Dive Brief:
- Telematics devices for areas such as maintenance, safety and operations can help carriers improve their performance and prevent unexpected downtime of trucks, but it’s underutilized by many carriers, according to an American Transportation Research Institute report released last month.
- Underutilized areas include missed preventative maintenance, engine health, rollover risk indicators, cost per mile and defect/fault diagnostics, the report found.
- “These KPIs may present a significant opportunity for carriers to expand their use of telematics data with a proven metric of high importance,” the report said.
Dive Insight:
While safety metrics are highly utilized, maintenance areas like these have clear return on investment — but adoption is slow, ATRI said.
“Trucking has broadly adopted telematics KPIs for safety management, but many fleets have not yet moved into telematics utilization for maintenance and operational performance management,” ATRI said.
Nearly one in three carriers don’t integrate telematics data with their TMS, and smaller fleets often rely on more manual methods, the report noted.
Telematics devices are hardware on a tractor, which includes ELDs and cameras, ATRI noted, and carriers can make sense of the data to evaluate and improve freight flow through software known as a transportation management system.
The survey also found 48% of fleets don’t integrate their telematics with maintenance management software, a practice more prevalent in smaller fleets like those with 21 to 320 power units.
The report gathered responses from a half dozen technology providers and over 100 carriers to help show what’s valuable and the extent to which firms are using them.
The reasoning for the slow adoption can vary. Too much data can freeze decision-making, and smaller fleets may have insufficient IT to manage it, the ATRI report noted. In addition, financial constraints can limit the use of telematics, among other factors, a federal report noted.
And with operational costs rising, there could be temptation to defer maintenance and equipment purchases.
James Sughroue, maintenance manager for Grand Island, Nebraska-based Chief Carriers, told Trucking Dive that his company uses telematics, maintenance software and a TMS. While the telematics can generate information about maintenance issues, the maintenance softare they use, Cetaris, provides everything they need and more, he said.
And while the systems are automated to talk to each other, Sughroue said he’s been curious to find an AI-based system to integrate everything together to generate new findings, such as additional preventative maintenance on a tractor and more.
“I am thinking an AI system that receives all the emails, can see what loads are doing from TMS, what drivers are doing from telematics, and what maintenance is all doing and can actually drive the company so to speak,” he also said in an email. When and whether the happens remains to be seen, but the potential is there, he added.
