What is Telematics
Today, when people say telematics, they are usually referring to vehicle telematics. To put simply, telematics is the use of telecommunications and informatics applied in computational systems and wireless technologies. As a field of technology telematics encompasses much more. Computer Science, wireless communications, instrumentation, sensors, electrical engineering, road transportation, road safety, telecommunications, and vehicular technologies all play a part in the understanding of the true nature and purpose of telematics.
What does Telematics do?
Principally telematics gives a vehicle dependent organizations the eyes and ears necessary to track and monitor all potential liabilities of said organizations. This include but is not limited to high valued assets such as vehicles, trailers, containers, and drivers. Telematics solutions also tend to monitor movements, status, and behavior of one or many drivers, and assets.
How does it work?
The monitoring of assets is usually done by utilizing a GPS receiver and an electronic device usually fit with a GSM GPRS modem or SMS sender which are connected to the vehicles diagnostics port. Once connected these devices can communicate with a PC-based or web-based software which translates and displays the data to users. The users who use this information would generally be dispatching, emergency, customer service, or coordinating units of an organization.
How can Telematics save money?
Personal accountability
Features such as Driver ID and harsh driving alerts can serve as incentives for drivers to hold more self-accountability for how vehicles are driven. not only is safer driving beneficial to everyone, but vehicles that are driven more responsibly often tend to have increased life spans and lower maintenance costs.
Resource accountability
A good telematics solution will track resources used such as fuel, and will also help in monitoring vehicle health. Many organizations struggle with fuel utilization and how to monitor or control it. This could be the result of faulty fuel logging systems. Many studies have shown that manual logging systems using paper and pen to track fueling or even time logs can often result in unintended mistakes. Computerized automation can greatly reduce this risk.
Vehicle health monitoring is another advantage of telematics that builds towards better resource accountability. Oil life, idling, engine hours, tire pressure and other critical vehicle metrics can be monitored autonomously and provide appropriate vehicle maintenance schedules that can ultimately reduce costs.
How can Telematics help with security
It’s not hard to see how Telematics promotes better fleet security by identifying vehicles, employees, and activities. the oversight that telematics provides is a great way of ensuring control for fleet managers. Never will a manager not know who drove what vehicles, when, and to where. Telematics gives the “who, what, when, where, why” of all activities. Not all the advantages, however, benefit only managers. Fleet staff and drivers can benefit from the oversight, especially for operations that work with high-value assets.
What should you look for in the telematics solution?
Components of Telematics
The combination of Satellite GPS technology, radio wave wireless communications, and vehicle CPU and engine diagnostics combine to receive and transmit information that can be used to compute all forms of vehicle information. This includes vehicle location, speed, controller input (for specialized vehicles that have user-controlled mechanisms such as plows, or street sweepers), maintenance issues, and route planning.
Satellite Navigation
GPS technology primarily relies on satellites which send and receive data from electronic devices on earth. Much of today’s computer technologies have GPS capabilities, our smartphones are a good example and the way the technology works is no different than that of the telematics devices available in the industry today.
Mobile Data
Mobile data is commonly sent and received using radio waves. Mobile network providers moved swiftly in the early 2000s to offer cheap, and wide range capability coverage to telematics customers by cellular communication.
LiGO® comes with a LiGO® Mobile application, which is a reduced function HTML5 mobile application that can be accessed from any connected smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Operations Managers find this application particularly useful when they are in the field to see their operations in real time and better manage their mobile resources.
Engine Diagnostics
Much of the data transmitted by telematics solutions can’t rely solely on Satellite technologies. Connecting devices to a vehicles CPU provides intricate vehicle data that can be converted to provide very important metrics to fleet managers.
Telematics Related Industries (IoT)
Fleet Management
The management of a company’s fleet is a fundamental role of any organization that owns or controls a number of ships and or motor vehicles. The duties of a fleet manager range from things like vehicle purchasing and maintenance, vehicle diagnostics and tracking, fuel management, driver safety management, and route and word order scheduling. For organizations that rely on vehicle transportation the goal of any fleet manager is to increase efficiency, decrease costs responsibly, and ensure full compliance with government legislation and Duty of Care obligations.
Smart City Public Facing Data
In many cases, specifically in the public sector Telematics enables fleet managers to seamlessly expand their duties in providing real-time information to the general population of any given City, County, or State. This could mean letting the general population know the street sweeping routes of an areas street cleaning fleet, garbage pickup routes, or snow removal schedules. In many parts of the country where hazardous weather events occur on a yearly basis, this can provide much-needed information to residents and allow them to better plan their activities.
InsureTech
It wasn’t long before insurance companies and insurance holders alike saw the benefits of telematics and how it could impact the insurance industry. Telematics can provide Insurance companies with clients driving behavior, and habits. This can result in an increase or decrease in policy premiums. Not only does this incentivize policyholders to improve their driving but it creates a better client-company relationship as it provides a more reasonable justifiable method of pricing Insurance.
Beyond vehicle tracking:
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What can you track?
- turn-by-turn directions (“Route Job”)
- Mobile Dispatch/jobs
- receive jobs
- pause jobs
- add values to jobs (enter data)
- complete jobs
- chat
- see vehicles
- Plow up – Plow down
- Time in area
- GeoFence violation
- Feed live pictures
- Export data to a public facing site
- voice recognition (enter data in fields based on speaking)
- Track the phone in LiGO®
- Record time
- Associated reports based on mobile activities (e.g., completed jobs)
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Adding a hotspot
Hotspot capabilities is an advanced feature of vehicle telematics that allows vehicles, and drivers, to have their own access point to the internet. This can be extremely useful for operations that involve vast areas of low cell connectivity.
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Dispatch
The Dispatch module is used to dispatch Jobs to mobile workers from the LiGO® application “Dispatch Tab”.
- Manage jobs from creation to completion.
- After jobs are created and assigned to workers, you can track them in the field.
- Add custom fields
- You have a full picture of the workday in one system, with real-time statistics.
- Create jobs directly on the map or from points of interest using your own choice of map. GpsGate supports every major mapping provider.
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Route optimization
LiGO® can convert a track that was created during a typical workday into a route or import an optimized route from your GIS so that notifications are received when a vehicle deviates from a planned route. Data from LiGO® can be exported to GIS so it can be analyzed for frequency/location data; the route can also be optimized using historical data.
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Real-time tracking and alerts
Interactive and intelligent mapping systems mean that you are getting the most accurate real-time tracking. LiGO is supported by over 750 devices which means excellent integration capabilities and quick setup procedures.
Set up alerts and notifications to be sent directly to your smart device or computer to stay on top of all your vehicle and asset activities. apply your own custom business rules to the system to fast track, automate, and efficiently improve operations.
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Reporting
LiGO® software has extensive reporting capabilities with over 20 standard built-in report formats. These built-in reports can easily be customized and then saved as custom reports for later use. LiGO® runs intuitive user-friendly ad-hoc reporting capabilities in a variety of types, formats, and methods. Compatibility features mean you can easily upload reports onto office programs like excel, and make reports available to other levels of operations across the board.
Reports can easily be programmed to be emailed automatically based on user-specified schedules which makes the task of keeping up with reports more streamlined in operations. The reports features are also compatible with LiGO® mobile for when you’re ‘on the go’. With reports, you may also create scorecards for your drivers to reward those that are efficient.
Integrations into backend systems:
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ESRI Systems
MarshallGIS is a recognized Esri partner, specializes in mapping and has been providing GIS software and services for over 20 years. LiGO® provides for multiple interface options with Esri ArcGIS. ArcGIS Server maps in LiGO®, live LiGO® vehicle feeds to your ArcGIS operations map, KML import/export, and CSV exports. MarshallGIS is operational with Esri ArcGIS Desktop 10.2 or higher.
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Enterprise Management Systems: Cityworks, Infor, Lucity
MarshallGIS has been partnered with Cityworks for over 5 years and is committed to supporting Cityworks integration. We support new versions of Cityworks within 1 month of release; API’s are designed to fluidly transition without breaks during a software version change.
No third party tools are needed to maintain integration.
We’ve also developed a workflow to push odometer readings from LiGO® into Cityworks and create a vehicle work order for activities such as vehicle inspections, oil changes, and tire rotations base on miles and or time.
Device security
MarshallGIS’ Data Center is secured behind double locked doors with limited access to only a few, vetted, essential, need to know MarshallGIS long team employees, and protected by 24/7/365 monitoring. The isolated LiGO® network is protected by a Cisco zone-based firewall and intrusion protection systems. LiGO® systems can only be accessed by the corporate senior systems engineer and senior development engineer. (Devices are not accessible from the Internet). The administrative website can only be accessed from onsite trusted subnets.
All cellular private network device communications occur via encrypted redundant AES IPsec tunnels to MarshallGIS’ secure servers and are inaccessible from the Internet. Customers may access their application through SSL (TLS) signed with CA certificates. Customers may limit access to their application from specific networks and use SAML, ADFS, or Okta for secure access.
MarshallGIS follows vendor recommendations, industry standards, and accepted best practices with a common sense approach. Marshall uses the weakest link methodology. Conventional defense in depth methodologies fails with weak barriers and questionable human access. MarshallGIS’ barriers are rock solid with systems access limited to only a few, MarshallGIS employers, highly competent, vested, long time engineers.
Any customer’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Electronic Health Information (EPI), Federal Tax Information (FTI), or Primary Account Numbers (PAN)s stored in LiGO® while in transit or at rest is encrypted using AES 256 or better encryption.
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