HITT- The Role of IoT in Fleet Management- June 18, 2024

It is time now for that training. Today focused on fleet management and the role of IoT in helping you and your clients navigate, innovate, and dominate these lucrative opportunities.
We are very happy to welcome the ever popular Graham Scott, Telarus VP of Advanced Solutions for Networking and Mobility, and his guest presenters, John Reed, managing partner for Fortify, and Robert Ayers, application solution consultant at AT and T Business. Welcome to each of you, and, Graham, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Doug. And, we’re gonna hear from John and Rob here in just a few minutes, but always a great opportunity to come and talk about IoT solutions. And one of the things that I love best about the solution we’re gonna talk about today is it’s fairly mature relative to a lot of the other solutions that are out on the marketplace. So, Chandler, if you can go ahead and advance to the next slide.
So, next one there, Chandler. So IoT fleet management, and this is obviously something that we see quite often when we look at IoT solutions. You take a look at that graph, right, up into the right, and we see that very commonly with IoT solutions. But like I said earlier, this is a solution that’s actually been around for a little bit, but the opportunity ahead of us is still tremendous.

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Opportunities in IoT Fleet Management
Many companies are not taking advantage of the benefits of the benefits of fleet management, and I think that obviously means opportunity for us. Especially small businesses tend to see fleet tracking and IoT fleet management as something that’s too expensive for them, and I think there’s a real opportunity for us to show them the value of this solution and what it can bring, and I’m gonna dive into that in here just a minute. But first, let’s sort of just talk about the opportunity as a whole. So in two thousand twenty three, about eight and a half billion dollars was done globally in this space.
And the graph there on the left shows us the US market, North America market. So if you can kinda eyeball that, you’re probably looking at about five billion here in the US and North America in twenty twenty three. Still a ton of money, but that stacks that you see below that is really what we love to see. Eleven percent compound annual growth rate from twenty twenty four to twenty thirty two.
Huge opportunity as this continues to grow both in North America and globally.
There are thirteen and a half million commercial trucks in the US right now, and that’s from the national, transportation safety board, and that is trucks over fifteen thousand pounds. So that’s a lot of trucks, but when you add things like pickups and light trucks that are also used for commercial vehicles, that number skyrockets. There’s about forty eight million pickups and about seventy five thousand light trucks on the road today in the US, and a large portion of those we know are being used for commercial purposes. So the opportunity here is tremendous.

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Benefits of Fleet Management
And for those of you who’ve seen me do one of my Ascend events, the one stat you’ll know that I always love to point out is that one at the bottom there from PricewaterhouseCoopers, ninety three percent of executives when surveyed believe the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks. Okay? So that tells us they are looking at this, and they are interested in what IoT can provide. So let’s dive in a little bit to the benefits of fleet management as a whole.

And, Chandler, if you wanna advance to the next slide there. So a lot of these we’ve seen before. Right? We’ve seen a number of these criteria, but optimizing vehicle performance is a big one.
Right? Maintenance windows, predicting maintenance, minimizing wear and tear, and improving customer service. Like, when there’s a breakdown, we wanna be able to advise our customers. Hey.
We had a truck breakdown. It’s going to take a little longer to get to you. This one here is becoming a bigger deal. Industry and regulatory compliances, environmental impact, government standards.
Those of you who were, here for my talk on energy a couple weeks ago, and, of course, you can always pull that up in the back office if you missed it. You remember I talked about ESG.
Well, organizations are very concerned about their environmental impact on the marketplace, place, and that’s a big part of, what investors look at when they’re looking at companies to invest in. So companies with fleet, very concerned with this. Number three, and we’re gonna come back to this one and hit on it with a little more reduced cost. Right?

Reduced mileage means reduced gas usage. Reduced accidents means reduced insurance. Big piece of the pie here. We definitely have to talk about that.

And then number four, reduce risks. You know, drivers, when they get on the road, that’s a huge risk. If you’ve got companies put on the road, massive risk, how can we minimize that? How can we minimize automobile accidents?

So next slide, Chandler.

Couple of other, benefits here.
You’ve got data that’s coming in. I mean, really, when we think about what is IoT, IoT is collecting data from the field and bringing it into the business where we can make important decisions and data driven decisions here. So if we know what’s going on with our trucks when they’re out on the road, we can ask questions like, do we need more vehicles? Do we need less vehicles? Can we decide when to pull a truck off the road to maintain it versus missing time because of a breakdown? And we can also look at driver performance, which is a big one we’re gonna talk about here in a few minutes.
Loss prevention is another one. Right? Reducing theft, lost goods. Everybody knows that if you watch the Sopranos, you know, when, things fall off the back of a truck.
Right? If we’re tracking all that stuff, we can certainly minimize those kinds of things, but it happens. It happens a lot. I remember seeing videos of that during the, pandemic.
People raiding trains and things like that. I mean, this kind of thing still happens. And then again, I’m gonna hit on that environmental impact, fuel and energy consumption, ESG standards. And this one here, operational integration.
Right? Can we bring data from what’s going on with our trucks in the field and integrate that and tie that to other data that’s going on in the, operations to create other operational efficiency. So there’s so many benefits to fleet management, but, Chandler, if you flip to the next slide, that’s all well and good, but how do we sell it? Right?

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Selling Fleet Management Solutions
I had the pleasure of going through an education session just, last week, and just like you guys, we we always try to invest in our education. And one of the things that it really hammered home was this idea of providing value to business owners. So I just listed off a litany of benefits that are happening. But if we can’t tie that to the two things that businesses care about the most, number one, making money and saving money, What are we here for?
Right? That is what businesses wanna hear about. Hey. How can your solution help me make money, or how can your solution help me save money?
So let’s talk about a little bit about the impact on the p and l that some of these, benefits have. So number one, obviously, fuel cost is huge. If you can reduce the cost of fuel, that is a massive advantage. That’s a huge expense for any company that is managing a fleet.
And then predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance is big as well. Understanding when to take your trucks off the road, when to increase their distance, how to manage those routes so that you are planning your maintenance windows so it does not impact operations.
And here’s a great stat that I got courtesy of Rob from AT and T. Her Gartner, a five percent reduction in operating costs is equal to a thirty percent increase in sales. Now you think about that. That is huge. What organization would not love to see a thirty percent increase in sales? Well, a five percent reduction in cost is the same per Gartner. So that’s pretty significant if we can deliver some cost savings with the fleet management solution.
This one, I think, is an an area that we don’t talk about a lot, risk. Okay? There were over forty thousand traffic fatalities in the US in twenty twenty three, and a study done by the National Safety Board showed that a sixty percent reduction in the number of incidents and an eighty six percent reduction in the cost of vehicle crashes when implementing a fleet management solution. So massive, massive benefit there.
There’s forty one thousand fatalities. That’s a huge thing, but think of all the other accidents where there’s damages and injuries that are not counted there. So there’s a massive, massive cost savings there. Then, of course, dash cams, which are two suppliers here we’re gonna talk about a little bit, can collect video for things like theft, accidents, vandalism, resulting in recovery of assets and recouping of costs.

So we all like to recover our stolen material. That’s a big, benefit there. And then insurance fraud is an area that I think we, the FBI has a lot of focus on, but, people making false claims. Right?
So if a driver has a a camera or you’ve got data from the, incident, you can sometimes combat fat false insurance claims, and that saves money on premiums over the years. So, again, huge benefits to the fleet tracking and fleet management solution.
However, key for us as tech advisers is how do we turn that into something that makes sense for business owners? They only care about two things, making money and saving money. So how do we tie those into those? So what I’m gonna do now is open it up to our panelists here, get some thoughts. So, Rob, let’s, we’re gonna give you guys each an opportunity to go into your individual solutions here in a few minutes. But, Rob, John, general conversation, and and we’ll start with Rob here first.

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Key Questions and Considerations
You know, when you’re out there with tech advisers, you’ve been working in this solution for quite a while. What are the kind of questions that tech advisers are asking, or what are the kind of questions your people at AT and T are asking that open up these kind of opportunities and resonate with business owners?
Sure.
And, absolutely. A lot of questions that get to the points that you’re outlining here. The four key areas that impact that customer’s business. So, obviously, different class fleet, different use cases based on different verticals. But it really starts with something very simple, like, what kind of vehicles does your organization have?
How Hey, Rob.
Rob, I’m just gonna, Rob, just gonna Rob, just gonna cut in here for a sec. Your mic is cutting in and out. So I’m gonna actually see if you can maybe do a little, maintenance there and turn same question over to you, John.
And then Rob, we’ll come back to you if you can see something with that mic there. But, John, same question to you. What what are you guys seeing out there when you’re talking to end user customers?
Yeah. Great question. And, you know, we we’ve seen some advisors get, you know, really, you know, smart and start doing a lot of research on the the companies they’re going to meet with. You know, I I I did a meeting with one where they found out that there were a bunch of complaints, online, about a company’s delivery times and their ability to get a truck on-site.
And that brought up the opportunity for us to look at route optimization and GPS tracking and be able to help improve that customer’s response time. You know, when one of their customers called in to customer service and they needed a repair, you know, their customer service rep was able to go in and look and see where all the vehicles were in the fleet and find the tech that was closest and who could get there the fastest. So there’s some pretty interesting stuff there that relate to customer experience and improved customer service and and tying back into that that, you know, the dollars and and how to drive money, which is pretty interesting.
Yeah. Rob, Rob, bringing it back to you. Hopefully, we got your Mike situation figured out there. Why don’t you just, I I I don’t think we caught most of what you said there, so start from the beginning if you don’t mind.
Yeah. Apologies. I I mean, certainly from, questions, how we’re approaching the market marketplace, lots of different questions that you can ask. I think John hit the nail on the head. It’s really about understanding your customer’s unique needs within their vertical.
So whether it’s, utilities, food service, you talked about compliance, of course, if you think about, you know, the the food safety management act act for by way of example, just being able to look at chain of custody, right, for our food supply our our supply chain across that. That could be a unique pain point for that particular customer and individual. So we really see, basic questions can open up a lot of opportunities. So what assets do you have today? Not just what vehicles, but what assets, what are you looking to measure, monitor, and why most importantly, I think, is is one of the key takeaways there.
Yeah. I love it. And I think, you know, one of the things I talk about at at my Ascend events is always like, do you understand how your customer makes money? Right? Because if you understand that and under you know, if if a big part of what they do is delivering products and services via a fleet, well, there’s opportunity there for you to plug in some solutions that can help save them money. Right? I think that’s, super impactful.
So, John, gonna turn things over here to you a little bit. Let’s just kinda dive into the solution that you guys have at in Fortify, by Azuga. Right? So tell us a little bit about that solution and how you guys are implementing it for businesses.

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Implementation of Fleet Management Solutions
Yeah. It’s really been a great solution and really a low cost entry, right, to be able to do it on a monthly recurring and be able to minimize those operational costs for the customers. But, you know, where we’re seeing a lot of the value, right, is is originally, it was always about GPS tracking, right, where, you know, electronic driver log records, you know, logging how much the drivers had gone, optimizing routes, the most efficient routes, real really cutting back on that fuel. Right? And then managing those assets to be able to have a a bird’s eye view and a dashboard that shows you where all your vehicles are, you know, where your entire fleet is and be able to to manage that.
And then, obviously, I talked about it before that customer service piece, right, and being able to track delivery times and enhancing customer satisfaction. So so those are a lot of the original reasons why our customers are are interested in in fleet tracking and telematics.
You know, but where it gets into on the next slide is is some of the exciting stuff that we’re starting to see when we can really drive AI into this.
Azuga has, you know, an algorithm that they’re doing to be able to score drivers and be able to detect, driver distraction and and other things like that to be able to really help drive safety.
The driver facing cameras have AI built into them so that you can if a driver is yawning excessively, you can have the driver pull over and look at a fatigued driver that could potentially lead into an accident. Right? If a driver’s eyes are constantly glancing down, looking at a a phone, or sending text messages, there’s a lot of things here that, you know, that you can do to educate and score and and score your drivers.
You know, it helps with with hiring and practices and things like that, but it all drives back to that safety. Right? There’s huge risks on these owner operators today. You know? One one accident, you know, could cripple a business. You know? And it’s a and to be able to be able to manage this and and do this through has has been huge.
You know, if you go to the next slide, you know, one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of customers do is what we call the gamification, right, to be able to provide rewards and programs and things for drivers.
You know, a lot of drivers, you know, that people say, I don’t wanna be watched. I don’t want a camera watching me at all times.
But when the business does it right and they build process around this and they tie it in, there’s a lot of lot of, you know, things that could be positive for everybody.
And it really benefits your your better drivers for sure.
You know, we talk about the driver scoring too in coaching.
You know, you can track it through the maintenance on see how one driver does with brakes over another driver that does with brakes. Right? If if you’ve got one driver that, you know, hits the brakes a little bit harder on a consistent basis, they start wearing through brakes twice as fast as your as your average driver. To be able to take that scoring and that information and be able to to drive that back, through the business and through the costs and the operation side is huge. Right? Tying back into that money and operational cost piece.
Yeah. I’ll go on to the next slide too because this is obviously a big one. Right? But the safety piece and tying in the insurance piece and and and getting your discounts and, you know, you know, so a lot of sure insurance companies are starting to offer programs and additional discounts for customers that have these types of devices and services that are that are truly taking the responsibility of managing their fleet and their safety and everything else. So, you know, I think that’s kinda one of the biggest pieces now is is the insurance factor and the risk factor in driving that that safety through it.

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Fully Managed Services and On-Site Installation
And then the last slide, you know, just a couple things that tied up there with ours. Obviously, you know, we provide everything as a fully managed service. We we can do on-site installation.
A lot of these services are very easy installs, just plugging into the OBD port of a vehicle, and being able to, you know, track and upload everything to the cloud. The cameras, you know, store video and an SD card, but also in the cloud as well. And then we layer on our support and management for the customers too. And, you know, Xynga has been a great partner for us.

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Partnership with Xynga and Industry Leadership
They’re one of the leaders in the industry. They’re owned by Bridgestone, so well, well known in the fleet industry and in in the vehicle industry. And, it’s a really, really great solution, and and we can provide demos and other things for customers. So, that’s all I had, Graham.
Yeah. No. I I love that. And I think for those of you who are very active in the call center world, when I heard about these this driver scoring and the gamification, that’s really what it kinda reminded me of.
Right? Using a lot of those same AI tools that you are seeing at play in call center environments, and and Sam Nelson does a great job of educating on all the different tools and stuff that are available there with AI. But I think this is an area where we’re starting to see it play here in fleet management, driver scoring, driver behavior, and it’s making a huge impact on safety records on the road there. So, Rob, let’s go ahead and turn things over to you to talk a little bit about AT and T.

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AT and T as a Market Leader in Fleet Management
Now at the beginning of the conversation, I talked about how this this solution’s actually been around for a little bit.
AT and T is one of the pioneers in in this solution and and still one of the market leaders. So let’s talk a little bit about AT and T solution and what you guys are doing in this space.
Yeah. Greatly appreciate it. And this may be a little bit of a rehash from some of the points that you covered earlier. But if you think of four areas of unique opportunity that AT and T looks at today, and that may be a little bit different, again, depending on each customer or use case there. But you mentioned earlier, of course, fuel cost. I think that’s a no brainer. Back to the, you know, five percent efficiency equals, thirty percent increase in sales, of course.
Huge huge impact to the customer, reducing idle time. If you kinda look down at fuel cost and sustainability, you know, pulling in electric vehicle support. Right? If we look at fleet electrification, really important to your customer.
How do we begin to augment and roll out, you know, automated vehicles, electric vehicles into our fleet? How do we begin to get there? Right? And this is part of that segue into, just that, electric vehicles, being able to monitor that, not just for fuel consumption, but looking at things like battery charging, etcetera.

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Optimizing Costs and Reducing Fuel Consumption
So lots of opportunity to optimize costs and reduce costs around fuel there. Video telematics option, obviously, John just talked about that in-depth, or, you know, touched on a number of different aspects there. But if you think of accountability, right, right up there at the top, following the rules of the road, video footage of stops, think about crosswalks, you know, things that can be enunciated with AI, which was mentioned earlier. So as you integrate in that video telematics option, it may be a challenge today for some of our customers, but a huge opportunity.

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Impact of Cameras on Insurance Premiums
We talked about bottom line things, like, of course, insurance.
We don’t have an exact number, but if you attach a camera anecdotally, we’ve seen about a two percent reduction from a lot of our customers just based on their insurance premiums.
Some of our competitors, I hate to mention them by name, but, one of the bigger ones in the marketplace, Samsera, has a great study.
They actually have shown a fifteen percent reduction in the overall, insurance premiums for organizations based on their customers utilizing things like onboard cameras for driver safety.

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Benefits of Vehicle Wi-Fi and Network Support
So not, not a fifteen percent off the bottom line just because they installed the camera, but fifteen percent overall because their their fleets become safer. Right? Fewer incidents back to some of the the points that you made earlier. Sounds really mundane, but in vehicle Wi Fi, why why would that suddenly be important?
You mentioned this this is a fairly mature industry. Well, the networks can support that appropriately today. Right? I I can support a number of different devices with an excellent connection.
Quite frankly, whether it’s AT and T or some of our competitors, the four g LTE A, five g is here today, so it can support video, but also Wi Fi incredibly important to our customers for things like point of sale, other applications that they’re how how they conduct business. Right?

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Versatility of Telematics Solutions
So I don’t wanna spend too much more time on this particular slide. Chandler, if you’ll pop over to the next one. Just a little bit of an eye chart. So, you know, we at AT and T look at one particular vehicle as having at least an opportunity for four different, activations, if you would. So think of that traditional, if you would, mature telematics box used to be nine pin hard wired into the vehicle.

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Applications of Telematics Beyond Traditional Use
As John mentioned, they’re plug and play now, OBD two. But that’s been around for a while. Right? Track trace, being able to breadcrumb trail, plan versus actual routes, important.
But as you get into other potential hot buttons for that customer, think of their equipment usage. This one’s a little unique, but think of sirens, booms. A door was open on the back of the the trailer right back to some of the shrinkage, commentary, asset tracking. What do you have on that truck that is of value to the organization that can disappear or is of of extreme high value.

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Specific Use Cases and Integrations
We’re working on one right now that’s a little different, than this particular, solution set, but it’s with elections. Right? Really, really specific chain of custody that needs to be followed there. Right?
The these are our elections that are coming up here, local county elections.
And so volume sensing in those boxes, the ability to to track that, those ballots as they’re moving, of course, across town and and exactly that chain of custody. Think of accident reconstruction, so the ability for that, of course, camera being able to access that data, that video footage, but also accident alert, you know, the ability to record that incident as it’s occurring and post accident as well. So lots of different examples here. If you think of the dash cameras, we’re gonna talk a little bit about a front facing camera, right, which is a little bit more traditional, as well as a dual facing camera to look at driver behavior.

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Promotions and Solutions Offered by AT and T
But there’s a number of different cameras that could be placed out just based on the customer’s vertical and use case. So start to think about snowplows. Right? We’ve had, you know, a a number of different use cases where they want a camera on the snowplow.
They want a a device that’s gonna measure the friction on the road for that particular, plow itself. Right? Lots of opportunities to connect and, address some specific use cases for the customer. So, Chandler, if you pop over to the next slide, I just wanna stay on track.

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Fleet Complete and AT and T Fleet Management
This is really basic. We have two particular, preset solutions that we’re gonna talk about that are really well supported, and then, obviously, you get into some custom things. This happens to be our fleet complete solution and cameras. As I mentioned, we have, excuse me.
The top one there is actually Geotab or AT and T fleet management. But, again, front facing or dual facing cameras. So if you think of, things like lane departure, tailgating, driver fatigue, weather conditions, all of these things from a, AI perspective can be pulled together, and you get different alerts and driver coaching. Right?
So not gonna read through all of these, but these are available, through AT and T, through two different products of ours. I will tell you that we have promotions around all these different things that we’re talking about today. So for instance, as you’re looking at your different, your different customer base and opportunities out there, know that we’re making this more affordable.
These are some of the solutions that we’re looking to push out in the marketplace. So think of, you know, ten or more are free. These are fairly expensive and sophisticated.
Again, AI based machine learning cameras that are plugged into the overall system and lots of different promotions to help the customer get going on these. So, Chandler, if you’ll cut over to the next one there, just very high level. Maybe should have started with this particular one here, but think of two different offers that we have in place today, as I mentioned, other custom, if you would send me, pre staged opportunities or products that we have out there we can look at. But fleet complete is our primary offer, so think of it as one truck, you know, that light pickup truck, if you would, all the way up to, you know, hundreds of, trucks, different assets that could be covered within a particular fleet. So it can scale, but it also starts for that that small business opportunity, if you would. So think of those basic telematics, in vehicle Wi Fi.

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Target Organizations and Customer Profiles
Certainly, we went mentioned some of the different camera use cases that can be applied for fleet complete, but this is a highly transactional product. This is something that Solaris can order, go out, help sell for you guys. We’ve got an entire, team of fleet complete overlays that can jump in with you and do a demo for your customer and walk through all these different features and technology with them.
On the other side, AT and T fleet management, a white label, if you would.
Behind the curtain there, probably a fairly familiar name. It’s Geotab.
So think of this as a slightly more sophisticated and customizable setup. So when we say more OEM integrations, Geotab, for instance, has a complete marketplace.
So I mentioned earlier a snowplow. That was a real life example where where we ultimately sold them AT and T fleet management for enterprise or Geotab.
I think it was about six hundred snowplows in, the Midwest somewhere, big business, right, upper Midwest.
And those were the use cases that they pulled through. And I learned more on that call about snowplows and some of their unique needs, of course, than I ever may have wanted to actually know. So lots of different integrations available there. We talked about some unique EV and sustainability reporting within fleet management.
It’s FedRAMP certified, and it has some really good specialty use cases that we can take a look at. So you’ve got two different offers. I just wanna make you feel comfortable that you don’t need to know, don’t need to ask all of the questions. You just need to be fairly dangerous, of course, to either engage myself or, of course, the the different, support teams behind these two products here.

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Scoping Questions for Qualifying Customers
So, Chandler, why don’t we pop one more? I think we’ve got one or two left. And, customer profile, I think, you know, John would probably not have said an agreement with this. You know, lots of different target organizations. This isn’t relegated to, you know, small business or food service that we’ve mentioned before, delivery only. You know, think of health care, retail, manufacturing.
You know, they all have fleets of some size. You know, no brainers like equipment rental, for asset tracking or asset utilization.
And then think of, you know, talking or speaking to some nontraditional titles.
Obviously, small businesses, some of the smaller mid market, you know, somebody’s wearing a lot of hats there. But think of that risk manager, safety and operations director. I think Graham had mentioned risk and highlighted that earlier. There are titles, of course, within organizations, and they play a really key role there, finance.
No brainers, you know, just people making decisions here, chief of police fire in terms of safety, but, other folks in terms of just outside of a transportation director, which can be a little bit rare as you get into business and, again, small to mid market businesses there.
Yeah. And just to jump in here on that, I think that’s one of the things we see a lot with IoT. Right? IoT solutions in general is that typically the decision makers, the people involved are a little bit outside the standard IT silo that a lot of our tech advisors are talking to.
So you’ve got departments from other groups that are sometimes brought into these discussions and decisions. So it’s a really important point to, to, to really kind of understand there that, you know, hey. Look. You’re not always gonna be talking to the IT department when you’re talking about some of these things.
It’s gonna be some other folks. So, Rob, I know you got a couple more slides here, so let’s quickly blow through these.
The next slide here where we’re gonna talk about qualifying the customer. Let’s bring John back in here to kind of, add his input on some of these questions because I think they’re really, really strong questions where we can ask the organization. So, obviously, what kind of vehicles does your organizations have? What how many?
How do you track and manage them today? Let’s start with do you track and manage them today. Right? I think that’s a big part of it.
So, guys, a lot of good questions on here. Rob, I know you you know this slide well. This is yours. But, John, anything that jumps out at you here on this slide?
No. Absolutely. Right? And and what we’ve seen is the prep ahead of time. Right? So if if you can do a little due diligence and a little research on the customer from their website, right, to understand what type of solutions, what kind of delivery vehicles they have.
You know, refrigeration’s another big one Rob touched on, whether they’ve got refrigeration trucks or not. That raises a lot of risk and a lot of other measures to be able to to monitor.
So, a lot of these are great, great questions.
Yeah.
Yeah. And Anyone you wanna highlight?
Well, I really like the right side. Right? I I think if we think of the mature part of fleet, it really or the the first seven there on the left to a large extent.
Some of those are no brainers getting into, of course, cost savings and safety. But getting into video telematics, those three questions. And then, to John’s point, asset management, you know, what conditions do you need to monitor your shipments? I think those are are critical questions really for any vertical or industry to kinda kinda dig into a little bit.
Some of them may say, you know, no big deal. But as you dig into and talk to some of those other people, to your point, Graham, you do discover things like shrinkage and some additional pain points in there. And these are really no brainers. It’s become extremely cost effective.
If I wanna stick a an asset tracker in the back of the vehicle and then measure, of course, the back of the bus, the back of the trailer, of course, so I can measure things like volume.
John and I had touched base last week and talked a little bit about trailer utilization, right, a big thing today, just in terms of optimizing your shipments.
So I think it’s that right side here, just in terms of some of the newer questions to drive opportunities.
Yeah. Love it. Graham, just to add Yep.
Yeah. Add add real quick that I like to one I like to ask is, you know, what happens if a vehicle breaks down in the field? What’s the business impact? You know what it means? To to not only be able to, you know, affect those deliveries or that slow service calls for the day, you know, but the cost associated with getting it back on the road and could predictive maintenance and being able to monitor the maintenance of the vehicles help, you know, reduce that operating cost?
Yeah. Great point. I think predictive maintenance is one of the things that a lot of businesses are saying have value here. Just the the incremental cost for pulling a truck or vehicle out of the field first off, obtaining it from the field where it’s maybe broken down and then servicing that, I mean, way less expensive if you can predict that maintenance and take care of it when it’s at the shop versus when it’s on the road.

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Transition to Q&A Section
So, Chandler, in the interest of time here, we’re gonna go ahead and just skip skip to the q and a section. And, we’ve got a cool video here that’s in the presentation. For those of you that want a copy of it, you can see it. Really kinda shows that video telematics.
But, you know, I know we’re kinda running a little long here, so we’re gonna go ahead and skip right to q and a. Doug, let’s loop you in here and just get some hey. What were you seeing out there from the chat? Seemed like a pretty active chat today.
It was an active chat. Thank you for the presentation and for all of the, information. It’s great. I’ve tried to consolidate a few things here. With regard to the telematics and the data that are collected in all of this, can you talk just quickly about the security of those data and what steps are being taken to ensure that the data remain accurate and cannot be, altered as they’re being used now to comply with various regulatory situations and may be used in legal disputes as well?
Rob, why don’t you take that one?
Yeah. That that’s a good one. I don’t know if I can answer it in, in its complete sense. There’s a lot of security, of course, that is, inherent in these particular, technologies, of course, if you think of connecting, data over LTE and whether it’s our network or or another, there’s lots of inherent security steps just in terms of authenticating. I will tell you as you look at collecting data specifically against a use case like hours of service or electronic logging devices utilizing that to address some of that compliance or, as I mentioned, you know, food safety and management act, very similar situation.
We often or almost every time, certainly recommend securing, utilizing some sort of security, including unified endpoint management, MDM, something to secure that end device, that end user interface even for point of sale and and things of that nature. So security is applied.

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Importance of Security in Data
I don’t know that I can broadly speak to the ability for somebody to, potentially change the video, today. But, back to Graham’s point, if you have video, testimonial, so to speak, or this information on file, it really expediates the ability to turn in a, insurance claim. Right? I mean, if here here’s the data. Why don’t you refute that this is, you know, a fake video, per se?
Very quickly, you’ll find, of course, that it’s not. But I think there’s a number of ways to look at security. We can look at that at a a point level.
Great response. Security seems to work its way into just about everything these days, and so I appreciate you addressing that. The other question that came up had to do I and I think most advisers I’ve always thought of fleet management this way is that I’m focused on the vehicle.

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Focus on Cargo and Intermodality
But we’ve talked a little bit today about focusing, using IoT and other resources on the cargo as well or the materials being transported and all of the ways that those could interact. One of the great questions that came up was, you know, how do we manage the intermodality of transportation where you’ve got a certain amount of cargo that may be going between cars, trucks, ships, trains, whatever it may be, and, keeping track of not only the fleet but the cargo involved.
Yeah. John, why don’t you jump on that one?
Yeah. Absolutely. And we have a combination of, of a couple different solutions with asset tracking, right, where we can actually track, a package or a pallet or even individual boxes, be able to not only track the the location of the box, but what did the box go through in shipping? Right?

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IoT Solutions for Cargo Tracking
Vibration, temperature. Was the box opened? Right? With you know, there’s different lighting and alerts and everything that, you know, that can tell if a box was open.
So there’s a lot of great IoT solutions that you can tie into this. You know, I talked about the refrigeration trucks. Right? You talked about tying route optimization in.
We’ve done solution where we put temperature sensors in refrigeration trucks because when they’re delivering in downtown like Boston, this stops. Every time they stop and open the truck, the refrigeration unit shuts off and the truck warms up. Well, if they do too many stops in a row, the truck doesn’t have a chance to regroup and get back to the proper temperatures. So that’s where you tie in the route optimization with the temperature sensors and different solutions like that.

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Tracking Trailers and Cargo
So there’s some really great things that you can do there for tracking everything from trailers to cargo in the vehicles.
The the third group of questions really had to do with the monitoring of the driver. And a lot of times, we think of that in terms of the driver’s, capabilities and compliance and that sort of thing, but it really has a lot to do with driver safety as well, especially with all of the changes that are happening in the types of fleets that are out there, the lengths that drivers are are, having to cover.
Driver safety is really an issue here, in terms of protecting them and making sure that they’re able to continue. Correct?
Yeah. No. I think that’s a that’s a really important change that we’ve seen there. Right? The asset is now not just what’s on the truck truck itself. The asset’s also your people. Right?
Right.
And making sure that your people are in good environments and good situations.
And, obviously, you know, we think of of that as, like, well, drivers, you know, we wanna monitor their behavior to make sure they’re doing the right things. But there’s also we wanna make sure that the elements that the drivers are in are safe. And, you know, a lot of times the video can show us that, you know, maybe there’s a liability issue or something happened and the driver’s being accused of, you know, running a red light or whatever it is. Well, if you’ve got video that disputes that, that benefits the driver tremendously.
Also, the conditions inside the cab, making sure that those are suitable for the driver. So assets can mean more than just the truck or the vehicle and what’s inside. It can also mean the people that are involved, and I think that’s sort of, something we’ve seen as an evolution of this solution.

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Closing Remarks
Absolutely true. We’re a little short on time. Great questions from everyone today. Of course, the presentation is recorded, will be available later today in Telarus University. Graham, last word to you.
Yeah. Last point I wanna say here is I know that one thing that tech advisers tend to think when they engage in a solution like this is I’m I’m not comfortable with this. This is not something I’m used to talking about. So I don’t have a lot of confidence, and I don’t wanna jeopardize my relationship with my customer to come in and talk about something I may not be familiar with.
If you have a customer that has a large fleet and you think there’s an opportunity there, bring me in. I am happy to lead that engagement with you. We’ve got AT and T. We’ve got John and his team, and we’ve got a whole lot of other, solution providers in the portfolio that can do these types of services.
Bring me in to help me manage that engagement for you. Happy to do it. We wanna get you guys in the right situation here. But, definitely, we’d love to work with some of you guys on these opportunities. And and between myself, the Telarus sales engineering team, and our, vendors, we’ve got a lot of great experts to bring in and help you.
Sounds great. Graham, John, Robert, thank you so much for the presentation today. Terrific information. I can’t wait to have you back on the call again soon.