Telematics Webinar Review: What Can Telematics Do for Your Rental Business?
RER Webinar: What Can Telematics Do for Your Rental Business?
On March 26, our CEO Tim Quinn teamed up with Chris Britt, Co-founder of MESO Inc., and David Swan, Product Manager for SkyJack to talk Telematics. Hosted by Rental Equipment Register Magazine, the webinar gave an in-depth view on the benefits of Telematics in equipment intensive organizations.
Head over to RER to check out the webinar.
Full Transcript:
MICHAEL (RER): Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon depending on where you are. Thank you very much for joining us today for our webinar, What Can Telematics Do for Your Rental Business sponsored by ThingTech company. My name is Michael Ross, I’m editor of Rental Equipment Register, more popularly known as our RER, and I’ll be moderating today’s webinar. Just a couple of minutes before we begin, I want to tell you a little bit about the webinar technology in front of you. The platform allows the audience to be a little more involved. It allows you to watch the event the way you want to watch it and what I mean. What I mean by that is you can customize your webcast console as you wish to do so move the windows around by dragging on the title bar or resize the windows by clicking on the lower right hand corner of any window. You’ll notice a toolbar at the bottom of the console and 1:00
those buttons allow you to open and close widgets on the screen. We also invite you to use social media. If at any time during the session, you hear something you like to tell others about, you can tweet it to your followers using the Twitter widget. Also, if at anytime you have any difficulties with the audio or the advancing of the slides, you simply press your F5 key and that will refresh your webinar console. So f5 on your keyboard. You can download the slides for this webinar by clicking on the folder icon on your screen. And you can do this during the webinar and it will not interrupt the presentation. So we appreciate your feedback as well. So please click on the red survey icon and let us know what you think about what we’re doing. So I would like to introduce briefly today’s presenters we have with us Tim Quinn. Tim is the 2:00
CEO and founder of ThingTech, he launched Thing tech in 2014 and bringing more than 20 years of experience building and deploying geospatial technologies for fleet and asset tracking. Before he worked at ThingTech, Tim served as Executive Vice President at Route Match Software, where he was a co founder and he led the sales, marketing and business development teams.Tim has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. We also have with us Chris Britt, the co founder of Meso Inc. Chris, along with his co founder Ed Heinz started Meso Inc. in 2014 to serve multiple industries, understanding the need for a third party company that can completely manage or support an existing a maintenance program and throughout Chris’s 3:00
career, Britt has managed the maintenance and utilization of multimillion dollar truck trailer and equipments leads and know the full value of a proactive, well managed maintenance program. And Chris also spent quite a few years in the rental industry with a small independent rental company and then united rentals. And last but not least today we have David Swan with us. And David is the see what is your title David. He is the product manager at Skyjack where he is responsible for driving information through exploring and applying disruptive technologies to historically a digitized market. David has been recognized as an industry leader in fleet connectivity and Digital Trends, speaking at various conferences worldwide and most recently 4:00
David led the development of the Skyjack’s award winning, connected fleet solution called Elevate. And David will be telling us about elevate Skyjack’s Telematics solution today. So I hope you folks, I get to learn about a good bit about Telematics today. I want to encourage you all to ask questions you can do so in writing, by clicking on the Q&A widget and submitting your questions will answer as many as we can at the conclusion of the presentation and, and our panelists will also try to answer some of those afterwards through email. So anyway, you’ve heard enough for me, let’s get to our special guest today, starting off with Tim Quinn, the CEO and founder of thing tech. So Tim, tell us a bit about Thing Tech and if you can sum up a little bit of the main benefits of your Telematics offering.
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TIM (ThingTech): Absolutely. Thank you, Michael. And thanks for all attendees for joining us today. ThingTech was found it very specifically to solve specific problems related around asset intensive or equipment intensive organizations primarily to solve problems realms, equipment or asset visibility, accountability, measurability and performance of the assets and equipment and a mobile workforce that’s either servicing that equipment or operating that equipment. So we really wanted to we built out a really horizontal, industrial IoT, Internet of Things platform that connects the multiple devices, multiple sensors, multiple pieces of equipment, to capture real time data and process that data that the data being Telematics data, of course, around diagnostic lead data utilization data, location data, contextual data, and then provide tools for this data that we’re capturing provide the ability for us to process massive amounts of data and Telematics data
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from the field, process that data through a rules engine, a workflow engine and an action engine to generate actionable data. So ultimately what we set out to do is really drive up what we like to call operational digital transformation to create smarter and more connected fleets equipment and workforce but also connect the back end enterprise and we’ll talk about this today feel there’s a big opportunity to connect a lot of this data that we’re capturing from the equipment bringing it back into the equipment rental companies enterprise so they can create a more connected customer stickier customer to help them give them insight into how that the equipment that they’re leasing or renting from our customers is helping them. And now when we talk about some of the, why think tanks or something kind of similar benefits we everything we do is in near real time, and
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With the specific goal and focus to really do things around reducing maintenance costs by creating smarter and more proactive and more predictive preventive maintenance programs. we want to streamline work processes. So, you know, with technicians out in the field, how can we help them have a higher fixed first rate. How can we give them the data that they need to make educated, educated decisions on how they’re maintaining that equipment, and how that equipment needs to be optimized from utilization perspective, we also want to help our customers and equipment rental space and their customers maximize asset productivity, in terms of how they utilize that equipment the most effectively, or their trends or patterns that are affecting performance or the things that they could be doing more effectively leverage their equipment that are leasing so they can do a couple things, generate revenue, generate more revenue and 8:00
And really extend the useful life of that of the asset or the equipment as it moves through its life. So, ultimately, the Thingtech or name Thingtech is derived from the internet of things where it’s all everything’s connected everything smart, where everything is getting smarter. So ultimately we want to try to improve operations and make the equipment smarter but also make the operation smarter. So Michael, that’s my pitch.
MICHAEL: All right, great. []
CHRIS (Meso): (video playing over voice) …preventative maintenance cycle. The fact that Telematics is now available to us and our customers, they also have a clean line of sight on the work that we’re doing and it’s everything’s done. Everything’s done in real time. By utilizing a Telematics platform that is that is rooted in the Internet of Things. me so have enabled fight maintenance services more efficiently, more efficiently with substantial cost savings for his customers. And when 10:00
We’re able to do this in a couple different facets. Maintenance overhead costs are a necessary evil, but when but when it’s the fixed one break approach, that’s the most costly approach for our customers in maintaining their fleet and keeping their customers satisfied with uptime equipment. Missile use the Telematics to gather information needed for an efficient maintenance that promotes long term efficiencies. Using a remote monitoring solution, again, rooted in the Internet of Things to help save money by reducing downtime with proactive and predictive maintenance. Even the slightest issues can grow into serious complications that result and unplanned downtime and expensive repairs. We identify and address those issues that could lead to potential problems resolved in the poor that before they escalate and turn reducing overhead costs by knowing precisely what needs to be 11:00
And when me so works with you to establish the strategic maintenance schedule that makes sense. Our system allows us to pinpoint our fleet exact location so we can dispatch expert technicians in a pool start truck that helping you need to wherever that help is needed. Come back on extra technicians minimum site visits, reduce inventory, reduce back office man hours and redundant steps. These are all the perks that Telematics is allowed our companies to produce for our customers. Our customers now have again have the capability of seeing their equipment and its health status regardless of what supporting their maintenance program for fully managing that program for them. So Telematics has truly been the has been the advantage and has been has been able to change how our industry services and maintains fleet more from a predictive maintenance instead of reactive maybe 12:00
and that’s the Meso program.
MICHAEL (RER): Great. Thank you very much Chris. Let’s go on to David Swan from Skyjack and Skyjack’s elevate is quite a new program and David tell us a little bit about about it and what it provides for rental companies?
DAVID (SkyJack): So we launched elevate last year at the ARA show in New Orleans and when we started looking at this program couple years ago, sort of our foundational Valley, our foundation was that we sell machines, we’re not a software company motto Telematics company and so anything that we were going to offer our customers there’s no, but it’d be based on the idea that we were going to resell Telematics, we never wanted into that business because we’re in the business of selling metal and delivering return on investment for our customers. So we started from there and I think that’s why this program has worked so well is
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We’ve started by saying, if we look at 3219 scissor, which is a fairly low cost, high volume machine, how do we make Telematics makes sense on that machine first, because if I can’t manage my entire fleet with Telematics, I can’t really do anything with Telematics, right? If it’s only on 10% of my machines, or 5% of machine. So we’ve really focused on delivering data points that are valuable to existing business processes, rather than looking at the technology from a What can it do in the future, we’re sort of looking at it as what having this make our customers money right now. And that’s what we’ve done is we’ve chosen a partner for data delivery, which is track unit. But really, it’s about what we’re doing on the other side of that on the machine and engineering side of that identifying those high value data points, and making sure that they fit into our customers existing process. And so I see sort of a day one return on investment rather than, hey, imagine all the cool stuff that we can do with Telematics someday. If we have this
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all our machines. so really when you’re looking at this slide that i have up on the screen right now this is it we see number for integrating into the machine production and minimize costs probably best segment when it comes to the technology side that’s really what it’s about but in terms of providing value to build these first three points, we’re going to our customers and their customers and saying what’s your biggest problem with any one of the machine categories when it comes to servicing and maintaining your fleet of these machines and what are the data points that would fix that if you know if you said i could magically have this data what data would you have and then we figured out how to create that data and really that’s what elevate is the digitizing of those analog problems that already exists to fit into analog processes, does that makes sense?
MICHAEL (RER): okay. Thank you david. Well, Tim why don’t you give us a bit of an overview about how it Telematics system can actually help a rental company be more successful. And are those rental companies out there that are using Telematics as you feel they’re running out there? They’re missing out. What do you What’s your take on this?
TIM (ThingTech): No, absolutely. And I think Chris is from Chris is separate from me. So in terms of the some of the operational workflows that that they can solve their you hit it right on the head. You know, for little quick little companies that are not getting insight into their equipment, or their equipment is the machines that are, they’re leasing out into the world to their customers if they’re really missing opportunities to really capture much stronger utilization data and diagnostic data, of course, where that utilization data kind of feed into very mission critical service offerings, whether it’s maintaining the equipment providing preventive maintenance programs, ensuring that the equipments, ensuring that the equipment does not going to fail from a predictive standpoint.
So, if we’re capturing all this Telematics data, the diagnostic data utilization, all the things that are coming back for our system for catching that properly, and we’re analyzing that near real time to be able to generate actionable data that opportunity is extremely strong opportunity to do really two things increase revenue opportunities and decreases kind of operating costs. And a third one that’s a little bit more less quantifiable is creating a sticky or more, more sticky customer if that, if that makes sense. And David’s points, I’m glad David brought up the OEM and the data point side. And one thing about that all that I’d like to mention here is if we’re capturing this data, we may have multiple as an end user or the lease or of the equipment that
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Maybe let the leasing from lipo or united rental, you know, I may have multiple types of OEM that are in my sleep, I need to be able to connect to not just the caterpillar OEM connection, but I might have to connect to other OEM feed. So if we so we bring all that data one single place, it really gives us opportunity to really see how our assets and equipment are performing. So, you know, I think this is having access and Telematics and Telematics data from an operational perspective, for all the things that equipment rental companies really need to are kind of trying to focus on in terms of trading, you know, assets, equipment that utilize more effectively more efficiently, maintained properly up times are strong reliability strong, that data is absolutely mission critical to to equipment rental companies as they move forward and then again, creating a connected
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customer or connected ecosystem with their partners, about the world of partners as well as customers, I think there’s a big opportunity around Telematics to share that data.
MICHAEL (RER): All right, thank you, Tim. And you can get a quick look here in just a few of the customers that that thing Tech has. Chris, you’ve been involved in the rental industry for a long time and going way back to the days so long before we even knew about Telematics you started. So what are some of the main benefits of Telematics has to offer a rental companies?
CHRIS (Meso):thanks to Michael Yeah, and really, that that to kind of follow up with what both Tim and David were saying, from the runner perspective, prior to Telematics to today, the companies around companies that are taking advantage of Telematics and using it to interact more with their customers and getting their customers 19:00
Onboard is, is truly making them a full service opportunity for their customer and provide more their customer with actionable results and actionable items to work from, you know, just from a rental company just to be able to schedule fleet maintenance. The idea that, you know, they can now look at a service call issue and before they dispatch for that service call, they can, with a quick line of sight they can see any other fleet issues that that they might have that’s out there in that geographic area or even service opportunities. Were before, this was a trip out to a service call on a trip back, not really having an understanding of how much fleet was being passed either direction that that could have been handled in same trip to make a much more efficient process for their for their maintenance team. there they’re able to see their rental equipment versus their customers and see okay, 20:00
where’s their equipment at versus Where’s their customer locations and job sites. They can set up geo zones around specific larger projects and they can look right on that project and see how many pieces of equipment they have their what’s, what’s the utilization type, what’s they can schedule their services on that particular project amongst many different customers who have equipment on that one project, and they also have the capability of connecting their customers so their customers can see, what rental equipment they have on site, and you know, what, what the health statuses on that on that equipment. So, you know, for the rental company, it just makes them a stronger partner for their customers. And it allows them to give, you know, visualization to their texts, in relation to the equipment. Get again, it gives our customers that line of sight on the health of the equipment they have on 21:00
right and the status of that equipment and the opportunity with the customers with the geo zones and the different notifications when is the quick cut putting the venues and if it’s not you know when is it going back to work and one of the not going back to work. So in the advantages for the rental companies with Telematics are just fantastic
Michael (RER):all right, thank you chris. Davis Swan of sky jack you know looking at it from the OEM perspective how can elevate help a rental company to be more efficient and save money and time and cut down on service calls and all the other benefits it as? David you there?
DAVID (SkyJack):i’m sorry, i was on mute. so i’ll give a specific example here because i think it’s important to kind of get into
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The details of this stuff if someone’s been done with the slides around there, I think I might be fighting with them. There we go.
MICHAEL (RER): Yeah. So just take a second and his own his own enemy there. So
DAVID (SkyJack): there we go. So I’ll tell you the biggest impact that Telematics has had for our customers so far, and how we’ve seen our direct return on investment for this product. And I think this example explains the Telematics really shouldn’t be about covering the cost of Telematics, it should be about making money. And that calculus should work out for everybody at some point in a in a much near term. And I think people think, or would normally think about when they think of integrating this technology, it’s not three years down the road, it’s not five years down the road. There’s a few simple steps that can be put into place when it comes to service and fleet management processes that can lead to that ROI quickly. So battery management is our biggest issue when we’re talking about our electric scissor lift machine class or category. And basically, the idea is 23:00
That if there’s a problem on a site on a job site that’s going to drive a service call, almost 50% of the time, that problem is going to be related to battery health, battery charging practices, knowledge about battery charging those sorts of things, as opposed to a hard mechanical problem. Okay. So what we’ve done is we’ve advised our customers and giving them the ability to insert a single step into their first point of contact process of someone’s calling up a rental branch and saying this machine won’t lift. And normally how it goes if that user or the contractor who’s renting it, so you know, are you charging the machine and what they’ll do is they’ll say, they’ll review with the person that has supposed to been charging the machine or they themselves will know and they’ll say, Yes, I’ve been charged me a machine every night. And then what happens is eventually when a service guy gets out to that site, we find out that they were using 100 foot long extension cord, right? And it wasn’t properly charging the batteries or that somebody was putting the machine on charge and then 24:00
Somebody will on a second shift or from another trade was coming on site and I’m plugging that machine. Meanwhile, I’ve just paid for windshield time for a guy to get in his truck and drive 50 miles to the site, only to find out that, you know, the batteries just weren’t being charged. Right. So if that if I think that my electric scissor lift and other some other electric machineries, well, makeup, such a huge chunk of my fleet. And that means that they’re proportionately representing a huge chunk of my service interaction. That’s right. If I can cut out 50% of those just by getting away from sending people are decider having extended conversations on the phone or on battery charges. And now I can log in, type in the serial number the machine say do you want to know what you did put it on charge at 8pm last night, but someone took it off charge at 9:45pm because I can see the voltage drop right now. There’s an immediate return there. And there’s really cool stuff that we plan to get to as well over the next few years that have to do with aggregating and analyzing data to get to predictive combustion maintenance and things like that on our 25:00
Larger machine categories. But right now just inserting that single step into your first point of contact service process is saving our customers 30% to 50% of unnecessary service interactions and trips out to say on their electric machines which they carry a whole lot of and rent out and large quantity sometimes depending on the side of the job. And those low cost high volume machines like or lower costs, I should say, like an electric scissor also happened to be the kinds of machines that are more generalist, it’s more likely that I’m going to rent an electric scissor out to a painter or an electrician that might only rent a scissor every fifth job depending on type electrician he is, or she is, and that means that they’re more likely to have those kind of silly service calls that you only get to avoid of using machine regularly like they might not know the charging behavior required or what kind of charge required for duty cycle so we’ve given service technicians or even the front 26:00
rental desk staff the ability to quickly investigate remotely in a way that they would normally have to do on site. You know, we’re in the past that would be a pilot cause for windshield time, and a frustrating and customer experience as well, because I just came out there and told you that you just weren’t plugging it in. Right? You know, and if I could have told you on the phone, that’s a whole lot better. So I think it’s those things that we’re seeing our customers sort of, they’re opening their eyes and saying, Okay, so this is what Telematics is though. It’s not just about this future world of predictive maintenance, and that is a big part of it. And we’re all moving towards that. So I don’t mean any disrespect to those goals, because we all have them. But there’s also this part where there’s immediate ROI for this product for for everybody. And they just have to you know, the low hanging fruit is there and if they’re in high quantities
Michael (RER): okay. We’ve done a good bit of research into Telematics I in the rental industry. And one of the things we’ve
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found is that some rental companies will, when they first getting into it, they’ll say, well, all this data is overwhelming. And I don’t really know where to begin. And suddenly, we’re inundated with all of this data and we don’t even know how to focus on what’s important. So Tim says you’re dealing directly with rental companies. Hi, how would you advise a rental company that’s relatively new to Telematics? And we’re assuming we’re talking about a not a big national company that has a big IT department, but let’s say a smaller company that doesn’t have all that much Health in the IT area, hush they start and what should they focus on? And how should they sort of ramp up over a period of time? How do you see it? What’s your advice to them?
TIM (ThingTech): That’s a great question. And I absolutely on David’s comments on data, and I think he was thinking a little bit to that as well. It was
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No, I think equipped a new equipment rental company that’s looking to implement a Telematics program. I think one of the big areas they really need to look at it from our experiences know really established what are their key, What are the real priorities for implementing a Telematics solution? And what are the low hanging fruit from a data perspective and operational perspective that you can gain immediate ROI or immediate value from and that might be something as simple just knowing where the location of that asset is? No diagnostics, no Telematics, no predictive maintenance, no work order automation or Field Service Automation, just simply show me where my stuff is that that I mean, that might be the simplest use case, but then be able to scale that up as your business grows and as you mature through the quote unquote, telematics life cycle if you will. So, you know, certainly understand exactly what your top two to three priorities are that you can actually gain value.
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You start really reducing costs are increasing revenues are making more money or create a more connected customer experience. And really start there. And then once you once you implement that system, you can easily scale into the more advanced functions of a true enterprise level Telematics solution. So, you know now with these solutions in the quote unquote cloud, it’s very easy to now just to quickly get started whether you’re connecting what we call indirect connection, which is to an OEM feed for, say, a empty 2.0 data or if it’s a directly connected devices plugged into the equipment for diagnostics and Telematics and location, Whatever method you choose really understand Kind of
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what your goals are. What are the priorities that are driving that decision? And then, you know, achieve those goals, but then be ready to start scaling that up for more advanced functions. I think there’s going to be I think this, this, these types of solutions are going to create a competitive advantage for some of the smaller, small medium sized criminal rental companies that are using this type of data in a very innovative way in terms of what they’re doing with the data will talk that probably I think in a couple slides later terms of some important things of connecting this data back to the back to the business applications, whether it’s your rental, your reservation systems, but the CRP system was CRN I think there’s a big opportunity for that as well. But the advice for a company starting to implement a Telematics program
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as clearly understand your goals have a path and a plan to achieve those goals and then be able to scale up for more advanced functionality as your needs and as your business matures through that to that life cycle
Michael (RER): all right great thank you very much Tim. Well, chris you guys are involved with me so with maintenance issues and maintenance strategies and for companies that are getting involved in Telematics they suddenly find that they have a lot more information about what’s going on with their machine so how can Telematics help route companies to develop a maintenance strategy and you know as they go forward?
CHRIS (Meso): Thank you michael and it did just again really follow up on what was said previously and then with Tim and David sentiments as well, the low hanging fruit has been ready
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a couple of times and i think those are probably the key benefits just right out of the gate with Telematics and just simply the basics just make such a difference early on with the Telematics and then having the opportunity to get into deeper dive with diagnostics in and really pulling that information from a utilization standpoint and so you can get more again predictive style maintenance and have those records to be able to avoid larger issues down the road again the maintenance the maintenance piece for the Telematics it’s going to save your customers a lot in the in the downtime and avoids and David mentioned the issue with the with the battery voltage in you know we’ve had just as a simple as the processes that were a customer now can have line of sight and see that battery voltage issue in decline
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And you know, without making a phone call, they can tell a key was left on. And you know, which will save you know, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands and in service calls in downtime downtime issues. You know the capability of being able to schedule that maintenance in a geographic area in the business is it as efficient as possible. Again, save thousands for our customers. Telematics, from their vehicle fleet to their equipment fleet to being able to look at our service text to be able to look at that opportunity all under one umbrella, including OEM, similar to David and sky Jack’s to be able to have that data being able to come into one platform so you can utilize the OEM Telematics and how they’re moving forward with their programs and having that program come in to one line of sight platform for our customers is vital information.
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MICHAEL (RER): Great. David Swan you as sky-jack is developed elevate and then road companies will often they’ll use her elevate on the sky jack machines but they might be working with other systems from other manufacturers on other machines and they may have a third party Telematics providers such as such as Thing tech For example, to integrate these various systems and try to then incorporate all the data with their ERP system. So what kind of challenges can this present?
DAVID (SkyJack): So I think that, when we do this, right, especially the responsibility that falls on an OEM not to get into proprietary systems and proprietary data delivery method and I think a lot of those challenges, they don’t go away but they become manageable after that step. So it’s not sometimes the case that people are not just using a sky jack Telematics solution. It’s always the case, none of our customers just use sky jack machines. And I think understanding that made us start with a mixed fleet solution rather than try and accommodate and make sweet solution. Really, this is like what we’ve done is put out a mixed fleet solution by nature. And I think without sounding to brag you there, I think that’s the mentality that will when everyone gets on board with the idea that data needs to be fairly open. And there was no, there’s no hope long term and trying to protect what you have in terms of data that’s deliverable to the customer. You have to make sure that customers have easy enough access to that data that they can do what they want with it, because that’s when it becomes valuable and that’s when we progress as an industry and building these solutions, right? So ThingTech needs to be able to access The sky jack side of the fleet, in the same likes is AMP standard through a familiar API technology like a well structured API in a way that they can benefit our shared customers in a way that they’re producing these solutions quickly and efficiently and accessing that low hanging fruit. So, I think is every as long as everyone is abiding by that philosophy of data needs to be open and easily accessible. It becomes manageable, right? And I think that’s the key to this problem.
MICHAEL (RER): All right. Tim, you I’m sure, I’ve already dealt with this issue a good bet your company will need to integrate. It’s the information they get from you with its ERP system that it uses, and make sure that 37:00
All the data is immediately actionable. So how does that work? Or I should say, you know, what, what kind of challenges do you face and doing that?
TIM (ThingTech): Well, you know, that’s a great question. And I’m really excited to hear David approach because I think, kind of open published API’s, and everybody playing in the sandbox together nicely is a critical trend is a critical trend for us as we move forward. And I think we all would probably agree, it’s all about the data and what we do with the data. So when we kind of look at connecting to other systems. So we rebuilt our platform on a very open published API system. So we look at, we look at our customers who 100% of our customers operate a mixed fleet. They may have 100 Ford F 150s for the service technician.
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They could have 55, Caterpillar g7, they got thodcast again sky Jack’s, they could have power generators that are out the world somewhere that all of this all these assets and I’ll do the quiz generating data. So what our approach to this data aggregation and data integration problems build this concept of connectors that are built on protocols. You know the AEMP 2.0 protocol is a great example of that, Jade 1939 can connection for automobile or for heavy piece of equipment, some great standard in terms of how we collect data known for light, light, medium duty vehicles being able to connect into the odd to standards. Know, we have all these standards out here. So, what we’ve done to really solve this, how do we play nicely in the sandbox and bring all of this data from all these different types of asset classes or equipment classes and the ones that
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Place, analyze that data, put rules on that data, put workloads on that data and generate actions on that data, whatever it may be. And because each of the workflows and actions breach equipment class will be dramatically different. So we had to build a very flexible configurable architecture that allows us to scale up to really massive amounts of data on a on a daily basis. And then we bring that in and if you look at this image here, we built these concepts of connectors, that the connectors can be what we call thing x connectors. They can be connectors to devices or equipment or sensors out in the world that’s collecting data and transmitting that data back over a communication method. What we’ve decided that they were kind of agnostic on the device and sensor side and we’re also agnostic, fairly agnostic on the communication method, and connecting whether we’re connecting directly to an engine or directly to a machine or piece of equipment or working 40:00
connected or indirectly via OEM API, all that data comes back to us as effectively in the same manner. So we can normalize that data, and then put that data into our system for the things that we do like visualization, analytics, predictive things of that nature. But the other piece that we write connectors to, you can’t really see and here’s we have what we call enterprise connectors, we think it’s really important to be able to create a connected customer and a connected workforce. So we’ve created enterprise connectors that connects into the back office for many of the major ERP CRM or field service applications that our customers are using. Whether that’s Salesforce, Oracle, viewpoint, field aware,Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft this year or whatever it may be. We built connectors that tie that Telematics data back into the enterprise back
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into the CRM in the RP world. So the business can take advantage of that data and, do other things with it? So we’re the bridge what, what we like to consider ourselves with the with our customers that were the bridge between the office to the field, and we facilitate this, the data coming back to really at the end of the day, it’s all about how do we if we identify an issue that’s going on right now, how do we solve how do you create a workflow that says, Stop doing that and create an action that generates that, that that immediately solves that problem.
now, and that action, by the way, could be connect back to the machine and turn it off yourself in an automated fashion? Right, because we got to remember, Telematics is not necessarily a one way street. It’s not just to connect collecting data from the machine or a piece of equipment in the world. It’s also connecting to the machine so issuing commands to the machine or the piece of equipment out in the world. This is the power generator say hey,
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generators acting up, we’re getting all the diagnostic codes off of it looks like it’s going to blow up. Well, an action could be a workflow could be connect to that machine and automatically shut it down with no human intervention at all. So for those are the things. So when we start looking at, you know, collecting this data, I think equipment rental companies have to really think about how do they get that data back into their enterprise back into the ERP, back into their CRM or back into their reservation systems or financial system so they can leverage the same data that that we have in our system. And that way we give that data back to them and an open public API. So, we’re very friendly in the sandbox, Michael.
MICHAEL (RER): All right. Thank you, Tim. It’s actually very gratifying to see that Telematics providers such as such as your company and ERP providers and OEM
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that are providing Telematics systems are seem to be working very, very well together and recognizing they’re not alone, and they need to cooperate with each other to make does out of work for everybody. So that’s really great to see. All right, Chris. Well, we see that companies are sometimes and rental companies. They’re deciding between handling maintenance in house or partnering with an organization like me so what do you think are some of the things companies should consider when they’re when they’re looking at that?
CHRIS (Meso): Thanks, Michael. Yeah, and just to follow up, on the open API’s and in the customers data, which really makes a company in our offering really possible for rental companies and in even end users in the in the field is to have that
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open, playing nice in the sandbox type of type of atmosphere to work in. Because again, all of our customers do have mixed fleet in the here David’s how, you know sky Jack’s view on that it’s truly what we hope for and I think what the industry needs having that having that open API so the customer it’s so it’s truly the customers data. And with that being the customers data, they can make that available to third party companies whether it’s a company like me so who can who can help from the maintenance side or even from from the tracking side having that open API even with our customers back end systems allows it allows us to interact us in real time in a two way street as well. So, what work we do perform it can it can go straight back to our customers, data and 45:00
database let that information be updated in real time. And at the same time, through through capabilities, we can see what we need to do on our end. And it makes a streamline much more efficient process for both us and our customer. So, you know, the nice advantage of the fact that, you know, you can get us by the hour when you need us and where you need us. And we can do that in real time. And we can do that with a line of sight to your fleet and you have a you have a line of sight, as well to our team or any third party, you’d be able to utilize, which in turn, it really does grow your coverage area where you’re able to do business because now you have the advantage of being able to work with third party partners like me, so or other companies out there that would be able to maintain your fleet, the standards, the standards that you want to maintain it. So you know, the
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the from Telematics to the future of augmented reality where we’re going to be able to start talking to technicians in the field from whether it’s back office experts for with our companies or with OEM experts, it’s really going to broaden the capabilities of technicians out there in the field to be able to do some of this skill set work that, before Telematics and before, the new technology adapter just just was very hard to do. So, rental companies, you know, don’t make that determination at the time but where that fleet is where the opportunity is for a good quality partner and a third party vendor will be able to support what they’re doing and do it the most cost efficient way to really improve their customer satisfaction. It’s all about uptime, and keeping that utilization, keeping that utilization up, so Thank you. 47:01
MICHAEL (RER): Alright, thanks very much, Chris. David, You know, as you have developed, elevate, and you’re looking towards the future, I’m sure you’re taking down the road, what are some of the new types of information that I can provide in the future?
DAVID (SkyJack): So we’ve learned pretty quickly and we’ve got some of our customers listening in that they’re very much ready to adapt and move as quickly as possible when it comes to making the experience for general contractors and for building projects better. And so where we’ve accelerated pretty dramatically or innovation programmer for the last couple years, and it’s largely because we’ve seen that response and when the right kind of technologies available to people, it becomes adopted, and they started driving the direction of it and I think it was just mentioned 48:00
really, we need to stop thinking about Telematics, Telematics. That sounded a little bit silly. But really, this isn’t just about reading information from the machines. When we talk about our cell phones and all the things they do. We talk about mobility router that until f&e, right. Like we’re not really talking about telephones anymore, are we talking about our mobile computing devices, we’re talking about a whole suite of really neat things that are able to do for us in our lives as consumers and as business people. And I think the next step for connected machines is just that it’s talking about connected fleet versus Telematics, right. Telematics is a great foundation. And it allows us to understand what’s going on to the field going on in the field. But as we increase our ability to read and write from controllers and machines and to understand what machines are doing and give instructions, over various communications mediums, we’re going to see 49:00
Crazy level of productivity come from this kind of technology. So, I think that or I know that our next step is to pursue a talk with discrete autonomous functionality in our construction machines. And what that means is using Telematics and communications technology as a baseline to provide to provide a more advanced services, I’ve got a video up there now hopefully not laughing. Anyway, was that [] functionality and a half where we have already there we go. So basically, the idea was that we could and commands from 7500 miles away and get live feedback within two seconds. 50:00
On the different various mechanical functions that my machine, right, so as a service technician, what could I do with that? Well, if I can solve 30 to 50% of my service calls on a scissor lift by just listening to the machine, and there’s a whole other 30%, that we might be able to get to remotely by sending commands to that machine and then seeing what it does, because that’s, of course, what a service technician does, at a really high level on site. You know, they manipulate the machine, they see how it behaves, and they diagnose it that way. So this is our first step on this path to having construction machine that performed discrete anonymous tasks is by using Telematics provide a two way communication for service technicians and you can imagine how this would be used by companies, for VDI processes and other things as well. There’s a whole lot of sort of wasted skilled labor going on right now especially with the state of our business being as busy 51:00
Yet it is right. That’s probably the last thing that I need. Somebody doing is spending a whole lot of time raising and lowering and steering every scissor lift that comes back in offer. And if that could do it themselves and tell me that it did it successfully and actually send that mechanical feedback through as simple data points, then I’d be pretty far ahead of where I’m at now. And I could be getting more return on my still labor hours. So I think that
MICHAEL (RER):All right. Thank you, David. And, Tim Quinn, any final thoughts from you on on where we’re going in the future with Telematics?
TIM (ThingTech):You know, again, I think both Chris and David kind of, kind of both touched touched on it. And, and I have to agree with David last points and kind of discuss kind of the concept of, the Telematics not absolute agree it’s, it’s kind of is a subset of a connected asset, a connected fleet connected workforce in 52:00
was critical data that drives these, this whole connected fleet and connected equipment world. But in when we look at what we’re doing and kind of when we look at our kind of roadmap and our innovation, and what’s going on in the world of the industrial IoT, and some of the trends that we see out there, you know, the thing that I would kind of state in this audience, and David was speaking about it. And I’m going to kind of put a term to it that many, many, many of us are focused on, which is kind of the edge what’s happening at the edge. And when I say the edge, that’s a completely autonomous, distributed architecture, where assets or equipment or quote unquote, things are seamlessly connected. And not only are they connected, but they’re connected to each other. So there is no concept of collecting data from one single machine, send it through the cloud back to the server to process. What we’re talking about is actually that’s happening at the machine itself. 53:00
And it’s also not only the machine itself, it’s you know, the edge processing edge computing is allowed us to start to learn in a distributed environment or decentralized environment where all this equipment say on a construction site is talking to each other. And that equipment is actually learning from each other, and a totally automated solution and totally automated environment. That is the premise of the connected Slater Connect vehicles. Because in some, in some use cases, there’s not enough time to collect a piece of data, send it over a wireless communication, process that on the server, then send the action back to it that could take 30 seconds. Many of these and fighting David’s example, there might be a safety issue where he he wants to be able to shut down that machine within milliseconds, not within five seconds because in five seconds, the machines already class. So the thing I’ll leave with 54:00
Kind of this group kind of looked in the future and certainly the edge computing and the autonomous computing that’s out in the world. As we move forward with Christmas speaking a lot of and I know his operation very well as, how do you how do you how do you empower the field service technician, to be able to do things more smartly or more effectively and more efficiently? So think of the impending augmented reality as well as virtual reality coming down to the technicians out in the world, that’s certainly going to Telematics data certainly going to drive that world as well. And then, you know, I think there’s a big between the API the impulse buy, oh, yeah. Which is, is really a game changer for our customers, that data being available, and a pretty open fashion. I think we’re going to continue to see that and continue to see I think David mentioned that audience becoming more open to pushing and publishing that data. And I think that’s going to also drive a much more connected customer. 55:00
that I think will create a more connected ecosystem within the equipment rental space, which I think is the next, next big industry that can be disrupted around this concept of a connected ecosystem. And I think Telematics is going to be the driver of that. And innovative companies like think that the force and like sky jack and what Lisa is done, and lead the way for that, that disruptive change and in this industry, so that’s my thoughts, Michael.
MICHAEL (RER): All right. Thank you very much, Tim. We have time for a couple of questions here before we sign off. One question has been asked is with data from manufacturer based systems, such as a JOG analyzer or a whole lot optimizer can they feed into the system in the office? So who can answer that question?
DAVID (SkyJack): I can answer that question. 56:00
Absolutely. So both of those solutions, the data is relatively published, and it’s published pretty well in a format that can be read. So, again, from our perspective to just be an API connector to bring that data in, and then connect that to the asset or the equipment that that’s that you’re looking to attach that data too. So as long as the asset or the equipment’s in, say, in the in the ThingTech database, are connected can be built into those systems to pull that in. And what we will do we normalize the data and we get a contacts, and then you use our, our platform tools to analyze the data report on the data, but rules on that data workflows on the data and actions on that data. So yes, it’s just a data source for us that we consume.
MICHAEL (RER):Right. Here’s a question from a software provider, inspire and they’re asking what information could Telematics providers systems get from rental management software such as inspire that can help so maybe Timmy can answer that one?
TIM (ThingTech):yeah that’s great question so now we’re capturing you know customer data location data you know asset data as it relates to the business or the business the book of business as with that piece of equipment so is it on is it only you know what’s the cost center was the responsibility center you know all the all the data that would come from the inspire system kind of as it relates to the business side of the equipment rental business that data is actually quite strong to bring into a Telematics platform or IoT platforms such as ours so that we can integrate that business data into the operational data to make better decisions so that we might have different workflows and actions based on 58:00
Equipment then own that we sold to them versus the equipment that we leased to them. And they’re under our warranty our maintenance program. So that data provides a ton of what we call contextual data. So that we can do things for what we call remediation data or prescriptive data to help solve the problems. So I think that’s a critical piece for the equipment rental businesses making sure that your back office your PC RM such as a inspire, or Salesforce what everybody I think those two are connected in a two way street is very critical to having, really deep is that’s what these progress.
MICHAEL (RER): Okay, one final question with a real quick answer. How do you deal with installing Telematics on a potential fleet customer when they have 70% of their fleet out on rent and knowing that they’re selling and buying fleet, you know, every day during enrollment 59:00
course of business, You want to tackle that one real quick, Tim?
TIM (ThingTech): Chris, how about you want to take that? That’s, you’ve been doing that for a long, long time.
MICHAEL (RER): Okay, good.
CHRIS (Meso): So, typically our customers will want to do that in stages. And as a fleet turns in itself, even that, that the Telematics hardware in a somewhat of a consumable could actually stay with that item. And it can move forward with it with a customer that you had sell to. And you would have that opportunity now to offer those services to that customer who ends up with that fleet. So normally is done in stages as it comes back in offer rent, but a lot of applications will go right on site. We’re getting ready to head out the end of this week done to Texas and add 20 right on location on a site there. So depend on how they’re connected and what how much diagnostics, you’re trying to pull. 1:00:00
Typically it’s done in the field with little interruption to our customers. MICHAEL: Right. Alright, great. Well, unfortunately we’re about out of time I think there’s been an outstanding presentation from Tim Brill of Thingtech, Chris Britt of Messer Inc and David Swan from sky jack. We want to thank all of you, gentlemen for your participation. we want to thank everyone out there who’s been listening for, for getting involved in listening to the to the webinar, we want to thank thing tech for the sponsorship. And I want to remind everybody out there that if you want to hear this again, or if you have friends that that you think could benefit from it that didn’t get a chance to listen, this web webcast will be on demand on our website that is RERMag.com It’ll be up probably within the next 48 hours.
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And it’ll be available for the next year. So we want to invite you to tell some of your friends and colleagues to listen in. So again, thanks for all of your participation and hope everybody has a great day. Thanks very much.
TIM (ThingTech):Thanks so much.
CHRIS (Meso):Thank you.
MICHAEL (RER) :Okay, I guess that’s it.
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