The GEOTAB Africa system for over a decade assisted business with leading edge and market leading tools to manage their fleets, these tools were designed on core principals of safety, productivity and profitability.
In recent years however GEOTAB raised the bar to a level well beyond the early days of measuring driver behaviour only, today GEOTAB collects data points from Accelerometer, Engine, Drive Train, Engine Management Systems, GPS, Driver and much more, to such an extent that the analysis of these data points allow for unlocking value for business that go well beyond the point of knowing where assets are and how these assets are being treated, this is the age of Big Data.
Recently GEOTAB got deployed at open cast mining site, with the key objective being to measure the behaviour of drivers to ensure safety on mine, and also to ensure abuse is identified prior to any damage occurring on these expensive assets, in the original requirement being the Dump Trucks deployed on the mine, GEOTAB in this case monitored and recorded speed travelled as well as engine and drive train data such as RPM, Temperature, Gear Position etc.
GEOTAB however highlighted to management at mine that the GEOTAB system could add significant greater value to meet the key requirements of the mine, such as adding GEOTAB units to Excavators and Drilling Rigs, not just to monitor when these assets are operating and more importantly not operating, but also to identify what ore is being mined by the Excavators as an example, in real-time.
The fact of knowing what ore was being mined, then got married with system designed by GEOTAB to record the actual loads collected by Dump Trucks from these excavators, and also where these Dump Trucks should dump the actual ore, to ensue ore is dumped at the correct dump point and to record the correct number of loads actually collected and dumped of each ore type, as opposed to human tally recordings.
This solution allowed the Mine to have a more accurate recording of different types of ore mined, actual productivity achieved and where the different bottlenecks or negative productivity factors on mine exists, allowing management to implement corrective actions.
GEOTAB system also assisted greatly in improving the distribution effectiveness of Brewery that implemented the GEOTAB solution. The model used by Brewery is one of using sub-contractors to distribute the product to distribution points across the country.
GEOTAB’s were fitted to all sub-contractor vehicles, and through data analysis GEOTAB indicated to customer the points within their distribution chain that required attention, this due to delayed delivery times, extended delivery delays at certain points, route deviations, truck breakdowns, non-optimised routing plans amongst others, with corrective actions adding significant capacity within their distribution structure, without increasing costs.
GEOTAB system aided significantly in improving service delivery of public bus service, as data collected and analysed from busses equipped with GEOTAB’s clearly indicated poor route planning, unscheduled stops, extended stops, late leaving and arrival of assets from and to depot (some deliberately so to record overtime hours by employees), and unsafe driving behaviour, and through corrective actions from management asset utilisation and service delivery to public greatly increased, in line with management expectations.
The key factor in the brief case studies and examples above is that these improvements were realised through the IT departments in each of the cases, without any physical engagement with the assets, everything from the IT mangers PC and reporting system designed by GEOTAB and customer, Data knowledge unleashed, over and above the data that allowed Fleet Manager to manage their fleets as usual.
