SHOP OPERATIONS
DATA & TELEMATICS
38 Fleet Maintenance | November/December 2017
hanks to advances in technology, telematics,
onboard diagnostic systems, the Internet of
Th ings (IoT) and more, vehicles are becoming
increasingly more intelligent. Vehicles are also
generating more and more Big Data. Basically,
Big Data describes the large volume of data from
traditional and digital sources, both inside and
outside an organization.
Nowadays, fl eets have huge amounts of vehicle
and operations trip data available from their
trucking management and maintenance systems,
mobile communication systems, onboard sensors
and telematics systems.
But it is not the amount of data that is important.
Rather, it is what an organization does with
the data.
Big Data – if collected and analyzed correctly
– off ers maintenance operations the potential to
ascertain valuable insights for enhanced decision
making and improved operational effi ciency.
Among the “gems” hidden in Big Data are:
Clues about the safety, effi ciency, performance
and vehicle health.
Information for determining the root causes of
failures, issues and defects in near-real time.
How to streamline operations for more precise
vehicle maintenance and repair scheduling and
budget forecasting.
Real-time vehicle utilization.
Reliability improvement
With high vehicle reliability, and thus availability,
uptime is increasingly important as transportation
solutions become more complex and the
transportation industry seeks new ways of being
competitive. Factors that impact vehicle reliability
are vehicle quality, preventive maintenance
actions and driver training, all of which help to
reduce the risk of unexpected downtime for vehicle
maintenance, repair and failures.
Having good data and eff ective data analytics –
the process of examining large amounts of data to
uncover hidden patterns, correlations and other
insights – can allow a maintenance operation to
move beyond preventive maintenance and into
predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance
involves periodic or continuous component inspection
and monitoring, looking for the presence of
warning conditions that indicate that a component
is about to fail, planned maintenance can be
performed prior to an equipment failure.
How to leverage
Big Data
to improve vehicle maintenance processes
It begins with T
good data
collection
and eff ective
analysis.
By David A. Kolman,
Contributing Editor
PART ONE OF A TWO-PART SERIES ON MAKING THE MOST OF BIG DATA