Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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technology: big data I Qualcomm's Performance Monitoring shows performance trends and when customerdefined thresholds have been broken through color coding and other visual tools. Alerts also can be generated and e-mailed to fleet personnel. comes with 15 categories for users to set up real-time preventive alerts. The person making a decision, such as a load planner, sees an onscreen alert if a transaction is out of bounds. RANS also sends an instant e-mail alert to a supervisor or other specified people in an organization who may want to prevent the transaction. TMW Systems offers The Dawg, an exception management tool that monitors business processes. For each exception, users select a time interval, such as an hour, for how frequently they want to be alerted. TMW customers use The Dawg to monitor for exceptions such as loads with excessive empty miles, invoices without fuel surcharges, revenue per mile, unassigned trucks, dropped trailers and orders without assigned rates. The Dawg also can be used to monitor data from sources other than TMWSuite, such as an accounting database within a company's computer network. In addition to preventing exceptions in the office, fleet management systems can prevent mistakes by drivers. Today's integrated dispatch and onboard computing platforms can present information to drivers in a structured automated fashion. Drivers receive and respond to information based upon their location or other events used to "trigger" a workflow process. Qualcomm Enterprise Services offers a Driver Workflow application for its Mobile Computing Platform. The application integrates with fleet dispatch systems, as well as other onboard sensors and systems. In many cases, exceptions can be identified before the driver deviates from the plan. When a driver arrives at a shipper's location to pick up a load, the application could be set up to give the driver specific instructions such as which trailer to pick up. If the driver hooks to the wrong trailer, the driver would see a popup alert on the MCP screen before he leaves the lot. PCS Software's TMS has a built-in feature that allows users to set business rules and specify which managers are notified whenever certain transactions do not meet company standards. 70 commercial carrier journal 0313_TECHFeature.indd 70 Intelligent alerts C.R. England, the largest refrigerated transporter in North America, has evolved its exception management beyond prevention of isolated transactions. Business intelligence tools have enabled the carrier to slice and dice data in many different ways, providing dynamic and active reporting capabilities. The Salt Lake City-based carrier is able to prevent more transactions earlier with alerts that combine exceptions from two or more areas. "You could run reporting in such a way that it would tell you if something was going on in a more complex way," says Ron Hall, director of operations technology. For example, Hall could create an alert if deadhead mileage were to increase in a particular fleet during a specific day of the week. Business intelligence also simplifies the amount of data that fleets wish to monitor from drivers and vehicles; otherwise, managers might become deluged by dozens, even hundreds, of alerts. One way to use data intelligently and more easily is to combine exceptions into a single indicator, or score, to see a more holistic view of performance. PeopleNet's approach to in-cab computing always has been predicated on exception reporting, says Randy Boyles, senior vice president of tailored solutions. Through integrated communications with TMS software, the in-cab device knows where the vehicle is supposed to be and when, along with the fleet's safety and performance settings. The device sends an instant alert to management, either through a text alert or integrated TMS message, if the plan is breached. Boyles refers to this style of exception reporting as using "point solutions." The next step is to determine which single exceptions or combinations can be used as predictors of events that soon will occur, such as mechanical failures and crashes. PeopleNet has an analytics division | march 2013 2/20/13 11:09 AM