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Commercial uses of vehicle-based telematics - the application of both the sending and receiving of data through electronic devices installed on fleet vehicles and wireless receivers — is an ever-evolving method of tracking and monitoring business assets off-site.
With the rapid growth of Wi-Fi networks, a maturing cellular market and the increasing mobility of workers, vehicle telematics is quickly evolving into more than just maintaining knowledge of whereabouts of products and distribution.
It’s changing the way we think about mobility out of the office.
Tracking fleet vehicle locations, detecting locations of drivers, remote servicing of electronic hardware on board vehicles and navigational mapping are just some of the functions available to the growing field of telematics users.
Phil Magney, president and principal analyst for Telematics Research Group Inc., says monitored telematics is doing very well in North American markets and is now about more than safety and security alone.
"This is helping the [auto] industry get greater recognition. Telematics is best defined as applications based on wireless."
Magney also says the automotive sector’s demand for telematics is being powered primarily by consumers.
"Customer demand - for basic functions such as Bluetooth, navigation and to a lesser extent radio.... Auto makers realize they need to communicate to and from their vehicles using wireless for remote diagnostics and maintenance.
"This is necessary for any digital device, let alone one that has many digital devices."
Lowering access costs
John Woronczuk, until recently the vice-president of marketing and business development for Netistix Inc. in Kanata, Ont., says Netistix’s business model embraces a significantly different approach from traditional cellular-GPS.
The company uses Wi-Fi as its telecommunications standard. Netistix’s branded telematics service called FleetPulse, a wireless, Web-based fleet management service - provides lower costs for businesses than cellular plans, Woronczuk says.
"The ongoing monthly airtime costs sometimes makes the business case ROI difficult. With our approach, all you’re doing is paying for the application and monthly fee."
According to Netistix, FleetPulse collects driver data by monitoring diagnostics information from vehicles through Wi-Fi networks. Further, it supports passive GPS vehicle tracking. The inherently lower cost of running Wi-Fi-based networks is a promising idea for Netistix, but remains in its infancy relative to mass deployment throughout North America.
"Our perspective on this is cellular technology is good for roadside assistance or stolen vehicles, but if you’re not concerned with more information and detailed driver information, you don’t need that information in real time.
"The cost benefit scenario is more fruitful with Wi-Fi. If you add up month by month through cellular technology with no monthly airtime costs with us, we’ll come in at between one-fifth and an 18th of the cost of a competitive solution."
Rail-time tracking
Trucks and cars aren’t the only vehicles benefiting from telematics.
Scott Boyes, president of Kansas City-based RailCrewXpress, employs a radio-based GPRS signal and satellite-based GPS to conduct real-time monitoring of railway-based transport. The dispatch centre, located in Toronto, receives data from a train trip through a Wireless Matrix dome unit attached to the top of the van of the train.
"We had developed an online, Web-based dispatch system to get the trip details out from the railroads into our system. What we needed was a way to get the trip orders out to the vehicles wherever they may be in North America.
"Then, the railway requires us to give them periodic reporting. When does our vehicle get to the rail yard? Did the crew stop along the way? They required all this information. Traditionally, the information gets in a few days in arrears by fax or mail. [Rail companies] want to do it in real time," Boyes explains.
Boyes says that with over a thousand railroad-based vehicles running around the United States at any given moment, monitoring of geographic locations via telematics is incredibly useful and an efficient use of resources.
"The railways have huge command centres that manage their crews and their trains. They will send a computerized message to our dispatch centre in Toronto and say, ‘We need you to pick up a crew,’ and that comes to us through the Web to our dispatch centre in Toronto.
"We [then] put that into the system [and] it sends an electronic message to a mobile data terminal in a van that happens to be one servicing that area. There on the terminal is all that information the person needs to complete that trip.
"When he gets to the rail yard, when the crew gets in the vehicle, if they stop for a lunch break or pick up another crew, all those events are recorded. All this data is coming back to our dispatch system in real time."
New and powerful advances in telematics hardware purport to increase production and distribution efficiencies of goods and services. In turn, the privacy concerns of workers on the job are becoming less and less of an issue for telematics companies.
It’s not really an issue anymore, Magney says. "Your telematics service provider becomes a trusted source of content. Just like eBay, Amazon or your insurance company."
"Other customers are more concerned knowing where the drivers are geographically. Were they doing the tasks they were being paid to do, or can they optimize the route? On the flip side of that, maybe you can reduce the amount of overtime [with telematics]," Woronczuk says.
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