How to convert Telematics from Cost-Center into Profit-Center?

During the last decades, with the proliferation of satellite services, cellular communication and mobility, many firms entered into the vehicle tracking and tracing business, offering simple location services. The main usage of such services is in the event of vehicle theft. Is mostly used by professional operation centers that can, in some cases, even rescue the stolen assets.

As time passed, such firms enriched the offering, by adding more services such as: temperature monitoring, door opening and graphic presentation of all assets on a map. This fact gave fleet owners the freedom to monitor assets on the move, converting soon to a real fleet management system.

Recently, more sophisticated devices can connect into the data communication bus of the vehicle (CANBUS) and read part of the flow of mechanical parameters between the different on-board computers. The raw data can be stored or transmitted to the fleet manager. But such crude data have no use for the owner, as it contains huge amounts of codes, without any feasible way to sort, digest and define an action.

As a matter of fact, all those systems are cost-centers for fleet owners, as they are paying modest monthly fees but getting the payoff only in case of problem. Therefore the industry is moving toward converting telematics to a profit-center.

Only a handful of the top telematics providers is capable of analyzing the diagnostic trouble codes. Traffilog for example, added several layers of Business Intelligence (BI), by selectively collecting data, analyzing it at the vehicle level and transmitting only meaningful events and action-driven alerts to the fleet manager.

The art of telediagnostics does not stop here: Traffilog can even predict future failure of components and schedule predictive maintenance cycles, based on real-time data analysis. The data are correlated with GPS location and G maneuvers, as well as with other analogue or digital sensors.