Introduction

The connected vehicle field is a microcosm of the IoT.  By using the potential of smart devices and of IoT connectivity, a connected vehicle not only can determine things such speed, location and temperature, but it also may interact with surrounding roads, buildings and other vehicles to provide near real-time information, improve safety and avoid traffic.

Consumer expectations have been deeply changed by the diffusion of smartphones and tablets. People now ask for uninterrupted connectivity and customizations, and the car it’s the natural habitat for this kind of requests and user experience.

GreenVulcano Fleet Solution exploit this market requests being able to communicate with all legacy (and cloud) enterprise systems, and having the experience of managing huge amount of data that provide precious and detailed business information to the company boards’.

Current Applications

Connected cars and business fleets are taking great advantage of smartphones and apps’ rise.

Using IoT technologies, users are able to unlock their cars, check the status of their batteries, find where they parked, and remotely activate the climate control system.

Fleet solution collect and analyze all data coming from hundreds of sensors, improving the security of passengers, (i.e. activating braking systems if case they feel bad while driving, or sending an SOS in case of car accident).

Fleet managers can use the software to monitor driver performance (hard braking, idle time, late starts, speed limits, detours, etc.), reduce fuel consumption, plan routes, track health and safety compliance, and manage vehicle lifecycles from acquisition to disposal.

Moreover, most systems also have built-in reporting capabilities that provide insights about high-level fleet strategy and asset utilization.

Common features are:

• GPS tracking/geolocation
• Regulatory compliance management
• Fuel management
• Dispatching
• Scorecards (for measuring driver performance)
• Work order management
• Maintenance
• Parts inventory
• Incident management
• Reporting/analytics

Main Challenges

There are many different industries that rely on some kind of transportation infrastructure, such as manufacturing, supply chain management, and public transportation, to name a few.

Many organizations are adopting fleet management solutions as a way to improve operational efficiency, increase revenue, and gain a competitive edge. Increasingly stringent emissions regulations and rising fuel costs are also contributing to the need for centralized fleet management systems.

The global fleet management technologies and services market — which includes analytics, tracking, monitoring, telematics, and vendor services — was valued at $12 billion last year and, according to main experts as McKinsey, is going to reach a potential revenue of $1.5 trillion by 2030.

The dynamicity of this sector brings many challenges for the business and providers to solve. The organization that want to adopt fleet management solutions in their organization need to careful analyze their situation and strategically plan the actions.

Main challenges can be summarize as follow:

• Training for the staff (i.e. employees or even IT professionals specialized on different fields): they will need advanced training on all of the tech functionality of modern cars in order to offer a satisfactory customer experience;
• Privacy standards and security that should be improved enough to safeguard connected car data, especially as employees will continue to use their personal devices in intertwined ways with business vehicles;
• Misalignment between software and car’s hardware: automotive products still are on a longer production and development cycle (5 years on average) compared to software and mobile devices (monthly or annually). Moreover, while a smartphone update can be completed instantly, the components of the vehicle require more involved work, or can’t reasonably be updated without additional expense. Customers’ desire of latest features will have to be managed by the realities of car production;
• Connectivity costs: who will bear the costs of connectivity in terms of data usage? Will employee add the car as a “device” to his existing mobile plan, or will the costs taken on by organization? I think this decision will be different depending on the organization, the employees’ roles or the arrangements between them and the company.

GV Fleet Management Solution

Taking advantage of his experience in the System Integration field for big enterprise, and from the experience managing huge amount of data, GreenVulcano has designed and developed a Fleet Management Solution based on his more than ten-years-old ESB.

Up to now GreenVulcano Fleet Management Solution is used by some of the main players in the Insurance, OEMs and Car-Sharing field offering a complete solution to manage large fleets and related huge amount of data.

GV Fleet Mangement

Our solution works as a network of devices and sensors that interact with each other leveraging the richness and the resource of the service.

But connectivity on smart cars, and on your fleet, can be pushed beyond the device-to-device communication: a fleet can be entirely connected to everything around it, from vehicle-to-vehicle, from vehicle-to-infrastructure and from vehicle-to-cloud.

As people are getting used to have a non-stop connection with the world, our goal is to make the passage from smartphone to car smoothest as possible, and allow enterprises to use the most modern technologies at their disposal avoiding classical problems of architectural diversity.

Main advantages

We’ve gathered and improved the latest technologies in order to give enterprises managers’ more control over projects, emergencies and forecasts, and guarantee a safer workplace to employees.

The integration of our solution with legacy systems, cloud services and IoT platform, allow us to guarantee to companies various features as:

• Suggestion of the best route for each drivers (improved efficiency rate)
• Suggestion of the proper equipment based on weather forecasts (change of tires, real-time control of braking system)
• Analyze and improve people's behaviour during drive (using gamification, notification of alerts, etc.)
• A modular solution that works at his best whatever the architecture in the enterprise, with a reduced time for implementation (it depends on the variety of internal systems)

For a more exhaustive report on the Automotive field or to leave us a comment, contact us at our Website