The global telematics market is highly competitive and businesses must continually innovate in order to meet customer demand while delivering cost efficient services. Product innovation is a key tool in maintaining a competitive edge.

According to industry experts, the mobile resource management and machine to machine sectors will continue to drive the market and generate better commercial fleet productivity (like fuel cost reduction, routing, reduced maintenance, driver monitoring), improving customer service (generating real-time status, timelier response times), and improving risk management (safety, control, and compliance).

According to Deloitte, 79% of companies with high-performing supply chains achieve revenue growth superior to the average within their industries. Challenges, such as globalization and gaps in supply chain and logistics talent make it difficult for companies to remain competitive in today’s market. Businesses must be agile and transform with the pace of the sector, focusing on product automation, digitalization and innovation.

As global demand for skilled technical resources intensifies and the available talent pool decreases, high-performing logistics businesses must compete for staff, fight to retain employees, and balance escalating costs driven by a job market where the very best engineers can name their price.

My colleague Michaela recently blogged on Geek Culture about the IT resourcing challenges being faced by companies caused by a myriad of factors including the covid pandemic, the “great resignation” and the rapidly accelerating IT skills gap. While this is clearly a global technology crisis the impact on a sector like telematics that is super competitive and very tightly regulated could be catastrophic. If you can’t recruit specialized technical resources with the necessary level of experience the writing is on the wall. Failure is not an option.

For more than five years, we’ve been working with some of the world’s largest fleet management companies. We’ve built specialist engineering teams and gained valuable expertise in the delivery and processing of vast quantities of mission critical telematics data. Whether this is used to track driver hours or constantly monitor in-vehicle systems or update service requirements, it is absolutely vital this data is captured, stored and analyzed real-time, to keep trucks on the road, deliveries on-schedule and the public safe.

We’ve been lucky to have worked on state-of-the-art telematics solutions for the “Over the Road” trucking industry and have jointly developed cutting-edge Fleet management Software (FMS). These systems have transformed inefficient fleet updates that previously required taking trucks and drivers off the road for maintenance and have replaced them with Over The Air (OTA) automated fleet firmware updates to cab based telematics boxes requiring zero downtime.

The solution also processes asynchronous messages that monitor “truck health” and “load data”for over 300,000 trucks and provides real-time information about the entire fleet with alarms notifying operators to any incidents or issues that can be proactively managed. This increases time on the road, reduces servicing requirements, minimizes breakdowns, avoids late deliveries and maximises revenue for fleet owners.

We’ve been instrumental in developing critical safety systems for the monitoring and reporting of driver hours and violations. This project syndicated huge volumes of data from a range of different in-cab telematics systems to enable the monitoring and enforcement of driver regulations. In situations where a driver works for multiple fleet operators (and therefore has a number of telematics boxes fitted) this service consolidates all this data into a single database to monitor behavior and prevent accidental (or deliberate) abuse of driver regulations.

Data is collected in real-time and batches from over 400,000 trucks and includes metrics for time spent working, driving hours, odometer hours and miles driven. Failure to accurately capture, record and interpret this data could result in prosecution, lost licences and clearly endangers driver and public safety. It’s super important stuff.

What all these telematics systems have in common is data. Truck loads, and truck loads of data, where every single byte collected is valuable and often mission critical. As a result, the skills needed to implement telematics solutions extend far beyond the basic understanding of the technical requirements.

We were able to bring all our industry experience, proven ways of working and some serious engineering and DevOps firepower (including AWS, SQS, Lambdas, Node.js, ElasticSearch, MySQL, SpringBoot, Microservices, Git, Python and C#) to the party. Using the principles outlined in the Tarmac 10 we built a culture of quality, communication, transparency and accountability ensuring we consistently delivered exceptional software.

Many development teams have the necessary technical skills but there is absolutely no substitute for industry expertise. Great development teams have all the technical skills but also appreciate the quality, scalability and velocity needed to support operations at this scale and complexity.

Written by: Bob Dow / Vice President, Sales