TE C H N OLOG Y T R EN D S | By Charles Rathmann
GPS TECHNOLOGY Gets More Interoperable, Available & Smarter Open systems, shared communication standards, satellite and intelligence are driving more interaction between machine telematics. Elevat IoT
common for them to ask us if we have a set of APIs. Yes, we do. They ask how to interface with our APIs and we give them our documentation.” This creates an open environment where the OEM can collect and use data as per their requirements. The customer’s operator can use that data to manage the equipment and the same data set can be exposed to other enterprise systems or point solutions used across the customer environment or even across a multi-company digital construction workflow.
AFFECTING OEM NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
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onstruction equipment users and construction executives operating mixed fleets have struggled with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) proprietary telematics systems. Executives responsible for a contractor or rental fleet have had to choose between disjointed systems or try to port limited amounts of data into a solution from companies like Tenna, Fleetio or multiple multifunction software applications that also offer equipment telematics features, such as Assignar or HCSS. Yet the OEM telematics category is growing at a rate of about 15.6% annually. And the capabilities of both OEM and independent telematics systems have expanded to include not
just location and maintenance codes, but productivity, safety, cost efficiency and compliance. This data is not used just to support the asset through a defined condition-based maintenance application, but must be usable by a broad spectrum of operational and analytics systems.
MORE OPEN APIS Stock telematics solutions coming to market in the coming months and years will be more open as OEM vendors recognize and yield to the needs of the market. Telematics solutions that don’t work and play well with other technologies will put OEMs at a disadvantage, as their customers want to see all their equipment across a mixed fleet on a single pane of glass.
18 EQUIPMEN T TOD AY | May 2022
According to Adam Livsay, co-founder and chief commercial officer of industrial internet of things (IoT) vendor Elevāt, equipment vendors are waking up, smelling the coffee and making their technology stacks more open to external systems. “The biggest change I have seen in the last few years is companies being comfortable using software APIs,” Livsay says, referring to the application programming interfaces that enable various software and hardware solutions to communicate with each other across all industries. “If an OEM designs a system that has a proprietary control software or algorithm, that sets up barriers. A tree trimming company using a piece of equipment may define utilization of
a piece of equipment using that algorithm or telematics product differently than their competitor. Or the same technology is used in a different application like street sweeping and productivity must then be captured in a different way.” It becomes easier, assures Livsay, whose company goes to market through 20 fluid power system integrators that drive its technologies into new product development (NPD) value streams for about 300 OEMs, at which point this information can be exposed to external systems that can display it or use it in different ways. “The Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) standard for mixed fleets helps,” he says. “Now it is very
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This shift will primarily be felt in the new product development (NPD) process and to a certain extent among equipment users, as APIs become the plugand play approach for systems integration, equipment end users to access data for their own purposes. Specific codes thrown by a piece of construction equipment may still, however, be proprietary and incomprehensible to thirdparty telematics systems from companies like Tenna, Fleetio and others. “We started seeing the shift about three years ago,” Livsay says. “In the last 18 months, we started to have this type of collaboration. Now, we are getting the next tranche of companies really starting to collaborate — ecosystem partners sharing information, sharing data, making it easier to get that proprietary data out. So, in the next year to four or five years, connected machines getting access to other connected machines will become a lot easier and the data system a lot richer.”
