Lift Truck Tips: Portals to a high-performing fleet

Fleet management and telematics offer a wealth of information to fleet owners, who can mine the data for efficiencies and cost savings. The process of delivering that data in an actionable format is the central challenge to successful fleet management practices, and there is no shortage of examples where data overwhelmed the end user or left them disappointed.

“With telematics, there’s often an assumption that if the customer buys a lift truck and telematics device, it will give them all the information they need,” says Josh Landreman, senior manager of product support for UniCarriers Americas. “It’s not always the full answer to the question, and I’ve seen a lot of companies buy such devices and a year later it’s fallen out of use and is just a box on the lift truck. In these cases, there was either an influx of too much information or not enough.”

There may be no shortcuts from data collection to fruitful analysis, but a variety of options for designing those pathways are available. Landreman says customers are pushing for reports that encompass data from multiple brands of equipment and telematic devices on a unified portal. Suppliers of that equipment are then challenged to tailor their base fleet management solutions to the customer’s homegrown software environment. Customers don’t want separate portals with separate logins, Landreman says, and might even seek to combine their over-the-road fleet tracking portal with lift truck fleet management solutions.

“They want all vendors to present data and drill-down capabilities through a single dashboard, but this is easier said than done,” he says. “There are some security concerns and proprietary information that means one vendor’s solution cannot necessarily see what another is doing.”

Even if a customer can harmonize disparate data sets, that harmony is likely to undergo change. No matter how satisfied they are with a certain brand, most are inclined to shop around at regular intervals, which can introduce yet another portal integration project. In addition, insights into fleet utilization could prompt reallocation of equipment types or adjustments to specifications.

Single-source visibility can simplify fleet management, but it’s still important to take gradual steps, especially when starting from scratch. Landreman suggests beginning with an hour meter and some basic tracking of maintenance schedules. From there, a fleet might graduate to an operator presence device to ensure the right operator is on the right equipment. A customer might also add some amount of geo-fencing to make sure each lift truck stays in the right place.

“They might add impact monitoring, then start to track individual unit data like engine performance on internal combustion equipment or electric temperatures and amperage, and eventually put it all together as a full package,” Landreman says. “If at least it comes to one dashboard location, it will be much easier, since if they jump right into four data streams there’s four times the potential for information overload.”