High-tech Visions Mapped Out At Fleet Management Summit

Imagine a world so connected that a service provider knows, even before a driver does, that an engine’s about to fail, a transmission’s nearing its best-before date, or a tire’s at high risk of blowout.

At the 2016 Canadian Fleet Maintenance Summit in April, participants considered a future where electronic data rules the road, enabling a new proactive approach to maintenance.

“The world is changing all around us,” Bill Dawson, vice-president of maintenance, operations and engineering with Miami-based Ryder Systems, told roughly 300 people attending as part of Truck World in Toronto.

“Technology has changed the way we listen to music and shop,” Dawson added. “There’s been a sea change. Things have gotten smaller, more complex and faster, and our business is no different.”

Software systems can now generate data that looks at trends and other evidence to accurately predict an alternator or other component will soon fail, allowing an operator to replace it preemptively, without losing significant downtime.

“There’s empirical data now that says if you maintain your fleet on time within a miles parameter and a time parameter, you’ll control costs and have more up-time and better asset utilization,” Dawson explained.

Dawson said Element Financial, a managed maintenance provider, recently invested significantly in technology designed to offer advanced analytics for customers.

Meanwhile, Ryder, Dawson’s own company, is using advanced planning and scheduling systems which manage a shop’s activity.

“The customer has full view of it from their desktop,” Dawson said. “They can see the available windows to service their truck, they can see the status of their truck at any time, and they can self-select at any time during the process.”

Self selection is crucial. Dawson said many customers want to use email or text to schedule preventative maintenance when it’s convenient.

Interconnecting the supply chain is vital to helping ensure parts are immediately available, and access to data can guide actual maintenance work. “When it’s time to add or replace a piece of equipment, all the information we’ve learned about their application can become part of the intelligence that decides what’s the right spec,” Dawson said.

Dawson described the volume and breadth of data that’s becoming available from sources such as sensors and product codes as overwhelming. “It potentially facilitates a world of no unplanned down-time. Only scheduled.”

New technologies aim at proactive maintenance

Many large original equipment manufacturers have launched early versions of technologies that have proactive maintenance in mind. Dawson pointed to Detroit Diesel’s Virtual Technician program, Cummins’ Connected Diagnostics, and Volvo ASIST.

“From 10,000 feet they all look pretty similar,” Dawson said. “They’re taking the full-code data into some kind of contact centre, interpreting it, and driving action to the user.”

The resulting phone call, text message or email leads to a suite of recommendations ranging from a service reminder to an urgent alert.

While technology stands to improve life for customers, data can be nuanced and complex, and maintenance providers and technicians need to adapt to an increasingly analytical environment.

Dawson said identical trucks hauling milk in Brooklyn or mattresses in Nebraska experience entirely different impacts in terms of idling time, stops and starts, and heat generated. “All of that is going to drive component wear and failure at very different rates,” Dawson said. “Having one broad stroke around preventative maintenance won’t solve that problem.”

With 800 service facilities and 5,200 technicians to maintain its 180,000-strong fleet, Ryder averages 40 hours a year in training per technician, Dawson said. “We need a high calibre of individual for these jobs. These people need to be bright and intuitive, and they need to constantly learn.”

Training needs to reflect the innovations

Discussion about high-tech spilled into other sessions. At a panel on human resources, Dan Hutchinson, who teaches in the truck and coach program at Centennial College in Toronto, said electrical and computer-based systems are playing an increasingly significant role, and training needs to reflect this.

“The days of technicians and mechanics being called grease monkeys is long gone,” Hutchinson said. “The amount of knowledge you need to know in electronics is huge. You have to be sharp to get into this trade.”

In a keynote entitled How to Avoid Information Paralysis, Kirk Altrichter, maintenance vice-president with Lincoln, Nebraska-based Crete Carrier, said the ability to gather information in real-time is amazing and fleet maintenance management software should drive decision-making.

Altrichter singled out tire management as one of the costliest maintenance expenses for fleet owners and said manufacturers are beginning to use bar-code and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track components from cradle to grave.

However, Altrichter said information management poses significant challenges. “How many asset systems do you have and do they all agree? Do you sync them up?”

Fault codes and sensors are useful in preventative maintenance, but Altrichter said he’s been “on the receiving end of a ton of sensor failures where (vehicle owners) didn’t need to bring the truck in other than to replace the sensor.”

Techs can now talk with their trucks

On the Truck World trade floor, Don Moore, executive director with the Canadian Transportation Equipment Association, told Service Truck Magazine he sees technology advancing rapidly and the key is reducing enormous amounts of data to meaningful information.

“The diagnostic capability of the systems they’re working with means technicians will have to know the limitations of the software they’re working with and what that diagnostic information really means, and they’ll have to turn that into a repair, a parts replacement, or whatever needs to be done.”

James Monteith, national training manager with Hino Motors Canada, said service trucks equipped with wifi already allow technicians to use their laptops to “talk” with trucks and identify error codes or other problems.

“What will eventually make it to the class 4-7 market that we compete in is a lot of what you see in a Class 8,” Monteith said. “That’s your telematics — your ability for the dealership to talk directly with the truck and the truck to talk directly with the dealership with respect to minor things like your diesel exhaust fluid is low, or you’re X number of kilometres beyond your scheduled service.”

Do advanced, preventative diagnostics spell the eventual demise of the service truck? Not quite, show attendees said.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get to that point,” the CTEA’s Don Moore said. “As good as any system is there are still issues with the sensors. There’s still going to be false positives and false negatives. It’s not a perfect world.”

Service trucks enable human element

For Hino’s James Monteith, service trucks are here to stay because the human component will never disappear. “While technology’s fantastic and may lead to certain efficiencies, there’s something to be said for a mobile service component where a real person driving a truck may be able to come to the scene and assist a driver,” Monteith said.

Jeff Van Poucke, president of Cummins Eastern Canada, described a bright future for service trucks.

“I don’t think the end will ever arrive,” he said. “The business of servicing equipment will evolve. We’ll probably know before we even get there what the root cause is and what parts to carry, and we’ll be able to turn the repair event around really quickly.”

Van Poucke said the capability already exists to use digital technology to diagnose and identify root causes of component failure, and the day will soon come where a patch or repair is delivered over the cellular network so a vehicle can be updated and recalibrated on the fly.

“I don’t think the need for service vehicles will ever go away,” Van Poucke said. “But I think the business of servicing equipment will change based on all of this intelligent information we’re getting.”

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