Last December, we visited Steve Minter at the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. Steve has been rolling out our Quadrant solution throughout the state in the vehicles he manages. The Kentucky Department of Agriculture is responsible for a wide range of activities, including:

• Regulation and inspection, (including every retail weigh scale in the state, eggs, amusement rides, pesticide use, and fuel pumps)
• Teens and tobacco
• A veterinary office
• A marketing division, (which runs farmers’ markets and promotes Kentucky agriculture products around the world)

Many people at the Department of Agriculture work remotely and by themselves. There are obvious safety concerns, which Steve has addressed using Quadrant to gain visibility into where vehicles are located. Steve helps ensure safety of workers by conducting remote physical vehicle inventory checks using Quadrant—something that was impossible to do before Quadrant. Steve has used Quadrant reporting to move from re-active to pro-active management of his fleet.

With innovative solutions like this, Steve’s long-term vision will provide a positive impact in all areas for which the Kentucky Department of Agriculture is responsible.  Customers, such as Steve, continue to show us new and innovative ways to use Quadrant on a day-to-day basis as a great telematics, automated GPS, and automatic vehicle location solution.

The GPS/AVL and telematics industry has been developing for a long time. Webtech Wireless started business in 1999 and today we have over 100,000 subscribers using our telematic solutions. While creating a new technology market can feel like climbing a mountain, now is a good time to join us on the trail. The routes are well defined and we are here to make it easy for you to gain the insight, benefits, and cost savings of deploying a telematic solution.

To give you some idea of the growth of the telematic market, here are some of the latest statistics:

• The total Mobile Resource Management (MRM) US market will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.9% from 2010 to 2013 (Source: Licht & Associates).
• The North American forecast for the number of fleet management systems in active use will have a CAGR of 12.6% from 2010 to 2015 (Source: Berg Insight).
• Global telematic component markets will grow at a CAGR of nearly 21% from 2011 to 2016 (Source: BCC Research).

These growth predictions demonstrate that telematic solutions have moved out of the early adopter category and into the mainstream. The reasons for adopting and deploying a telematic solution for your fleet include the following list from an MRM presentation by Licht & Associates:

Increased Productivity: Increase the number of jobs per day and more productive driving miles.

Improved Customer Service: More timely response times, real-time status updates, and tighter service windows.

Cost Savings: More efficient routing, fuel reductions in the 5-15% range, and reduced maintenance costs in the 10-30% range.

Risk Management: Accident reduction, lower insurance costs, accident reconstruction, and asset recovery.

Regulation/Green Initiatives: U.S. Senate Bill 3884 (installation of electronic on board recorders), CONTRAN 245 in Brazil (installation of a GPS tracking device on new vehicles), and vehicle re-routing as a key way to reduce miles in a transportation green initiative.

We have helped clients in all these areas and are enthusiastic about being part of the growing telematic market in 2012 and the future.

The American Transportation Research Institute just released their 2011 Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry 2011 Report. This annual report surveys more than 4,000 carriers to produce a rank ordering of the key issues the trucking industry sees for itself.

For Webtech Wireless, it was good to see that Onboard Truck Technology is a top 10 issue from the survey respondents. In fact, the graph above shows that for 85% of the trucking industry, onboard technology ranks 5 or higher. For 70% of the industry, it ranks 7 or higher.

Automated GPS and AVL solutions, like the ones we offer, can have an impact on several other of the critical issues raised in the survey. For example,

#2. Hours of Service. Both Quadrant In Cab and Quadrant Manager offer key HOS capabilities, including predictive in cab alerts.

#3. Driver Shortage. Customers tell us that it is the best drivers that stay around when they deploy a telematics solution. A professionally run organization that uses telematics and reporting to level the playing field, making all drivers accountable, is more likely to attract better drivers.

#4. CSA. Good compliance with CSA rules can be enabled through a telematics deployment and automated HOS solution (see #2).

#5. Fuel. Customers use our solutions to monitor idling, driver behaviour and fuel economy, which enables them to increase their fleet fuel economy and lower their fuel costs.

#9. Onboard Truck Technology. Need we say more?

We are pleased to be positioned to help customers solve five out of the top ten issues that the American Transportation Research Institute has identified for 2011.

For six decades, National Foods has been dedicated to delivering fresh eggs from their rural farms to customers all over Everett, Washington.

With customer service as a main priority, Kevin Bookey, Transportation Manager was concerned on how to best manage their 160 drivers and over 90 tractors and straight truck fleet. Kevin knew he needed better accountability and visibility into what the trucks were doing every day.

Using the Webtech Wireless Quadrant solution, National Foods was able to save costs while improving efficiency. Everyday National Foods delivers their fresh farm eggs to a number of businesses, primarily restaurants, who require precise delivery times. Their business plan estimated that unloading and delivery should not take longer than one hour. Once Quadrant was installed, Kevin was able to narrow down and identify delivery stops that took as long as two and a half hours. Working in collaboration with their customers, National Foods was able to reduce the longer unloading times and increase the productivity of their employees.

As a family owned business, the owners often lose sleep worrying about the safety of their drivers and trucks. With the Quadrant solution, they receive the data they need to monitor driver behaviour, in order to reduce speeding and accident rates; giving the owners of National Foods a good night’s rest.

National Foods has had a positive change with customer interaction since implementing the Quadrant solution. Customer Service Representatives directly interact with Quadrant, allowing them to personally address customer’s questions about delivery times. Now, the customer is receiving more accurate information and the dispatchers are no longer interrupted with customer inquiries.

National Foods delivers their eggs using Webtech Wireless’ telematics solution. With Quadrant they are able to lower costs and improve customer service while lowering risks so that owners and managers can all sleep at night. All of this is for National Foods’ commitment so that that the people of Everett can enjoy meals made with the best and freshest eggs possible.

Our brand appears in everything we do with customers. This blog, our web site, our products, communications pieces, quotes, invoices, and statements all have our brand logo. If we had a fleet of vehicles, our brand would be highly visible on each and every vehicle too.

Our customers are in the same situation. Whether in transportation, oil and gas, transit, winter fleets, or government, the corporate or organizational brand is shown on each fleet asset. When those assets are operated in the way management requires they operate, those brand assets do a lot for an organization. But what if they are not being operated appropriately? What happens to your brand reputation?

We recently had a situation in which the president of an oil and gas field services company was driving down a two-lane highway in the oil patch of northern Alberta. He was driving along, obeying the speed limit, when one of his own company vehicles pulled out and passed him, rocking his car in the wake of the huge vehicle’s slip stream as it took off down the highway.  A short phone call later, the president knew exactly who had blown by him on that narrow northern highway.

It is management’s responsibility to know what is going on with their assets. With highly visible brands painted on the side of our vehicle assets out in the public, it is only with GPS based real-time reporting solutions that you can gain visibility and accountability into those brand assets. Do you know where your brand is today?

Making drivers productive makes the business productive. One of the biggest productivity gains is from getting drivers off the phone and on the road. Our Webtech Wireless’ solutions can be the key to unlocking the productivity of your drivers by using automatic vehicle location with two-way in-cab communication.

Rather than wait on the phone to be dispatched, drivers receive their next instructions on an in-cab unit.  As a manager, you know that the message was sent, received, and read. There is end to end accountability and visibility into what is happening. Good drivers want to be on the road, not on the phone, and telematics let’s them become great drivers.

What are you doing to make your drivers more productive?

Keeping large fleets maintained and always on the move is a challenge. Organizations spend a lot of time and energy working out the best methods and time to do maintenance. While telematics solutions, like those from us, can help with this, there is a bigger cultural issue which comes up once you implement a telematics solution.

Maintenance is used to sending vehicles back on the road once the mechanical parts of the vehicle are ready. For organizations that integrate telematics into their IT systems and business processes, it can cause numerous problems to send a vehicle out that is working mechanically, but does not have the telematics system working perfectly. When implementing a telematics solution, it is critical that senior management involves maintenance. From installing locators and MDTs in the vehicles, to testing to insure that the equipment is both working and reporting accurate data back.

For an organization that has committed to integrating telematics into their operations, vehicles are only ready to roll when they have both, the mechanical and telematics systems all working.

WebTech Wireless has been ranked in third place in the most recent evaluation of worldwide Commercial Telematics In-Cab Hardware vendors by London-based ABI Research. The ranking is part of ABI’s Vendor Matrix, which is updated continually to reflect the rapidly changing face of the global telematics market. The Matrix, as well as the criteria used to arrive at the ranking, can be accessed free of charge on the ABI website.

WebTech Wireless’ Edward Kulperger, Vice President Insurance, OEM, and International Business, was quoted in a Times Colonist article dealing with the impact technology could have on the insurance industry, and in particular, how this technology could affect senior drivers. Also qutoed in the article were representatives from the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC), Volvo cars and the Ford Motor Company. The article can be read online at: High tech to keep your drive alive.