Vigillo Expands Athena Data-Mining Platform
Vigillo is offering new fuel and maintenance dashboards within its Athena “big-data” platform, representing a further expansion of the company’s data analytics capabilities.
The platform, announced in December and launched in March, acts as a hub connecting data from a variety of sources, including the information collected by a fleet’s onboard technology and back-office systems, as well as third-party sources such as weather information and economic updates.
Analysis of those disparate data streams can provide fleets with “actionable intelligence,” Steven Bryan, the company’s founder and CEO, said Sept. 9 in an editorial forum with Transport Topics editors and reporters.
Bryan said the trucking industry’s technology vendors are generating huge amounts of data for carriers, but Athena’s job is to pull it all together.
“We’re completely data agnostic,” Bryan said. “Just feed us the data. As long as it’s coming in, we think we can help carriers make better sense out of it, make better business decisions and understand where their pain or inefficiencies are coming from.”
Vigillo said Athena’s new fuel dashboard is designed to help companies make better fuel contract decisions by analyzing the location, volume and cost of fuel purchases.
The new maintenance dashboard creates reports that identify the types of breakdowns in a fleet and how they correspond with inspections and violations.
Another new channel reports the disposition of driver citations by type, location and other factors, the company said.
Over the past several years, Vigillo’s primary focus has been on providing scorecards that help carriers, brokers and shippers manage compliance under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program. The company said about 2,000 carriers subscribe to its service for CSA compliance.
“We have been very niche, very focused on CSA,” Bryan said.
With Athena, however, the Portland, Oregon-based company is broadening its focus to other areas of data analytics.
Athena represents Vigillo’s future, but the company also plans to continue enhancing its CSA platform as long as that program exists, Bryan said.
He said “dozens” of customers — generally large and midsize fleets — are now using Athena for deeper analysis of their operations.
“We think we’ve built a system that’s flexible enough to keep up with the crushing wave of data that’s here now and is just going to continue getting bigger,” Bryan said.
Vigillo also announced that it has hired Andy Kaplan as Athena’s technical account manager to help support the growing number of data projects that customers are asking the company to help them tackle.
