The Power of Remote Diagnostics for Fleet Maintenance

Roadside breakdowns are a major concern for commercial fleets, with an industry average of about one major breakdown every 100,000 miles and the average cost of roadside repairs on the rise. 

Breakdowns not only impact a fleet as expensive repairs, they can incur hidden costs such as lost revenue, cargo delays, towing fees, missed deadlines, transferring and rerouting, stress on your maintenance department, and damage to fleet reputation. Breakdowns can also be dangerous to drivers and other cars on the road, and can significantly shorten the longevity of fleet assets.

Why Improved Maintenance Practices Are Important

Commercial fleets are increasingly embracing preventative maintenance and more responsive on-board alerting to reduce the chances of unexpected roadside breakdowns. A recent study by the ATA's Technology Maintenance Council showed that, while results varied by type of truck, fleets implementing improved maintenance practices can gain significant improvements in truck performance. In fact, one fleet in the truckload category ran 300% more miles between breakdowns than the vertical average thanks to best-in-class fleet practices.

Increasing drivers’ situational awareness also plays a key role in increasing the longevity of your trucks, and creating a safer environment for your team. Understanding fault alarms, being notified of unusual performance, or being alerted that a required maintenance is approaching can prevent costly and dangerous problems from arising down the line.

What is Remote Diagnostics?

The concept of remote diagnostics means that drivers and management don’t need to wait until a truck is in the maintenance shop to understand what’s happening under the hood. Instead, real-time alerts and recommended responses are delivered to the driver’s cab and any other appropriate team members.

Platform Science has partnered with Noregon, an industry-recognized leader in service and maintenance technologies for commercial trucking, to add a remote diagnostic add-on app to the Virtual Vehicle Marketplace. TripVision provides the real-time insights and predictive algorithms needed to prevent serious malfunctions and safety-related issues.

Leveraging the rich diagnostic database of Noregon’s in-shop flagship product, JPRO, TripVision provides insights into all major components to help detect health-, safety-, or performance-related issues as soon as — or in some cases, before — they happen.

TripVision improves efficiencies and safety, and drives down total cost of fleet ownership by offering:

• Actionable Insights: Get alerted to issues that can be resolved without a trip to the shop. TripVision recommends how to best manage the vehicle based on its current condition.
• Predictive Faults: Get notified of faults that are likely to escalate into bigger problems so you can avoid roadside breakdowns. By detecting issues as they happen, you can make more informed decisions as to how and when maintenance needs to occur.
• An All Makes, All Models Approach: From the powertrain to ADAS systems, you can monitor every component from the TripVision application
• Easy-to-Understand Recommendations: TripVision examines all faults on the vehicle and provides “effect on vehicle” descriptions and action plans in common terms that anyone can understand.
• Configuration for Your Fleet Needs: Filter out extraneous alerts and set up the specific needs for various members of your organization. 
• Built-in Maintenance Management: Stay on schedule with interval-based maintenance events like oil changes and tune-ups. Additionally, features like Fault History and configurable PDF reports, your maintenance team can easily access the information they need before the vehicle ever arrives.
• Streamlined Dashboards: A single dashboard view helps you identify vehicles that need attention, or view overall health, safety, and performance statistics to improve benchmarking and objective tracking.
• Geofencing Features: Receive notifications whenever a fleet vehicle enters or departs a user-defined area, such as a maintenance facility. Create and schedule reports to view geofence data like dwell times or total number of vehicles in a fence.

By increasing your visibility into what’s really going on with each vehicle in your fleet, you can optimize your maintenance plan, keep your drivers safer on the road, and avoid major costs that come from roadside breakdowns, including compliance violations.

‍Learn more about Noregon’s TripVision app for Platform Science customers now, or explore all of Platform Science’s tools for fleets now.