It’s 4 o’clock on a cold morning. The driver turns the key in the truck. But it won’t start. An alert on the dash has been ignored. The battery has gone below its reserve capacity and needs to be replaced.
Now the driver, drawing a wage for standing around, is waiting on an auto electrician while the customer’s freight is going to be late.
In this scenario, money and time, have been wasted by a company in no position to do so. To add salt into the wound, it could have been avoided.
If a ruleset had been implemented notifying the workshop that the batteries, whose voltage can be measured 100 times a second, needed checking, the maintenance management system could have been consulted on when the batteries were last replaced.
A custom ruleset, like those built into My Geotab, would have cascaded the task through the organisational network the moment something happened onboard the vehicle.
“That can be the difference between a minor incident two weeks down the line or something catastrophic,” says Andrew Hintz, Geotab Associate Vice President Heavy Transport.
“If you actually capture that real-time and send it back it gives the guys in the workshop something to work with and they can go back and look at what the fault code is and get the truck off the road.”
Telematics makes it possible to isolate different areas where immediate cost reductions can be achieved. What’s more, these tools can be used not just preventively but creatively.
While a vast amount of the road transport industry is still using first generation telematics platforms, if they are using any at all, Geotab offers something far more sophisticated when it is applied to the likes of fleet management, maintenance schedules and pre-emptive diagnostics.
The data obtained from a second generation telematics device with a good CAN bus library is rich and Geotab helps its customers exploit it for the better.
A fleet can trend datasets to the point it might overlay engine coolant temperature versus ambient temperature based on the geolocation of where their trucks are operating.
An outlier, in which the coolant temperature is running 15 per cent above normal operating temperature on a particular vehicle, can, via a data platform, trigger a notification.
“The truck runs outside whatever their designated rule set is, and it can prompt something as simple as inspecting the radiator,” says Andrew.
“Perhaps the fan is not coming in. Maybe the vehicle has been out during harvest, and the radiator is blocked with grass. It just allows a technician to get those insights to do something ahead of an engine overheat event two weeks later and all of a sudden, you’re up for an engine rebuild.”
As a central platform built on modules, Geotab can even surface information relevant to total cost of ownership by showing labour components and parts that have been used so operators have a detailed understanding of the end-to-end maintenance history of the truck.
By making the most of their rulesets, fleets are optimising how they action workflows across the three pillars as Andrew identifies them: fuel, maintenance, mass management.
“Fuel can be as much as 30 per cent of the operational expenditure for a transport company,” he says.
“They can save money just by understanding the way a driver can perform better. Or maybe it’s the vehicles that are idling for too long.”
Fuel tax credits are also a largely untapped metric for fleets. According to Andrew they’re rarely claiming the full 51.6 cents per litre for offroad usage.
“They might be claiming a safe harbour rate of around 20 cents a litre, but they are leaving a lot on the table,” he says.
“Many are not maximising that claim. They have the ability to do a four-year retrospective claim and month-by-month going forward based on where you can prove 90 days of data and your business doesn’t typically change. Some of the outcomes we’re seeing are six figure sums.”
A leading garden supplier in Melbourne with 90 tipper trucks using power take-offs in their fleet recently discovered how much they had underestimated their offroad usage.
It was significant. After the data was put through a fuel tax estimator, the business was able to secure a four-year retrospective claim of just over $150,000 with an ongoing annual claim of $45,000 a year.
“Break that down across 90 trucks per month. It’s a bit over $41 per vehicle. Now depending on your technology onboard that truck, that’s going to subsidise your telematics solution depending on what they have signed up for,” says Andrew.
“That’s an amazing outcome. A fuel tax credit for offroad usage can potentially fund your technology. In this case if they had a GO9 device they probably would have had money in their hand at the end of each month.”
Some businesses will, of course, have vehicles that spend more time offroad. Cement agitators have potential for a fuel tax credit up to $200 per vehicle per month.
Waste management is also another good segment in which a fuel tax credit of up to $120 per vehicle per month can potentially be claimed.
Fridge vans with cooling units on the trailer are another example cited by Andrew.
“Aside from the offroad component there is a 100 per cent on-road claim at 51 cents per litre because it’s not on the main engine that’s powering the vehicle,” he says.
“It’s on an auxiliary engine that’s powering the fridge unit. Most people don’t realise how good it actually can be. When you’re running a transport company which is typically sub 5 per cent margins, you want every cent that you can get your hands on.”
With 20 years in the industry, Andrew has watched with interest how major events such as the Global Financial Crisis, the fallout from the mining boom and the recent inflationary post-COVID environment have impacted operators. In downturn economies, he observes, they rally to telematics.
“It’s those times when the economy gets tough that have some of the best adoption rates you can see in telematics not just in transport but across the board,” he says.
“Where the business has an economic challenge and they’re trying to find every cent they can. That’s when telematics does best.”
Historically businesses have chased safety as an outcome or driver training to conserve money on fuel. But those days, according to Andrew, are gone.
“We’re now seeing educated customers who recognise safety is a great thing for the business, they grab the data and focus on that for 90 days, and get on top of it, retrain drivers find some fuel savings as a result and if the vehicles are being driven too harsh you will see the roll-on effect in maintenance. Brakes not needing to be replaced as often and other areas as well,” he says.
“Then they look somewhere else. Sometimes it’s smarter routing. Are they allowing freight movements to be more productive? There is big savings from smarter routing but there’s ultimately improved customer service as well. Then they move onto preventative maintenance.”
He adds, “It’s not just one data point that they’re chasing, and crucially, they get everybody across the business onboard.”
