6 Core Competencies for Fleet Management Mobile Deployments

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6 Core Competencies for Fleet Management Mobile Deployments

Jim Dempsey

Trucking and package delivery fleet managers face pressures to increase efficiencies and reduce expenses while they enhance customer service. Fleet Management and the data maintained by electronic logging device (ELD) solutions paired with rugged, purpose-built mobile devices, are essential for achiving these goals. These devices are designed to perform under adverse and demanding conditions, where consumer-grade tablets and notebooks are not purposely designed to withstand daily usage in commercial vehicles and likely to fail. In order for Fleet Managers to meet their goals, their mobile device deployments need to address these six core competancies.

1. Customer Service

Customers rely on timely and transparent delivery tracking provided wirelessly by on-vehicle mobile solutions to dispatch systems that track progress against planned routes and allow dispatchers to answer inquiries from customers. The mobile devices must have built in optimal wireless connectivity to connect to both GPS satellites and cellular networks — even through weak signal areas. The mobile applications that generate and report conditions along the delivery path ease customer service tasks by delivering regular updates to keep operations staff aware of current conditions or possible delays.

According to Laura Lohrke, senior product manager at Omnitracs, “The lack of mobile connection in each vehicle leaves you blind to their status.” For example, with health-care providers, transport and location of life-critical medical equipment and supplies such as oxygen and medicines must be accounted for in real time.

2. Asset Management 

Assets range from forklifts to trucks and trailers, each of which contributes to the smooth and continuous functioning of a transportation fleet. Mobile technology and the applications they support, track and report their locations and when they are expected to return to the company yard or distribution center. This timing information is critical to schedule loading and unloading, and the data collected by the applications is used to understand how assets are performing and when maintenance is needed.

3. Fuel Management

It's imperative for transport companies to create the most fuel-efficient routes for their drivers through GPS-enabled route guidance. “We can create the perfect plan for mileage, but if we don’t know if the driver followed the plan, costs can be much higher than they should be,” says Lohrke. Vehicles with a telematics “black box” coupled with a wirelessly connected rugged mobile device solution, allow operations to check routes in real time. This provides information on driving habits such as rapid acceleration, idling, and speeding — all of which can increase operating costs.

4. Compliance Solutions

One aspect of the ELD mandate allows that mobile devices such as tablets or rugged handhelds can be used as long as the system as a whole meets ELD requirements. This allows drivers to not only use their mobile devices for navigation and see alerts but also to use them to perform pre and post vehicle inspections. When the mobile tablets are out of the vehicle, they are subject to adversities such as weather conditions and grease. Using industrial-grade mobile tablets or handheld devices that can withstand near constant vibration, extreme weather conditions, survive being dropped or liquid spills and be operated with heavy duty gloves on, will deliver reliable use. Consumer-oriented mobile devices are likely to fail under these conditions and possibly lead compliance issues and even fines.

5. Accurate and Timely Data Reporting

Mobile handheld computing units remove the extra-time and inaccuracies of manual record keeping, as required by the ELD mandate. Automated updates can be triggered by GPS location or time of day, and drivers can enter responses by touching the screen rather than writing. The results of the captured data are transmitted to the transport company’s internal applications wirelessly and become part of the driver-vehicle inspection report (DVIR). Data can also be captured and reported on vehicle performance and maintenance, allowing more proactive and efficient scheduling for service versus dealing with unexpected breakdowns. Results from the data collected by mobile devices can be evaluated by safety supervisors and driver managers, then shared with drivers to address areas of concern, thereby keeping them and their cargo safe and in compliance with regulations.

6. Driver/Employee Safety

Mobile solutions allow drivers to receive critical alerts on weather, road conditions or traffic as well as other timely information updates from dispatchers. Flexible mounting options allow positioning of screens so drivers can see them without being distracted from their view of the road.  

Is your mobile fleet management & ELD solution ready to reliably meet these 6 core competencies and comply with the ELD mandate? Purpose-built, rugged mobile device solutions are essential to increase efficiencies, decrease downtime being in compliance. Visit us online for more information on equipping your fleet with rugged mobile devices to improve your fleet operations.

Technology’s impact on your summer ice cream parlor

icecreamblog

Technology’s impact on your summer ice cream parlor

6 minute read

While consumers may spend their summer seeking exotic ice cream flavors—Lobster, Cheetos and Spruce Tip are whipped up, ready for the adventurous eater—savvy businesses are bringing on new technologies to help figure out things like what new flavors will sell. 

Just south of Cincinnati, across the Kentucky border, vegan and vegetarian ice cream and sandwich shop Piper’s Cafe is leveraging big data to keep up with its customers: “We are growing and we can't remember all of our customers by name and face any longer. I'm looking forward to seeing what patterns my new regular guests fall into and adapting," says co-owner Chip Atkins in a report from The Week. Cloud and mobile technology mean that ice cream shops and other small restaurants can take advantage of the kind of big data insights that large restaurant owners have been using to lower costs and boost operational efficiencies. 
 

How the restaurant industry is reading tech disruptions

Not all restaurant innovations come in the form of new flavors or food items. Some important breakthroughs arise as solutions to common problems plaguing restauranteurs—from high labor costs to declining traffic. How to use breakthroughs such as big data and other disruptive technologies dominated our conversations at the 2018 National Restaurant Association trade show. 

In a recent research study conducted by Panasonic, nearly four out of five respondents stated they believed competitors in their own industry will pull ahead if they do not adopt or invest in disruptive technology. Seven in ten said they felt companies outside their industry could disrupt them. 

And these ideas were more pronounced in the food service, hospitality and retail industries. These sectors are more likely than others to say disruptive technologies are critical to the future success of their companies.

Connected restaurants

Across all industries, three of the top five adopted disruptive technologies are cloud, IoT and robotics. Each of these technologies plays a role in the connected kitchen, where appliances all sync to the cloud, communicate over a network, can be managed remotely and even using predictive analytics. Spyce, a new restaurant in Boston, is built around a robotic kitchen, and relies on cloud and IoT. The robotic kitchen “wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below,” according to a review in Salon. 

Labor is one of the costliest elements of running a restaurant and can eat up as much as 40 percent of a restaurant’s gross revenue, according to estimates. Software that has the capacity to collect and analyze data will the connecting element of automated processes and are already making it possible for labor intensive industries across the board to run more efficiently. MaryPat Sullivan, chief nursing officer at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, New Jersey, told Healthcare IT News earlier this year that the hospital network was able to save $70 million on operational costs by successfully employing predictive analytics. Software programs such as Panasonic’s Clearview platform have helped franchise owners of some of the largest QSR chains grow at a faster rate than their corporate-owned counterparts that still operate on legacy software. These functionalities integrated with the automation capabilities of PanaCIM are already changing the landscape of kitchen and back office interoperability.

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Personalizing experiences

Last month, we wrote about how the hospitality and retail industry are turning to artificial intelligence to create an increasingly nuanced personal experience for their customers. Of all the industries polled in our research, 90 percent say personalization is important to the future success of their company. Furthermore, they believe that the first step is to simplify the customer experience. But there is also a divide about what personalizing the customer experience entails. According to 40 percent of respondents, “personalizing” means making it simpler for customers to engage. Only 20 percent interpret this as “being able to customize services and offerings” by using customer data analytics to predict and impact purchase behavior. 

Personalization in ordering has contributed to the widespread interest and adoption of kiosks in the restaurant industry. McDonalds see kiosks as part its digital growth accelerator that will expand choices for how customers order, pay and are served, according to its latest annual report. Similarly, Subway also announced it was planning to introduce kiosks. In Texas, a number of Dairy Queen restaurants are already reaping benefits of self-service kiosks. 

Brands that have been early adopters of kiosks have reported that the average check size is up to 30 percent higher than at the counter. These kiosks don’t just allow the restaurant to continually upsell through the entire ordering process, but customers are also given the opportunity to fully customize their order, which leads to an increasingly personalized experience.

Authors
Jeff Pinc - Director of Food Services at Panasonic

Inside next-gen manufacturing

next gen factory

Inside next-gen manufacturing

5 minutes

In mid-February, the National Association of Manufacturers kicked off a cross-country trip visiting plants in more than a half-dozen states. The trip started in Troy, Michigan at “Automation Alley.” 

Job growth from Michigan to Buffalo, NY

The trip began as the business of making things faces major changes. Today American manufacturers need to fill some 364,000 jobs, according to a report from Deloitte and NAM. Panasonic manufacturing jobs are among them. In Buffalo, New York, Panasonic is partnering with Tesla in the production of solar cells for roof tiles—a product that integrates high-efficiency photovoltaics with roofing materials—and we’re looking for next-gen workers.

According to the Deloitte/NAM report, over the next couple of years, the number of manufacturing jobs in this country is expected to climb to 3.5 million. What kind of jobs will they be?

Our findings show that most of these new jobs will be created by small to mid-size manufacturers. The majority of American manufacturers are considered “small,” with fewer than 500 employees, according the U.S. Census Bureau. Its data shows that in 2015, there were 251,774 firms in the sector and all but 3,813 were defined as small. 

Disruptive tech in manufacturing

When these manufacturers create jobs tomorrow, they’ll have titles like supply chain specialist, manufacturing execution system developer, electrical technician and analyst. These titles relate to changes brought on by everything from supply chain automation to advanced robotics to artificial intelligence (AI). A few years ago, consulting firm McKinsey identified AI, advanced robotics and IoT among two dozen disruptive technologies that would account for trillions of dollars in economic value. Panasonic is deeply engaged in the advancement of almost half of these technologies. That’s important because when you’re creating experiences, chances are, you’re going to need to stitch together many of them into an integrated solution. Our future is focused on finding ways to apply our disruptive tech expertise to make radically new experiences possible. 

Factory work is becoming a new experience. From Automation Alley in Feb., NAM CEO Jay Timmons talked about how innovation is changing work: “Some people may think ‘automation’ and ‘job creation’ are mutually exclusive. That’s simply not true. Innovation is expanding opportunities and what American workers can do."

Millennials bring new skills to manufacturing

Manufacturers must think about how disruptive technologies will change the way they do business, operate plants and train workers. Automation, for instance, means that a worker will handle more responsibilities and needs additional skills to fulfill them. Big Data skills, for instance, are important to advanced manufacturing. Panasonic’s award-winning PanaCIM is a manufacturing execution system that creates an ecosystem connecting disparate islands of data across an enterprise—production data, MRP/ERP and legacy systems. Understanding and applying such data is key to operating the system.  Millennials (often defined as those now aged 20-40) come to manufacturing with new skills like MES management, but experts say that's just the start. “Millennials have already started changing the manufacturing and supply chains -- and for the better," according to an IndustryWeek report.

In support of growing manufacturers, Panasonic has invested heavily in its vision of a new manufacturing landscape–one that supports companies regardless of size, product mix or skill level. For instance, it designed its MES Manufacturing Execution System software to optimize the supply chain as a full-blown package and as an easy-to-install express system for companies with limited infrastructure. Panasonic introduced pick-and-place equipment that addresses the need for smaller lot sizes and tighter control over work in process and scheduling. Additionally, the Panasonic cloud9 Innovation Center, just outside Chicago, is a comprehensive facility where manufacturers can try out new applications, speak with experts and explore production hardware and complementary technology. 

Learn more about disruptive technology and manufacturing. 

Authors
Faisal Pandit - President of Panasonic Factory Solutions Co. of America