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DAMBACH Lagersysteme Inc.
5295 West River Drive, Suite 200, Comstock Park, MI 49321
Office: +1-616-784-6484 info@dambach-lagersysteme.com
www.dambach-lagersysteme.com
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13 - 15 March 2018
Hall 1, Stand 1F41
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Usha Iyer, vice president of marketing at Honeywell Safety
& Productivity Solutions. Honeywell recently teamed up
with transportation technology provider Omnitracs to
launch an ELD software platform designed to help fleets
improve worker safety and avoid violations, among other
capabilities.
And that’s only the beginning,
according to Iyer. Developers
are currently looking at ways
to use “smart” ELDs to tackle
other industry challenges, she
said. “Fleets are not just complying with the regulation to
track drivers’ hours of service
but are now looking at how
they can use ELDs to drive
toward other challenges like
rising labor costs, driver shortages, and e-commerce trends,”
she said.
To reach those goals, developers will take advantage of
ELDs’ capability to collect more granular real-time data
than was possible with automatic onboard recording
devices (AOBRDs), the previous generation of vehicle data
recorders, Iyer said. By analyzing the ELD-generated data
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with cloud-based software, fleets can improve variables
ranging from asset utilization rates to navigation, safety,
and fuel efficiency, she said.
Fleets could even use the capabilities to improve the
driver experience by delivering customized services to each
individual truck, Iyer added. “A
driver could get into his cab
in the morning, log in [to an
onboard computer], and manage his workflow, whether that
means turn-by-turn navigation
or document capture and imaging,” she said.
BOOSTING THE ROI ON ELDs
As for when all this might
happen, that will depend on a
couple of factors, according to
Norm Ellis, president of ERoad,
a Portland, Ore.-based fleet
management solutions provider. Much of the hardware
needed to enable such applications is already in place, he
said. But getting to the next level will require software
improvements as well as building up the network of trucks
equipped with the devices, he said.
The ELD mandate that took effect in December affects
about 4 million trucks in the U.S., including 2. 5 million
to 3 million vehicles that had already been equipped with
either AOBRDs or ELDs well before the deadline, Ellis said.
Adding the remaining 1 million to 1. 5 million vehicles and
beginning the required process of upgrading the rest to
newer ELD models will generate a flood of new data that
fleets could potentially use to generate valuable insights,
he said.
As more fleets adopt ELDs, they will increasingly look for
additional ways to use the information the devices provide.
“Some people will just hunker down and use it to monitor
hours of service, but once you have this device in the vehicle, many others will ask ‘What else can I use the ELD for
that will give me a return on investment?’” Ellis said.
Technology providers have anticipated that question. A
number have already rolled out ELDs with features like
wireless data plans, cloud analytics platforms, or connections to vehicle telematics. While those enhanced models
cost more than their basic counterparts, most fleets will be
able to justify the investment through the operational savings they yield, he said.
For example, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety
Administration (FMCSA) requires that ELDs be connected
to a vehicle’s engine control module (ECM) so the device
can record when the ignition is turned on and when the
vehicle is moving. However, some enhanced ELDs allow
users to collect a wide range of additional data, such as
engine diagnostics, and send it to a cloud-based platform
for analysis. If the results indicated that, say, the truck was
