Climbing the Data Mountain
Rolf Lockwood
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Rolf Lockwood
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Managing data is utterly essential to the successful maintenance of a truck fleet in 2016. That’s a given. But knowing it is one thing – doing it is quite another.
That was the issue tackled by a panel discussion I put together and moderated at the inaugural Canadian Fleet Maintenance Summit in Toronto recently. In a session entitled “The Electronics Revolution and Trucking of the Future,” panelists spoke of ways that data can help address challenges. And the benefits of all that retrievable information aren’t limited to big outfits.
“Small fleets can behave as big ones if they embrace the tools that the dealers and the OEM have today,” said Skip Yeakel, principal engineer and government/industry/academia link at Volvo Trucks. He referred to his company’s Uptime Center and the way it diagnoses issues remotely as an example. It’s there for everyone.
Even though larger fleets have more resources to explore raw data, smaller operations can still look at single reports or receive alerts, added Larry Jordan, vice president of product management at Zonar Systems in California. These are the details that can help avoid breakdowns and delays.
“In a perfect world, I’d like to see a truck tell me what’s wrong with it,” said Kirk Altrichter, vice president fleet services for Ohio’s Kenan Advantage Group and former chairman of the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council.
The biggest challenge is sifting through the reams of available data to find hidden info nuggets, he said. Gathering the data can be a problem, and there can certainly be too much of a good thing. Altrichter learned that the hard way after once asking to be alerted about any monitored fault codes.
“We ended up turning it off quite quickly,” he said. The goal instead is distinguishing between the codes that require immediate …Read the rest of this story
