Predictive Analytics Keep Delivery Vehicles Running

For commercial fleets, vehicle efficiency and uptime are always vital, but that’s been especially true over the last couple of years.

During the pandemic, the demands on the supply chain expanded aggressively with the growing need for transport and delivery of goods. At the same time, due to other supply chain issues, there’s been a shortage of new vehicles.

Together, these trends have forced fleets to keep their existing vehicles on the road longer. As the vehicles get older and collect more miles, it becomes more critical for fleet managers to keep up with what’s happening.

“If you sit in the shoes of a fleet manager, they walk in every day and they have, let’s say, 100 drivers going into trucks and they have all these goods that are packed into the back of the trucks they need to get to different points throughout the day,” Shiva Bhardwaj, founder and CEO of Pitstop, told PYMNTS. “If, all of a sudden, two of the trucks break down, it just disrupts the whole plan of your day-to-day workflow and it becomes a very high pain point.”

Adopting Digital Solutions 

Managing the maintenance of those vehicles to avoid breakdowns and analyzing their total cost of ownership to see when they should be replaced, has largely been done manually.

“There’s a large percentage — probably 70% — that’s pen and paper in this industry,” Bhardwaj said. “Right now, people are doing this kind of stuff very manually and infrequently. So, it’s more of a rule of thumb based on experience.”

More and more, though, fleets are adopting platforms that provide digital tools and insights. Pitstop offers a cloud-based analytics platform that uses data from connected vehicles as well as artificial intelligence (AI) to help fleet managers predict and prevent vehicle failures.

With predictive analytics delivered by the platform, fleet managers can plan the vehicle’s downtime for needed maintenance and avoid unexpected breakdowns.

Delivering Notifications to Fleet Managers 

Today’s vehicles have an average of about 100 modules that receive input from sensors and control things like motors and switches, Bhardwaj said.

When that data is streamed to a platform like Pitstop, it can be used for predictive analytics. The data points can be fed into prediction models that tell the user the state of the vehicle’s subsystems and the risk of failure of those subsystems.

This information is delivered to the fleet manager via alerts that are categorized as critical, major or minor based on which vehicles need maintenance or have a risk of downtime.

The platform is powered by the data streaming from thousands of vehicles. So, for example, it can see how much braking a vehicle has done, while carrying how heavy of a load, and then estimate how much energy has been dissipated through the brakes. It can then compare that to other, similar vehicles and their rate of brake wear.

“That dictates what alert you want to send the user,” Bhardwaj said. “It might say, ‘Hey, this vehicle’s brake wear is very high. We estimate that it’s going to need replacement in the coming month or two. You should get an inspector to do a double-check on it.’”

While the vehicles’ original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) provide service schedules based on time and mileage, vehicles’ needs can vary based on how they are used. For example, a vehicle that’s used only on city streets will do a lot more braking than one that is cruising on a highway most of the time. And a vehicle that’s carrying heavy equipment will be under greater stress than one that isn’t.

“Everyone’s using these assets so differently. As a result, they’re going to wear differently,” Bhardwaj said.

Determining Total Cost of Ownership 

This data can also be used to analyze a vehicle’s fuel costs and maintenance costs to see if they are performing as they should. With insights enabled by AI, the fleet manager can look at the vehicles’ total cost of ownership.

Because the platform knows the condition of every system on a vehicle, it can provide insights that help the fleet manager determine which vehicles to take off the road for maintenance and which vehicles to remove from their fleet because their costs are escalating.

“So, on any given week, you say, ‘Here’s three vehicles we’ve got to take care of,’” Bhardwaj said. “The other vehicles, it’s constantly monitoring and doing analysis and then when there’s an issue it will highlight it so you can take action. That allows you to be tunnel-focused on the few assets that actually have risk versus not knowing what’s about to happen.”