“Applications used to be site-based; users were only
able to see trucks within that facility,” Brown says.
With hosted applications like T-Matics, she says, customers can look at thousands of pieces of equipment
across the country, analyzing trends on a corporate
level or comparing specific sites or regions.
Telematics solutions are becoming increasingly
flexible. For example, TotalTrax recently released its
SX/VX telematics platform, which features an open
architecture that allows easy integration of its own
or third-party applications. Using a single hardware
device, customers can choose only the features they
need and purchase them via downloadable software
packages. Users can also choose which individual
functions to employ across different sites and vehicles, and decide whether to
host the platform software
locally or centrally, or have
TotalTrax host it. In addition, the user interface can
be displayed on any brows-er-enabled device, including existing vehicle-mounted terminals, tablets, or
smartphones, the company
says.
Originally, wireless vehicle management systems
only fed data about things
like impacts and maintenance into fleet management
software. The next advance was to integrate with
a WMS. In Jungheinrich’s Warehouse Navigation
System for very-narrow-aisle trucks, for example,
when instructions come in from the WMS, the wireless navigation system plots the most efficient path to
the picking or putaway location; the truck completes
the activity and sends a confirmation to the WMS.
Now, telematics systems are reaching beyond the
WMS to work with other software, such as labor
management systems (LMS). By integrating data
from a wireless vehicle system and an LMS through a
single data portal, users gain visibility into both mate-
rial flow and labor utilization, says John Rosenberger,
manager of i Warehouse Gateway and global telemat-
ics for The Raymond Corp., developer of the i Ware-
house suite of fleet management products. This allows
fleet managers to identify inefficiencies and unneces-
sary costs associated with the interaction of people,
processes, and equipment. And because this combi-
nation produces extremely accurate task-time mea-
surements through continuous monitoring, it also has
the potential to revolutionize labor standards. Now,
Rosenberger says, “if the job changes—say, to a differ-
ent slot and rack—we can measure that automatically
and can adjust the labor standard accordingly.”
WHERE TO NEXT?
Lift truck telematics providers have added many new
products and applications over the past two to three
years. The pace of development is likely to accelerate,
according to the experts consulted for this article.
Here are some predictions for where this technology
is headed in the near future:
Battery data will be integrated with truck and operator information. Crown
Equipment Corp. will soon
release an on-board battery
monitor that will wirelessly
feed data into its InfoLink
fleet management system.
Users will gain real-time
visibility of a battery’s performance while it’s in use
and for the first time, will
be able to view and analyze
that information in concert
with other lift truck data as
well as tie individual operators to battery performance.
More trucks will have factory-installed systems.
Previously, these systems were strictly aftermarket
add-ons, but that’s starting to change. “Because technology is an integral part of the solutions we provide
for our customers, we are seeing high demand for
new trucks to be equipped with telematics right off
the line,” says Tim Raper, telematics product and program manager for Toyota Material Handling, U.S.A.
He expects to see a jump in orders for trucks with
the telematics capability integrated into the vehicle’s
“canbus,” or electronic controller.
Dynamic routing and resource allocation will become
feasible. Improvements in wireless vehicle tracking
and locating technologies will allow software to monitor traffic flow and patterns, identifying problems
like congestion or an accident and rerouting trucks
around them, says Rosenberger. He also foresees the
ability to dynamically reallocate lift truck capacity
based on internal and external data sources, includ-
