Q&A: Why collaboration is driving the future of transport sustainability

The past decade has seen the rapid growth of data. What are the impli­ca­tions in the trans­port indus­try?

The infor­ma­tion a vehi­cle or fleet holds has dras­ti­cal­ly accel­er­at­ed data-dri­ven deci­sion-mak­ing through­out the trans­port indus­try. Depre­ci­a­tion mod­el­ling, route opti­mi­sa­tion and use cal­cu­la­tions are now more accu­rate than ever. All of these areas have a direct effect on a business’s bot­tom line, sharp­en­ing the need to com­pre­hend what data is avail­able and how to use it.

As an exam­ple, con­nect­ed vehi­cles are becom­ing some­what stan­dard prac­tice in the OEM [orig­i­nal equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­er] space, gath­er­ing their own telem­at­ics and feed­ing it back to a data pool. By 2030, 88% of cars sold world­wide will be pre-con­nect­ed to net­works via embed­ded devices and near­ly all vehi­cles in the EU and US will be con­nect­ed, accord­ing to a study by Ptole­mus Con­sult­ing.

How has this impact­ed how fleet man­agers and oper­a­tors approach data?

With the increas­ing focus on sus­tain­abil­i­ty and fleet tran­si­tion from inter­nal com­bus­tion engines (ICE) to elec­tric vehi­cles (EVs), they’ve come to realise two crit­i­cal points. First, data is core to a suc­cess­ful EV tran­si­tion strat­e­gy. Fleet man­agers must first under­stand how their exist­ing vehi­cles are used and then what they can tran­si­tion to. As a pio­neer in EV fleet tran­si­tion, Geotab has sup­port­ed count­less fleets on this jour­ney through the use of our elec­tric vehi­cle suit­abil­i­ty assess­ment plat­form.

Sec­ond, data is need­ed to effi­cient­ly oper­ate an elec­tric fleet and, in many cas­es, a mixed fleet of EVs and ICE vehi­cles. While there may be over­lap in many data points, there are also new ones to get to grips with, such as state of charge.

How impor­tant is it that large dataset busi­ness­es col­lab­o­rate and share data?

Data democ­ra­ti­sa­tion max­imis­es val­ue to busi­ness­es and end users, which has impli­ca­tions not just for com­mer­cial fleets but also local and nation­al gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives such as charg­ing infra­struc­ture plan­ning. It means every indi­vid­ual ben­e­fits indi­rect­ly from shared data prac­tices.

From an organ­i­sa­tion stand­point, this requires look­ing at data from a prod­uct man­age­ment per­spec­tive, not just a data sci­ence per­spec­tive, to tru­ly under­stand the solu­tion and ben­e­fits that a dataset can pro­vide. Also, you can’t for­get that data shar­ing agree­ments have pri­va­cy impli­ca­tions, which can be a bar­ri­er if not defined clear­ly and trans­par­ent­ly from the begin­ning.

What role is Geotab play­ing in bring­ing data points togeth­er?

Pro­cess­ing bil­lions of data points every day, our open plat­form allows fleet busi­ness­es of all sizes to auto­mate oper­a­tions by inte­grat­ing and aggre­gat­ing vehi­cle data with their oth­er data assets. Geotab does the heavy lift­ing on behalf of busi­ness­es to con­tex­tu­alise and present data in a mean­ing­ful way and scale in line with grow­ing fleet sizes. MyGeotab is the front-end that deliv­ers all this infor­ma­tion in an easy-to-under­stand for­mat, while our recent­ly added ‘Active Insights’ fea­ture takes the leg work out of analysing tables and charts by iden­ti­fy­ing areas that may be of con­cern or require atten­tion, fur­ther enhanc­ing over­all fleet man­age­ment effi­cien­cy.

What is the ulti­mate val­ue for fleet organ­i­sa­tions that pull in mul­ti­fac­eted data insights?

The ulti­mate val­ue is in pro­vid­ing diag­no­sis rather than hypoth­e­sis. The abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate insights com­bin­ing both fre­quen­cy of data and ‘labelled data’, such as engine error codes and OEM part num­bers, dri­ves direct bot­tom-line improve­ments. For exam­ple, his­toric telem­at­ics data, vehi­cle error codes and SMR records can com­bine to pro­vide pre­dic­tive main­te­nance ana­lyt­ics, flag­ging when vehi­cle under­per­for­mance might become an issue in the future.

Ingest­ing data from con­sumer vehi­cle providers, as well as oth­er streams such as hyper-local weath­er data and cam­era footage, also helps paint a con­tex­tu­al pic­ture of cur­rent and future fleet sus­tain­abil­i­ty. When we con­duct­ed an EV suit­abil­i­ty assess­ment of Enter­prise Fleet Management’s 91,000-strong fleet, we found that 13% could be eco­nom­i­cal­ly replaced by EVs. This rep­re­sents a poten­tial sav­ing of $33m and 194,000 tons of CO2 over four years.

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it geotab.com/uk

Pro­mot­ed by Geotab