Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/678459
commercial carrier journal | may 2016 49 COVER STORY: BIG DATA ANALYTICS real-time EDI, the new system enables the company to keep up with demand. "It's going to become a hugely important thing to meet the near real-time demands of customers," he says. Data used by transportation firms is increasing at expo- nential rates, but so is the speed, power and intelligence of their information systems. Instead of working with exceptions that occurred in the last month or even yester- day, companies are using modern business tools to deliver more automation and intelligence to the front line. Delivering insights to drivers Omnitracs Analytics, a division of Omnitracs, has long offered predictive models that can help determine which drivers are most likely to be in accidents, file workers compensation claims or quit. The company also has a driver fatigue model that uses sleep science and ELD data to predict how much sleep drivers obtained in a 24-hour period and when. For fleets that use the fatigue model, real-time scores are used to identify the most at-risk drivers. Omnitracs Analytics soon plans to make its predictive models adapt- able to users at all levels of a fleet, including drivers. "Now we are trying to empower everyone," says Brad Taylor, Omnitracs' vice president of data and Internet of Things solutions. Omnitracs has invested in a navigation app as a foun- dational piece of this effort. Rather than send drivers alerts if they exceed the posted speed limits, the analytics will identify the risky behavior's cause and recommend a solution to the driver – perhaps in anticipation of the behavior reoccurring. The analysis may show a pattern of speeding events for one driver near his home terminal. A message could be sent to him through the navigation app: "During the last 100 miles of your trip, you tend to speed up. Watch your speed." "What we are working on here is knitting everything together with navigation," Taylor says. "That is how you get to the point where you can make those types of rec- ommendations to the driver." Fuel efficiency is another area where prescriptive infor- mation could help the driver. LinkeDrive's PedalCoach, Zonar's Z-Fuel and Vnomics' TrueFuel give drivers a score for fuel performance independent of factors they cannot control such as equipment type, load weight, topography and other operating conditions. Vnomics TrueFuel also gives drivers instant feedback – a distinctive beep – when drivers exceed the rpm thresh- old for optimal fuel economy, which for most vehicles is 1,500, says Mari McGowan, director of market develop- ment. At the end of each trip, TrueFuel gives the driver a fuel efficiency score based on a scale of 100. Additional details such as the gallons a driver wasted over a certain time pe- riod or how much time they spent in each gear are avail- able for review through a fleet management web portal. Multidimensional data As the volume of data continues to increase, so do oppor- tunities to uncover new ways to improve – and leapfrog the competition. Barton Logistics, a nonasset transportation com- pany, contracts with owner-operators and carriers to offer shipper customers a virtual fleet of 100 trucks and trailers. The Medina, Texas-based company uses McLeod Software's LoadMaster TMS, but "we had questions that canned reports couldn't answer," says Criss Wilson, vice president of operations. In 2012, Wilson began working with McLeod Software to develop a multidimensional data cube using the SQL Server database service. McLeod calls this product and service a business intelligence foundation. Wilson says the cube has made analysis faster and more expansive. He now is able to analyze data such as revenue, Las Cruces, N.M.-based Mesilla Valley Transportation already had the tech- nology to send EDI messages, but further improvements were needed. Mesilla Valley Transportation created a process to automate the workflow to meet a customer's EDI needs more consistently and be rewarded with more business.