Truck Parts and Service | Heavy Duty Trucking, Aftermarket, Service Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/599520
Cover Story 17 connectivity of a driver and a truck" to its terminal and/or dispatcher. The uptime potential of that connectivity is enor- mous, and as such, North American fl eets have started to take note. Asset tracking and hours- of-service monitoring with electronic on-board record- ers (EOBR) still account for the lion's share of telematics usage within North American fl eets. But the popularity of maintenance-centric products — available through factory and retrofi t installation — is growing. And that market prolifera- tion has only increased of late, Fortuna says. "There has been a pretty rapid uptake [in adoption] in the past two years, especially in the last year or so, and we think it is only going to accel- erate from here," he says. "For a long time telematics were just being used by the big fl eets, but in the last 24 to 30 months fl eets of every shape and size have started to adopt systems," adds Powell. "That has really changed the landscape." Once its advantages are fully realized, telematics will revolutionize heavy-duty trucking maintenance across all service channels. A recent study by ABI Re- search determined "it is just a matter of time" before the fi rst United States commercial telematics provider exceeds one million vehicles under management. The study also predicts telematics software will be present on more than 73 million vehicles worldwide by 2020. This is technology that isn't going to remain on the backburner much longer. The maintenance upside of telematics is driven from data acquisition. By recording vehicle performance and fault codes, telematics providers have ac- cess to expansive amounts of maintenance-related records. Zonar Systems COO Vikas Jain says his company works in conjunction with its OEM partners to analyze the data it collects to uncover trends across specifi c vehicle con- fi gurations and duty cycles. Jain says this research is particularly valuable in determining the severity of fault codes. Not every fault code im- mediately requires service, and trends found within data allow telematics providers to advise customers on if they need to pull over immediately, within a number of hours, or if a fault code has possibly been presented in error. "When a driver sees a check engine light, he might not know what that means," says Jain. "But we capture that fault code and can see exactly what it says … and what it means." Fortuna gives OEMs credit for this opportunity, as every new ECU installed on a vehicle enhances the data set from which a telematics system can analyze. "You can get a much better picture of what is going on within a vehicle overall when you look at all of those sys- tems in combination," he says. In cases where the maintenance issue requires downtime, Jackson says the amount of data that can be immediately transferred to necessary parties is enor- mous. Everything from asset W W W . T R U C K P A R T S A N D S E R V I C E . C O M N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 5 | T R U C K P A R T S & S E R V I C E There has been a pretty rapid uptake [in adoption] in the past two years, especially in the last year or so, and we think it is only going to accelerate from here. – Jimmy Fortuna, vice president of product management at Omnitracs Telematics systems today are installed during vehicle production and through retrofi tting. But like any component, they also must be monitored and maintained to ensure they are correctly capturing and transmitting data.