Tell us about predictive analytics and what that means to fleets.
Predictive analytics is all about trying to help our customers move from being reactive to proactive using the information that is available to us from fleets. We use a rich data set from a variety of sources including telematics, fuel cards, and maintenance. In the past we would help a customer look at a quarter’s worth of historical data or maybe even a year’s worth of historical data and could tell them where they have been.
What our customers are really asking us to do now is to shorten that window and look out into the future. How do we move from rear window viewing to forward looking with our fleet? Where are we going with our fleet? What are our expenses going to look like? And so the predictive analytics component of our solution is really focused on taking all of that rich data and helping our customers look into the future and see where their sort of deep water areas are as it relates to their spend, whether it is maintenance, fuel, remarketing of their assets, or even where their opportunities for replacing assets are within their fleet.
What are your clients saying about this?
They are very excited about this opportunity. The ability to look back and see where they have been is great, but what they really want us to tell them is where they are headed and what they can do about it. How do they react or how should they be actioning the information that we have available off of these vehicles? When and where should they be replacing these assets? Where should they be looking for the lowest fuel prices out in the future? How do they take advantage of all this insight?
They want to drive that information to the appropriate people in their organization, sometimes at the fleet manager level, sometimes all the way down to the driver level. It is one thing for us to predict and provide insight, but the next step for us is to take that insight and actually action it so we are seeing a return on what we are predicting in those models.
Tell us more about the cost savings opportunities you have identified.
We identified an opportunity to reduce excessive idling from a telematics prospective. We are using that information to really home in on which vehicles you have to focus on to get the return on investment on your fuel spend. We are doing the same thing from a maintenance standpoint by being able to predict which assets are your costliest assets in the future. We can remove those assets from your portfolio before they become a high maintenance expense.
On the alternative fuel side, we are identifying vehicles that are good candidates, using analytics again, to identify where are the assets that are fueling up at standard gasoline fuel locations but could be fueling up maybe a half mile down the road at a CNG location or electric vehicle opportunity. We see opportunities that further reduce your overall fuel spend by replacing those assets, as well.
Let’s drill this down to managing the driver.
Managing the driver is probably our biggest challenge. There has been a lot of talk about gamification and how you change behaviors in drivers. The jury is still out on the best way to do that. Gamification is definitely one aspect. How do I personalize the information for each individual driver so that it is meaningful to them so they use it just like I love to use Google?
I get on Google every day because it means something to me, it provides an insight for me that I can’t get anywhere else. We need to figure out, what is it about a driver that gets them to that site or to that page every day to help them change their behavior and make them want to do it? That is our biggest challenge and that is what we are working on right now.
What’s next?
What we want to do with this predictive analytics capability is essentially move it into a cloud so that anybody who has a connected vehicle or maybe even a connected asset that we can run predictive analytics on and output recommendations. We want to make that as seamless as possible. Right now, it is a tool that we can use on behalf of our customers. We will eventually make it customer facing so customers can use it themselves, but ultimately when you acquire your vehicle and you plug it into our fleet optimization cloud it will just start outputting the recommendations for you to help you better manage your fleet over time.
Doug Peters is Analytics Product and COE Leader at GE Capital Fleet Services
[email protected]
