Digital Directors Save Money
Savvy routing and good directions add to the efficiency of any fleet.
JOHN BENDEL
TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
"How do I get there?'' That's what drivers ask. In a well-run fleet they get answers. Savvy routing and good directions add to the efficiency of any fleet. Good directions are even more critical in fleets with high driver turnover and numbers of inexperienced drivers.
But providing directions takes valuable time and, depending on the scope of operations, a substantial body of knowledge. So, many fleets and individual drivers now use digital routing technology, which these days comes in two basic forms.
Off-Board Is On Its Way
"There are two ways to do navigation, on-board and off-board. On-board is where there's a DVD or CD ROM device with the data. That's what most everything is today,'' said Paul Drysch, vp North America for WirelessCar.
"Where it's going, though, is off-board where the database is sitting on a server somewhere and you access it only when you need it via a wireless hookup in your vehicle,'' Drysch said.
WirelessCar is a telematics joint venture of three Swedish companies, wireless phone maker Ericcson, Talia, a Scandinavian wireless carrier, and Volvo. Telematics, of course, is the technology for providing wireless location and communications services to vehicles on the road.
WirelessCar packages, manages and bills for the various services necessary to delivery telematics products. For example, Nexiq Technologies, which provides wireless monitoring of engine and other vehicle parameters, is a WirelessCar customer.
What does off-board navigation promise that on-board systems don't already provide?
The answer, of course, is more up-to-date data.
Off-board navigation systems can be updated immediately as new information becomes available. Indeed, as Intelligent Transportation initiatives around the country make real-time traffic information available, off-board navigation systems will be able to pass that information to subscribers as needed.
And while better CD ROM-based products are updated regularly, those updated disks don't always get where they need to go.
"Okay, I bought this DVD and it's updated every three months. I have to get the new DVDs out to all my trucks and get them installed correctly,'' said Drysch.
"Even when it's provided free to the consumer, like when it's in the purchase price of a car, and they send out new disks, something like 10 or 15 percent of people never get around to installing the new data.
"When you're talking about a business, you're paying people and somebody's got to take all these disks, distribute them to the right people, then those people have to install them. It becomes expensive,'' Drysch said.
Some fleets simply don't do it.
Not surprisingly, Drysch believes telematics will eventually deliver a better alternative.
"You skip all that and do it all off-board. The GPS device figures out where the vehicle is and just pulls the relevant data from the server and delivers it to the vehicle,'' he said.
That isn't easy because it costs money to send data wirelessly; the more data, the higher the cost. So for the time being at least, no trucking companies provide state-of-the-art driver navigation — maps and turn-by-turn voice directions — over Qualcomm or other mobile communications system.
But according to Drysch, off-board's time is coming.
"As airtime gets cheaper, the off-board model gets more economical,'' said Drysch, adding that the next generation of cellular communications will go a long way to making off-board navigation a popular option.
On-Board Is Here Now
Meanwhile, on-board navigation remains a economical, state-of-the-art option.
Take RouteTools, a CD ROM-based product from Rand McNally. The program generates maps and turn-by-turn directions from point-to-point on a laptop or desktop computer. RouteTools optimizes multiple-stop routes and finds truckstops based on location, fuel system and available features. Rand McNally provides updates, including construction information, every two weeks.
Updates are frequent because they are distributed on the Internet, not CD ROM. Subscribers log on at the Rand McNally site to download the latest information, which resides on their computer's hard drive until it is replaced by a more recent update.
Meanwhile a number of companies, DeLorme and ALK Technologies for example, offer compact systems including portable GPS receivers easily mounted on a dashboard. Software on a handheld computer creates door-to-door maps and real-time spoken directions. A growing number of truckload drivers use such systems once they've left the Interstates to find local pick up or delivery addresses.
DeLorme's product is called EarthMate; ALK's is called CoPilot. Neither come with truck-sensitive databases. However, ALK offers a truck-sensitive CoPilot-Truck for laptop computers, complete with spoken directions. ALK company CEO, Alain Kornhauser, told HDT he hopes eventually to deliver a truck-sensitive database through a handheld computer.
Bob Simmons, General Manager of Rand McNally's Transportation Data Management unit, said his company is considering many possibilities, including off-board options.
"You have to be looking at that now because there is a customer base looking for that,'' he said.
Simmons said technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that what seems impossible now, could be reality in a very short time.
Simmons recalled a fictional car named Kit on the 1980s TV show "Knight Rider.''
"It had every telematic device you could think of and basically a brain of its own. We laughed thinking it would never apply in our world of transportation,'' he said.
Of course, we're not laughing any more.
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