Many construction companies that rely on fleets of equipment are encouraged by the promises of telematics.
Now being built into a high percentage of construction equipment, telematics takes the output from equipment monitoring systems, combines it with the GPS information that gives the location of the equipment, and sends the information wirelessly to a Web site where it can be accessed by the equipment manufacturer, its dealers, and equipment owners.
Beyond that manufacturer-centric vision, telematics also offers the potential for a fleet manager to have real-time data that includes the machine’s location, its fuel consumption, its hour meter reading, idle time, and preventive maintenance compliance statistics. But as you might suspect there are a few complications.
Each manufacturer makes the information for their brand of equipment only available on their Web sites, so the fleet manager has to get the information there. That means the data isn’t integrated into the end-user’s enterprise software system. The other problem is that equipment manufacturers package the data in their own proprietary formats. A construction company that has equipment from different manufacturers is stuck accessing the telematics data from several Web sites.
“Currently, for an asset manager to track his mixed fleet for even general information requires a review of multiple web sites, something that is tremendously inefficient,” said Dick Brannigan, CEM, President of Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP) and equipment operations manager for John R. Jurgensen Co. “Further, it is difficult to integrate the data into enterprise software solutions. The willingness of these manufacturers to partner with end users to address this issue will turn the tremendous promise of telematics information into a reality for today’s fleet manager.”
But that may be changing as the AEMP has received commitments from Caterpillar, John Deere, Komatsu, Manitowac, Qualcomm and Volvo to provide non-proprietary telematics information directly to end users in a standardized file format. The data under consideration includes machine location, machine identification, time stamp, date stamp, fuel use, hours and run/idle time. AEMP will be working to include other data, and in the coming months will be trying to bring more manufacturers on board with the initiative.
Telematics however, at least at that technology’s current state of the art, may not necessarily meet the needs of many construction businesses simply because it is designed more for the needs of manufacturers and equipment dealers. For more on that, listen in to my podcast with Brad Mathews, vice president of marketing for Dexter + Chaney this Friday, 1/15.
