Telogis
I have been doing some contract work this month with old friends and colleagues now at Telogis. The Novell and Cambridge connections are legion — Dave Cozzens, my old boss and manager of the Cambridge Digital Business Strategy practice is now Telogis CEO, and many former colleagues are either working there or contracting. Even Jack Messman, the former Cambridge and then Novell CEO is on Telogis’ Board.
Just like homecoming for me.
Telogis has a fleet tracking SaaS application, OnTrack. I’ve known about fleet management and tracking systems going back to the old satellite days and before, but I was surprised at how far things have come. Telogis’ technology reflects an accumulation of incremental changes, none of which is horribly earth-shattering by itself, but cumulatively is pretty interesting.
It turns out that heavy vehicles, like all consumer vehicles these days, have onboard computers, and there is an industry standard for querying those computers via a protocol called JBus. Telogis has onboard hardware with GPS and a wireless modem. Add a standard piece of hardware to query the vehicle computer and pass it to the Telogis hardware, and you can get close-to-real-time reporting of everything the onboard computer knows, plus GPS. Telogis can effectively re-create the vehicle dashboard, including not just speed and location, but things like battery voltage, oil pressure, engine temp, even whether the seatbelts are buckled and the doors are latched.
Fleet tracking started off as a way to monitor drivers, to make sure they weren’t parking somewhere for a nap or using the trucks for side jobs, and monitoring drivers is still part of the value. Now employers know if their drivers are speeding and what routes they are taking between destinations. But the value is expanding to monitoring the vehicles themselves — to knowing ahead of time when a vehicle needs maintenance, say because the fuel economy is declining or the engine is running hot. Add sophisticated routing algorithms for dispatch on top of this, and the vehicle, driver, customer and corporate office are all highly integrated.
I know this is all rather mundane, and familiar to anyone working in a company with field service or delivery operations. But it’s an example of what can be done with location-based computing and wireless networks. This is one of those things that has quietly advanced without much fanfare, and turns out to be rather nifty.