Do more than just manage your fleet: optimize it with predictive analytics

It’s an exciting but challenging time to be in the transportation business. The industry is facing a myriad of issues from driver and technician shortages to unplanned downtime and rising fuel costs. The bottom line is: not having your trucks and drivers operating at peak performance can lead to unhappy employees, wasted time and lost revenue.

At the same time, a new wave of technologies has emerged to help fleets overcome these challenges. Telematics solutions, which have been widely adopted over the last decade, enable businesses to transport data in real-time to see what is happening across their fleet — but that is only the beginning. Sending the data is just the first step — it's what you do with that data that really matters. That’s where the power of industrial AI comes in.

Move beyond “Where’s my truck?” with predictive analytics.

While many fleet solutions — like fleet maintenance software, telematics solutions and even OEMs — may claim to have predictive capabilities, very few of them actually do. As fleets begin to realize this, it leaves them wondering: What is AI? And how do I use it to benefit my fleet?

Industrial AI turns your data into actionable insights that drive financial results for your business. Meaning, instead of simply surfacing fault codes or knowing when your drivers are idling, you can take high-quality data, aggregate it, apply artificial intelligence technology, and use the insights to make proactive changes to your business operations.

Here are just a few ways fleet owner/operators are using AI to drive change in their businesses:

• Improving driver safety.
• Reducing fuel costs.
• Smarter route planning.
• Hiring and retaining drivers.
• Reducing unplanned downtime.
• Flipping maintenance from reactive to proactive.

AI can help fleet companies amplify their current digital investments in many ways. The key to being successful with AI-powered technology is to first understand the business problem you’re trying to solve.

Proactively maintain every truck in your fleet with predictive maintenance.

In our work, one of the biggest opportunities we see for fleets to save money is in predictive maintenance. The average long-haul, 1,000-vehicle fleet can save millions across maintenance and fuel annually by deploying AI-powered predictive maintenance strategies.

Predictive maintenance uses high-frequency raw data readings combined with AI, machine learning, historical performance data and contextual data to alert you to condition-based maintenance needs. This type of maintenance is proactively performed when your vehicles are still working but at high risk of failure. The goal of predictive maintenance is to transition from unplanned downtime — which is expensive and disruptive to your operations — to planned maintenance. This optimizes your maintenance cadence, maximizes vehicle availability and mitigates the risk of under- or over-maintaining your vehicles.

AI-enabled, predictive maintenance requires:

1. Raw, high-resolution readings: Most telematics providers only surface fault codes without the raw readings, which carry the real insights.
2. Contextual data: Telematics companies focus on vehicular data, which is only a small part of the picture. Contextual data — such as weather conditions, historical data, operator behavior and driving conditions — are needed as well.
3. Sophisticated industrial AI: Instead of focusing on threshold alerts for individual channels, predictive maintenance technology recognizes patterns from raw, high-resolution data across multiple channels and in order to catch problems before they occur.

Predictive maintenance takes massive amounts of data into account, it ultimately presents fewer, more meaningful insights and data points — helping you avoid data overload.

Interested in learning more about AI-powered predictive maintenance and how it differs from other maintenance strategies? Take a look at our free guide on maintenance strategy options.