In April, Geotab was certified as an application service provider for the Telematics Monitoring Application (TMA) and Road Infrastructure Management (RIM) applications under the National Telematics Framework.
The certification builds on Transport Certification Australia’s type-approval of Geotab’s GO9-LTM telematics device prior and means vehicle operators can now use the device for enrolment in government schemes and initiatives that use TMA and RIM.
Effectively, these developments have helped to expand Geotab’s operations to support what it considers to be a growing market in Australia.
Two years ago, when Sean Killen, Geotab Vice President Global Markets, inherited the team responsible for the region, compliance in the heavy truck segment was immediately identified as a priority given it was considered core to its offering.
It was a matter, Sean recalls, of no longer playing by Geotab rules and playing by the Australian rules.
“Some of the bigger fleets in Australia haven’t looked at us as a possible solution,” says Sean.
“They never had, which if you look at our position globally, it’s a kind of an odd position since we have about a million heavy trucks on the road around the world.”
A decision to invest aggressively in the development group was undertaken as part of its commitment to meeting the highest standards of performance and reliability in telematics technology.
There were two areas of focus the team gave its full attention.
The first was the aforementioned Transport Certification Australia TMA compliance; and the second was for the eventuality of an Electronic Work Diary (EWD) mandate which was sewn up through a joint venture with Logmaster.
“It doesn’t happen quickly as it takes around a year of development,” Sean adds.
That involved at first getting the hardware, and then later, a full application suite approved with Geotab subsequently building the EWD into its software.
The organisation, as Sean observes, had performed well where it played historically but was yet to fully realise its potential for this market segment in Australia.
“Putting those two things together going into the truck show gave us a lot of momentum in the product,” he says.
Among the maintenance tools Geotab launched this year Fault Code Management, which provides actionable insights into fault severity, recommended actions, and potential component impact, will be key as fleets look to minimise major cost drivers.
“Look at the state of the world right now,” he says.
“Cost reduction is going to be really important. We tend to do very well in tough economic times and down cycles because of that.”
Having the facility to delve deeper into the fault data to extract predictive solutions from analysis will do wonders, naturally, for fleet management protocols and vehicle utilisation.
President Global Markets, speaking at an event.
For consumer goods companies, of which Geotab currently partners with some of the biggest in the world, namely Amazon, PepsiCo and UPS, having a fully loaded vehicle break down is a nightmare scenario.
“It’s just a huge cost. A lot of this fault code stuff and the predictive maintenance that we’re going to be doing and do now we’ll be bringing to Australia,” says Sean.
“Some of these fleets are forcing us, from an innovation standpoint, to get to a place where they can really get an ROI globally off of their fleets.”
He adds, “If you look at the library of fault codes that we can do now, it’s second-to-none.”
Video technology is one area Geotab is investing heavily. The company views it as being a key component to the future of safety and telematics for commercial road transport in Australia.
It’s not the only pipeline the company expects to see boom. Artificial Intelligence, aside from being the next big disruption in the industry, is anticipated to occasion growth opportunities in contracting markets as businesses consolidate.
The onus of doing more with less will be never more crucial when crunching numbers and utilising everything from mobile assets to safety systems.
The biggest headaches for fleets especially top tier carriers, such as accidents which are costly and also represent challenges to branding, can be minimised with lightning efficiency by an almost instantaneous scrutiny applied to the data captured.
“Because Geotab produces so much data, something like 80 billion data points a day, AI is the tool to really get value from it,” says Sean.
“We’ve invested heavily in the data and the value that it can add. The AI that’s coming just takes it to the next level.”
Geotab CEO Neil Cawse works with an internal AI engine he has developed over recent years. It’s well advanced, way past the BETA stage.
“A customer can say to him how do I reduce accidents by 5 per cent over the next year?” says Sean.
“It will take their data and churn out a pretty good way to do it in 90 seconds right now. Some of the things it’s putting together are in 45 seconds.”
Because every make and model that shows up in Australia is not identical to those in North America or even Europe, the more Geotab can reverse engineer, the more fault codes it inputs, the more OEMs it partners with the better it becomes.
& Analytics at Geotab Connect earlier this year.
“It helps immensely when you have a partnership with the actual OEM instead of trying to get around them,” explains Sean.
“What’s interesting about Geotab’s position in the market is they’ll entertain Geotab at the table at a global OEM level. Ford will sit down with Geotab globally and talk about a partnership. That’s a hard position for a small telematics company local only to Australia. They won’t probably have that conversation just because there’s too much to do. There’s too many of them.”
Geotab has about 50 OEM partnerships globally with all the major OEMs, both heavy and light commercial.
Many of these companies planned on being players in the space, by trying to make revenue off their data which despite having generated it is likely inferior. Sean explains why.
“No OEM does it the same and none of the OEMs talk to each other,” he says. “Take Linfox as an example. Think about how many different types of vehicles they have in that fleet right now and how old some of them are.”
Fleets, to that claim, are getting as many kilometres as possible from a vehicle until there are no further benefits.
With ten different OEMs from different parts of the world all talking a different language a software platform is needed that can aggregate it and make a common output.
According to Sean, this is why the OEMs have failed at data analysis.
“Unless it’s a small fleet with 15 vehicles and it’s all their data it just doesn’t scale,” he says.
“GM will never talk to Ford who will never talk to Toyota who will never talk to Volvo who will never talk to Kenworth. But they will all talk to us, and we can bridge that gap and that’s the value long-term. The hardware will eventually go away. I have no doubt in my mind, ten years from now, Geotab will sell very few aftermarket devices, but it will still be the platform.”
As for the prospect of its regional focus in Australia, Sean is volubly optimistic.
“The Aussie market is incredibly compelling and the one I really feel the best about,” he says.
“I think Australia is ready to move away from the incumbent telematics providers that gave them what telematics did ten years ago.”
The Australian market if it is to keep pace with the latest telemetry developments happening in North America and western Europe is poised to make a giant leap says Sean.
“I do think the adoption of really innovative telematics has been slow into Australia not because nobody wants to do it but because it’s hard for a small company to expand globally fast,” he says. “We’re the biggest and we’re ready.”
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