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Blacklisting the black box
Date: 23 October 2014 | Author: Jack Carfrae
Telematics systems used to exist solely for locating vehicles. You had one because you needed to know where your staff and assets were - and that was about the size of it.
The technology has progressed no end in the past few years though, to the point where the mapping element is almost falling by the wayside.
"We have customers who don't even look at a map any more. It's moved on much further than that," says Alex Rothwell, chief technology officer at Masternaut.
These days, the skill is in gleaning data from the vehicle and converting it into something meaningful for fleets.
"Companies have been developing their technology to derive information directly from the vehicle," says Martin Bramwell, managing director of In-Car Cleverness. "Fault codes, RPM and speed are now reasonably widespread, and that trend towards additional data streams will continue.
"Applications will drive the way in which [the] technology is employed. For instance, a driver with a telematics unit might be contacted by his dealer to tell him of a forthcoming service or fault that has just occurred and been transmitted to the dealer's CRM [customer relationship management] system."
