There is a growing assortment of telematics platforms on the market today, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. As you'll quickly discover when evaluating solutions, not all telematics platforms are made equal. In fact, how and why they were made is what often sets the great platforms apart from the weak ones. The evolution of different platforms has depended largely on the vision and central objectives of the systems’ design from the beginning. Some platforms started out with a very basic “dots on a map” approach and weren't originally concerned with data related to the equipment they monitored.
Pedigree Technologies’ OneView platform, on the other hand, was developed from the beginning with the idea that the customer needed more than location data—that diagnostics was important and central to the operation of most companies that wanted location tracking.
We recognized that companies wanted to be able to improve their operations with more data, better algorithms, and detailed reports that could combine data points and alerts when those data points crossed over one another to indicate a need for oversight or interaction. Certainly, telematics platforms have evolved to provide more data, but the ability for the data to mean more really goes to the heart of a telematics company’s philosophy should be about who their customers are and what they want (and need) from a solution provider.
Evolution has not occurred at the platform level only. Telematics companies that embraced the concept that one telematics device was not sufficient to provide all the data from different types of machines operating under wide-ranging conditions, naturally offer a richer and more complete set of solutions. Customers usually have a vast array of equipment types and manufacturers, and existing equipment integration is a huge priority and concern.
So, in order to improve a customer’s ability to streamline operations, different devices need to be considered in the larger solution and multiple devices are required. In addition, the platform needs to be built to support multiple device types and various sets of data from those devices.
The ELD mandate rule will exacerbate this philosophical difference between telematics solution providers. If customers have a mixed fleet in construction, rental or various other industries, they will likely need an Electronic Logs (ELD) solution for some of their fleet. If those companies are using a telematics solution today, they may not be able to “add” an ELD solution from the same telematics provider.
At the end of the day, that problem goes back to the vision of individual telematics providers and how they designed their platforms early on. Current telematics customers may, therefore, end up paying more, training employees on multiple systems and have less continuity in their use of telematics data--due to the vision (or lack thereof) their current vendor (s) had in developing their platform from the beginning.
With the OneView platform, you'll discover that it was built from the start with the end user in mind. Every innovation along the way has been geared towards making more and more data available so you can make the right decisions at the right time.