Volvo Trucks’ Remote Telematics Can Spot Problems Before Drivers Do

There are few parts of running a national shipping company that are not complex. You have the logistical challenges of getting the right goods to the right places. You need to make sure you have drivers scheduled to make all those deliveries. Even the trucks themselves are becoming more and more complicated with advanced technologies filling the cabin and the engine bay. It’s that last bit that Volvo Trucks North America and its partners are focusing on to make the first bits easier to manage.

As with any shipping company, uptime is critical for Raider Express, a refrigerated truckload carrier that operates 350 company-owned tractors and has 700 53-foot refrigerated trailers. The company started working with Volvo about eight years ago in an attempt to improve fuel economy. The relationship has evolved to the data-heavy one with remote diagnostics that it is today once Raider Express realized it could increase the time its trucks were on the road if it gathered and used more data from the trucks. To cite just one example, monitoring engine temperatures to catch a potential issue before it became a bigger problem allows Raider to route the truck through its Fort Worth, Texas maintenance facility before sending it on a run to the East Coast.

“Every mile that we go down the road costs us a fixed amount of money and we can measure that carefully every day and operate on a pretty thin margin,” Raider Express owner Mike Eggleton Sr. said.

Volvo’s trucks can monitor much more than just engine temperatures, said Ash Makki, the product marketing manager for Volvo Trucks North America.

“We collect a massive amount of data and information from the trucks,” he said, including monitoring the engine, transmission, after treatment, electronic control units and fuel economy, among other data points.

“Then, the challenge becomes, what do you do with that data,” he said. “How do you connect the dots to make meaningful information that means something to the customer, instead of a gush of emails and notifications that, after a while, they’re not even going to pay attention to what you’re sending them. That’s what differentiates our Volvo uptime services from anyone else in the industry.”

To do this, Volvo turns to SAS, which Ash said helps analyze the data and take a deeper dive into finding problems ahead of time, sometimes all the way down to a specific component. The amount of data can be staggering. Jason Mann, the vice president of internet of things at SAS, said a modern Volvo truck can generate roughly 10,000 measurements per work day. Not all of these represent a problem (simply measuring turbocharger vibration or transmission temperature, for example, is just part of the system) and certainly not all are transmitted through the telematics system.

SAS’ goal is to manage all of that data so that any alerts generated are meaningful, since the “alert fatigue” Ash hinted at is real.

“As a general initiative, and one of the reasons that we had partnered with Volvo in this effort, is that the big issue in this space is the amount of false positives,” Mann said. “So many of the alerts were generated that eventually the operators became numb to those notifications. So the reduction of false positives is the primary objective and the value of analytics within this sequence.”

Dan Eggleton, CFO for Raider Express, said it amazed him when he realized just how much data Volvo and SAS can process for his company.

“There are so many different facets that this project has developed that it’s almost mind boggling,” he said. “The biggest single advantage that this has brought is that we effectively now are able to manage by exception, by outliers.”

Dan Eggleton pointed to the truck’s fuel consumption prediction model as one example. The system looks at the amount of gallons that the truck consumes and comes up with a number that it has learns should be the fuel economy. When it sees that a particular truck is not performing according to this trend, the system can offer suggestions.

“[Before,] we’d spend hours and hours trying to chase a problem in the engine that wasn’t there, trying to find something particular in the driver’s habits that weren’t necessarily there, and we would either wind up being frustrated or there was an underlying problem there that we couldn’t find,” he said. “What we’re able to do with this data feed is, most of the time, within a high percentage of accuracy, we either know what the issue is right off the bat or we know there isn’t a problem. One of the biggest advantages is the time-saving aspect of not chasing problems that aren’t there.”

Volvo’s Makki compared using Volvo Truck’s overall telematics solution to health insurance. You don’t absolutely need it, but going without is not exactly advisable.

“Can you run a shipping operation without uptime services? Of course, the answer is yes, but is the risk that you’re taking doing that worth it?” he said. “If you have a truck and a driver, you can run an operation, but the risk that you’re taking without monitoring that operation and analyzing the data from that truck mean you cannot optimize the performance of that truck and keep it out of the shop as much as possible. The telematics systems are made to really let the customer stay ahead of the ball and plan accordingly.”