it still does to this day. We try to automate as many of the changes as possible, but when you’re adding new fleet assets, or a person retires, leaves the company or moves around within the company, there’s a lot of work involved and a cost of maintenance to update the system.”

The Bottom Line
How can you set up your telematics deployment to go as smoothly as possible?

“Do your homework and think about long-term solutions because once you settle with a [telematics] company, you’re making a long-term commitment,” Jefferson said. “You don’t want to be changing [providers] every year; it’s too much work.”

What does a litigator want to know after a commercial vehicle crash?

Here’s how Jeff Burns, an attorney with the Kansas City, Missouri-based law firm Dollar, Burns & Becker LC, put it in his presentation to fleet managers at the NTEA Work Truck Show in March: “How did the company try to prevent this crash?”

After all, the plaintiff’s attorney is looking for a defendant that offers the highest potential settlement award – and a company is a much more lucrative target than the individual driver who may be at fault in an incident.

One of the things Burns said that companies could do to demonstrate a commitment to preventing incidents is to deploy vehicle tracking technology, like telematics, and make sure it’s being used in ways that support safer driving and equipment operation practices throughout the organization.

So, how can utility fleet leaders use telematics to drive greater safety – and reduce risk exposure for their employers?

1. Keep Score
A starting point is to use telematics to monitor driver behavior so that management can provide objective feedback and coach drivers on any behaviors they need to improve, such as hard braking, aggressive acceleration, hard cornering or speeding events. You also can organize that data into scorecards that show drivers their own trends and how they stack up with their peers.

“When you start to identify for a driver directly what their score is compared to their peers or how they’re trending as far as their overall driving habits, I think the drivers take notice – especially if the scorecard shows that they aren’t the top driver they thought they were,” said Kimberly Clark, telematics product leader with Element Fleet Management (www.elementfleet.com).

2. Integrate Video
Ryan Driscoll, marketing director at telematics provider GPS Insight (www.gpsinsight.com), said that his company is developing a system that integrates forward- and driver-facing cameras with telematics.

“It won’t be livestream video at all times, where you can just check in as Big Brother,” Driscoll said. Instead, the video would be made available based on exception – that is, a driving event that falls outside specific parameters set by management.

How does it work?

“Suppose the driver slams on the brakes,” Driscoll said. “When an exception like that happens, the system records the 10 to 15 seconds before the incident and 10 to 15 seconds after the incident so that you get a full picture of what happened that caused that event to take place.”

What can you learn from that video?

“Perhaps the driver bent over to grab his soda on the ground and took his eyes off the road for two seconds, and when he came back up, he realized he was too close to the vehicle in front of him and slammed the brakes,” Driscoll said. “This insight enables you to more effectively coach the driver on how to avoid doing something like that in the future and decrease his chances of getting into an accident.”

3. Provide Real-Time Feedback
It’s one thing to have data to help you coach drivers a day, week or month after a risky driving event has been recorded. But what if your drivers could get immediate feedback inside the vehicle to discourage high-risk behaviors?

This level of telematics capability is becoming more prominent and useful, Clark said.

“It could be an instance where the driver is speeding, say, more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, and that goes against fleet policy,” she said. “The system would issue an alert to that driver in that moment – whether it be a buzz or a vocal command – that they’ve broken the policy. What often happens is that drivers aren’t even aware that they are engaging in certain behaviors. So, it’s helpful to provide an immediate interaction with the driver to say, ‘This behavior is not acceptable.'”

4. Call for Help
A few years ago, Rural Electric Cooperative (REC), a power company serving south central Oklahoma, went to GPS Insight looking for a system that would enable a lineworker to call for help in an emergency.

GPS Insight developed a panic button that REC’s lineworker would wear on their belt loop or somewhere else on their person.

“It’s basically a key fob with a button on it,” Driscoll said. “And when the [lineworker] hits that button, the system notifies dispatch of an emergency to send help to that location.”

The timing couldn’t have been better for REC. About five months after deploying the panic button system, a lineman had to use it.

“It was in an area that had been plagued by wildfires, and the lineman pulled up to a location to change a transformer,” Driscoll said. “He didn’t take notice of the tall grass around the truck and went up into the [aerial] bucket to start working. But shortly after, while in the bucket, he looked down and noticed the grass was on fire next to his truck. By the time he got down from the bucket, the truck had caught fire, with his cellphone and radio inside the cab.”

But the lineman had the panic button on his belt, which he pushed. And the telematics system pinpointed his exact location and alerted dispatch to send help immediately.

5. Collaborate on Safety
When initiating a large-scale telematics deployment, it’s important to garner support from stakeholders in various departments across the organization to ensure the rollout goes as smoothly as possible, Clark said.

“Changing driver behavior also requires changing the culture, especially if you have a significantly high accident rate or recently had an unfortunate incident, such as a death or serious injury of one of your drivers,” she said. “In that case, you’re really changing a culture. And that means you need the whole team – the drivers, their managers, HR, legal and so forth – all there working together to build a strong safety culture.”

The Bottom Line
While telematics can’t prevent all incidents, you can use it in smart ways that help you significantly improve driver safety and your company’s bottom line.

A lot has happened in the fleet telematics market the past year that could impact utility fleet operations. Major telecom firms have expanded their footprint in the fleet sector with Verizon’s acquisitions of Telogis and Fleetmatics, while AT&T has established key partnerships to provide branded telematics services such as AT&T Fleet Complete and AT&T Fleet Manager. And more and more telematics providers have inked deals with automakers in recent months.

So, what’s driving these trends? And how might they shape the future of telematics and connected fleets?

UFP spoke with experts from C.J. Driscoll & Associates, GPS Insight, Telogis and Element Fleet Management to get their market outlook.

Telecom Expansion
Why are major telecom firms expanding into the fleet telematics industry? Will this trend continue?

“With landline subscriber bases shrinking and the mobile phone market saturated with declining marginal value, the connected vehicle offers a new market opportunity that allows the telecom companies to capitalize on the need for the vehicle to communicate to the OEM, driver, surrounding infrastructure and other third-party services through cellular networks,” said Kimberly Clark, telematics product leader for Element Fleet Management (www.elementfleet.com). “It also allows them to expand and sell additional products, including in-car applications and infotainment solutions, as this technology becomes mainstream within new vehicles.”

Clark said that telecom expansion into the fleet market will continue for the foreseeable future and “benefit utility fleets through new innovation possibilities, increased pressure on direct OEM connectivity solutions and lower communication costs as part of their service offering over time.”

Ryan Driscoll, marketing director for GPS Insight (www.gpsinsight.com), agreed that more telecom companies will enter the fleet market but said that existing large, privately held telematics firms will remain strong.

“Verizon has invested a ton in telematics, and I believe that AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are watching to see how successful it is before getting more aggressive and following suit,” Driscoll said. “I believe it is only a matter of time before all the major telecoms are in the telematics space. Although they are large brands, telematics isn’t a primary focus for them, nor a specialty, so they will certainly still be going up against the larger privately held telematics companies that specialize in fleet management.”

Kelly Frey, vice president of product marketing for Telogis (www.telogis.com), which is part of Verizon Telematics (www.verizontelematics.com), said that Verizon’s foray into fleet telematics, which started in 2012 with its acquisition of Hughes Telematics, is part of a larger strategy to become an industry leader in the broader internet of things (IoT) category.

“Connected vehicles and assets empowered by telematics are very good examples of ‘things’ that pertain to the internet of things,” Frey said. “These things inherently need to be connected to a reliable and secure network that supports the mission-critical operations powered by IoT and telematics. There are approximately 1.2 billion vehicles on the planet – including about 330 million commercial vehicles – that could benefit from being connected to the internet to improve maintenance and performance and enrich the lives of the drivers with improved safety and reliability. And telecom providers, like Verizon, are focused on making this connectivity easier and more enriching with compelling solutions that drive business value as well as consumer value. The trend will absolutely continue on a global scale.”

Partnerships with Automakers
In recent months a growing number of telematics providers have announced partnerships with vehicle OEMs. Does this mean that OEM partnerships will be necessary for telematics providers to continue to grow by the end of this decade? Or is there still room for telematics providers to prosper in the future without OEM partnerships?

“It’s necessary for telematics providers to partner with OEMs to survive and thrive if the telematics providers and OEMs are interested in maximizing the end fleet customer value,” Frey said. “Manufacturers such as Hino Motors already provide built-in telematics that provide advanced engine diagnostics and maintenance alerts along with a fleet management portal and mobile app. Several other manufacturers – such as Ford, GM, Volvo, Mack and Isuzu – offer built-in telematics already and there will be more in the very near future. Telematics providers such as Telogis will continue to invest heavily in OEM partnerships by offering broader platform capabilities such as route and schedule optimization, commercial navigation and mobile applications that are tightly integrated with back-office capabilities, workflow optimization and automation.”

Clem Driscoll, founder and principal of C.J. Driscoll & Associates (www.cjdriscoll.com), a market research firm that covers the telematics industry, said that although automaker partnerships offer telematics providers an efficient sales channel to expand their customer base, those relationships don’t appear to be a requirement to succeed in the fleet telematics space.

“There are companies like Geotab, which has 400,000 to 500,000 units in service or more and isn’t the primary telematics partner of vehicle OEMs in the U.S. but is growing at a fast rate,” he said. “And GPS Insight is another example. They’ve done very well and don’t have, to my knowledge, any OEM relationships but haven’t needed them in order to prosper.”

But as more and more OEMs adopt telematics, what role will there be for third-party telematics providers?

Since automakers don’t have expertise in fleet management, that’s where third-party telematics firms will continue to bring value, according to Clem Driscoll. “So far, especially if you look at the heavy-truck manufacturers, they haven’t gone much beyond offering remote vehicle diagnostics-related services,” he said. “That’s because it’s difficult for the vehicle OEMs to say, ‘Well, we’re going to offer a complete fleet solution.’ Since most fleets are not homogeneous, with vehicles from different manufacturers, [fleets] will probably hesitate to adopt a single telematics solution from the vehicle manufacturers.”

Clark with Element Fleet Management agreed. “OEM-embedded solutions do not solve all of the needs for [fleet] customers such as driver identification, satellite access in remote areas, panic buttons and electronic hours-of-service monitoring, as just a few examples. And there are questions on how much paperwork will be involved in the future to connect a car, as some may require driver consent. And OEMs will likely not provide a web-based platform for a fleet user to get easy access to the data, so they need both telematics companies and fleet management firms to provide this accessibility to the data for fleet customers into the future.”

The Future of Telematics
So, what does the future look like for the fleet telematics industry? What new telematics capabilities and/or use cases will emerge in the next three to five years that could impact how utility fleet professionals run their fleets?

“Over the next few years we will start to see more developments around IoT connections leveraging in-vehicle Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities,” said Frey with Telogis. “We will see a lot of advancements with [advanced driver assistance systems] to assist the driver with safety and performance related to efficiency and fuel economy. And there will be significant movement towards vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and ultimately autonomous vehicle capabilities built into vehicles that telematics providers will leverage to continue to improve efficiency, safety and productivity.”

According to Ryan Driscoll with GPS Insight: “Fleet management will continue to become more decentralized, which means that mobile apps will become more and more critical for fleet management, ultimately being the primary tool used. And there will be more integration with back-end systems so that fleet management and drivers can be much more efficient overall and deliver more value to their customers than they have in the past.”

Clark with Element Fleet Management predicted the following: “Telematics systems will allow for opportunities for utility network providers to put together truck-sharing networks of vehicles made possible through use of real-time visibility and new mobile applications. This could enhance customer service by allowing utility customers experiencing an issue or outage to get visibility to real-time truck deployment activity. There will also be better sensors for tracking real-time bucket usage status through OEM and aftermarket supplier solutions. And analytics will be drastically enhanced to provide opportunities for predictive analytics in storm-surge planning using weather and historical pattern activities, and improved prescriptive maintenance diagnostics tools to reduce downtime.”

The Bottom Line
The fleet telematics landscape appears to be shifting, as telecom giants expand into the market, more automakers seek to grow their telematics offerings, and emerging connected-car technologies unleash new capabilities that could boost fleet productivity, improve worker safety and cut costs. Stay tuned.