TECHNOLOGY
OEM Construction Equipment Telematics Evolves by Charles Rathmann
ELEVAT IOT
C
onstruction equipment users and construction executives operating mixed fleets have struggled with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) proprietary telematics systems. Executives responsible for a rental fleet or contractor 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 multi-function software applications that also offer equipment telematics features like Assignar or HCSS. Yet the OEM telematics category is growing at a rate of about 15.6% annually. The capabilities of 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 yield to the needs of the market. Telematics solutions that don’t play well with other technologies will put OEMs at a disadvantage as their customers want to see equipment across a mixed fleet on a single pane of glass. According to Adam Livesay, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Seattle-based internet of things (IoT) vendor Elevāt.IoT, 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,” Livesay said, 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, according to Livesay, 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, when this information can be exposed to external systems that can display it or use it in different ways. “The Associated Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) standard for mixed fleets helps,” he said. “Now it is very 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 data per their requirements, their customer’s operator can use it to manage equipment and the data set can be exposed to other enterprise systems used across the customer environment or even across a multi-company digital construction workflow.
OEM New Product Development This shift though will primarily be felt in the NPD process and to a certain extent among equipment users as APIs become the plug-and 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 third party telematics systems from companies like Tenna, Fleetio and others. “We started seeing the shift about three years ago,” Livesay said. “In the
OEM Off-Highway | MARCH/APRIL 2022
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