iTECH: Technology Firms ‘Harvest’ Data for New Software

Data amassed for safety and maintenance applications are being repurposed in software that can help fleets improve driver performance and bottom-line results, according to technology developers and transportation company officials.

“There are always veins of gold that live inside large databases,” said Steve Bryan, CEO of Vigillo LLC, Portland, Ore. “If you can figure out where those little nuggets are inside that data, there are always ways to turn that into [something useful for your] business.”

In fact, applications initially developed for regulatory compliance, accident avoidance and vehicle repair have all been mined in recent years to create products that track the performance histories of both drivers and trucks.

“A very large database of information that interests people is of huge value,” Bryan said.

For Vigillo, one of the most successful examples has been the use of carrier safety data to help fleets with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Admin­istration’s new Compliance, Safety, Accountability program. Vigillo had offered a product for several years that helped fleets break down data on a variety of subjects, including drivers, managers, navigation and benchmarking. As a result, the company was sitting on roadside inspection and crash data records for at least 750,000 drivers.

When the new FMCSA requirements were released, Bryan said, Vigillo realized it could use the same data to develop an application that would make it easier for fleets to check up on potential new hires.

For Amy Smith, business and finance manager for Exxact Express Inc., Lakeland, Fla., Vigillo’s ability to provide the data has benefited her business.

“I was pulling all the [driver safety] information off the FMCSA’s data dump site,” Smith said. “It took me 13 to 15 hours a month to crunch all these numbers, because they [are] updated once a month. I figured there had to be someone out there who could do this more quickly than I could.”

Data that dissect driver habits also  are being reused for an application designed to prevent accidents.

Meritor Inc., Troy, Mich., said data collected through its lane departure, collision avoidance and anti-lock braking systems could help identify the root cause of crashes, which could lead to the modification of existing safety systems or the development of new ones.

“What you find is you’re never quite sure what happened in the crash,” said Alan Korn, director of advance brake system integration for Meritor. “If you have data to determine the true root cause of the crash, you could use that information to perhaps modify the control systems you have available. We could use that information to maybe enhance our products, or modify products that are not very effective today.”

The company is developing an application called Safety Direct, which monitors collision warnings, lane departures and drifts and anti-lock braking events. It also can alert fleets to drivers who are getting inordinately frequent warnings.

“If you can see trends when something terribly negative is happening, you can alter driver behavior so you never get in accident-avoidance mode,” Korn said. “[For example,] the likelihood of that driver being involved in a rear-end collision is much higher than a driver that rarely or never is involved with these events. It monitors how the vehicle is being driven in what would be classified as normal traffic.”

A potential problem for Meritor is that its products work with the data, but the fleets technically own the data from the products they use.

“What we want to do is work very closely with many fleets and understand the true root cause of these crashes,” Korn said. “We’ve spoken to fleets about the product, and there are a number of fleets that are pilot-testing the Safety Direct product. They want to eliminate crashes. So the data is going to flow from the fleets to the suppliers to the OEMs.”

Data can serve more than their original intended purpose in the maintenance area as well, as Decisiv Inc., Glen Allen, Va., discovered with its Service Management Platform product. Originally designed to track repair history, the product included service records and the details of what happened between a breakdown and repair completion.

Pete Russo, Decisiv’s vice president of professional services and customer support, said the company saw that the product could be adapted, with a stronger communication focus, also to assess the performance of people.

Russo said that although his company’s initial focus was on service history, “our fleet customers . . . wanted their service rotations to communicate with them [via] electronic folders . . . rather than sending information back and forth using e-mail.”

The new product, called Service Man­agement Scorecard, is used by fleets to manage the maintenance process as well as to track the status of their units, Russo said, adding that the company’s product developers found that repurposing the data was not difficult.

Existing data on service events, such as time stamps, provided most of the answers, Russo said: “If we just tilted the data 90 degrees . . . it focused more on people’s performance than on the truck.”

Braedy Tritthart, coordinator of outsourced maintenance for Bison Transport, Winnipeg, Manitoba, said Decisiv’s system puts communication data connected to maintenance in a much more useable format.

“With the platform, we can see the exact communication that took place between Bison and a service provider, removing the possibility of lost or deleted e-mails, faxes and phone messages,” Tritthart said. “That eliminates the time it takes to address discrepancies, while knowing exactly when a repair is done cuts downtime and improves vehicle utilization.”

Bison has more than 1,000 tractors and operates throughout the United States and Canada.

Russo said the successful repurposing of the maintenance data has Decisiv thinking of other ways to similarly optimize data value.

“We’re looking at what other intelligence we can pull from data that could be useful to a fleet or a service station,” he said. “And also, taking it a step further, what if we combined our data with somebody else’s data? What information would that provide?”

The more-extensive use of existing data may be a product of the industry’s struggles — and perhaps an example of how lean times can spur innovation.

Meritor’s Korn said he believes tough times in the automotive industry have forced suppliers to seek more value from the resources they already have, and many products stemming from the same set of data serve as an example.

“We don’t have the freedom anymore to just do a lot of research,” he said. “A lot of what we do has to be driven by data.”

Where technology companies are recycling data culled from electronic sources to create new products, mapping company Rand McNally, Skokie, III., has migrated data found for decades in its print products to digital formats.

In particular, it has adapted the information found in its paperback Motor Carrier’s Road Atlas to in-cab electronic devices. The devices incorporate data from the print atlases for years with built-in GPS functionality, and they can tell truck drivers which routes they can or cannot drive, the company said.

“That data eventually found its way into our Intelliroute customized routing and our truck navigation device,” said John McAvoy, director of engineering for the company. Rand McNally also found there was a demand for electronically formatted paging grids. The original grids were placed in atlases to help people read them. Now the electronic grids are being used to help fleets with dispatch and other functions.

“When they sent firefighters or police to a location, they would refer to a paging grid in our book,” McAvoy said. “So some customers would build their own app around that, and we got to the point where we actually put it on our website. From that experience, we found that we could put the paging grid on our truck navigation device.”

Rand McNally also took much of the road construction data it gathered in the early 1990s for a CD-ROM product and applied them to its truck navigation devices.

Jeremy Scott, supervisor of corporate communications and purchasing for USA Truck Inc., Van Buren, Ark., said Rand McNally’s MileMaker has been popular with the company’s drivers because it helps them track the miles for which they will be paid — although they have to be sure to set the system correctly to read the data.

Because most of USA Truck’s drivers are owner-operators, they need to purchase their own amenities for their trucks, and they often do so in the company’s store. MileMaker and the in-cab TND units on which they operate the software have been popular items, Scott said, because drivers find it easy to use the data.

“If they’re delivering from Point A to Point B, and they don’t have it set up right, the miles will be off a little bit,” Scott said. “But they still have a much better idea what they’re going to be paid.”