Don’t Let Anything Get You Down

Fleet downtime is a major operational challenge. When planned, it is a necessary evil. When unplanned, it has the potential to alter your company’s entire future for the worse. The key to reducing the impact of downtime on your budgets, workforce and sales is minimizing risk wherever possible by choosing the right maintenance strategy and making sure your fleet is always protected against any threat. However, while there are a number of management strategies for addressing downtime, the tools and approaches available until now have been partial or imperfect.

Top Causes and Approaches

The majority of vehicle downtime results from three primary causes:

Wear and Tear

Wear and tear is a natural part of the vehicle and fleet lifecycle. Most commonly addressed through maintenance and mitigation, fleets will occasionally also try to reduce the burden of work on each vehicle, by increasing turnover rates or hiring contract vehicles for high-volume periods throughout the year. These strategies often incur lower costs than unexpected or extended downtime due to breakdowns or problems with critical equipment. 

Accidents

Aside from the obvious danger to drivers and other road users, accidents frequently cause unexpected downtime. Fleets often approach improving driver behaviors and habits through blanket policies, like retraining programs or installing speed limiters.  

Planned and Scheduled Downtime

A certain amount of downtime is inevitable in any fleet operation – whether for operational requirements like refueling or due to staff or route management reasons. Many companies use these opportunities to conduct additional preventive or condition-based mechanical inspections and corrections. Until now, this has been achieved through regular, manual vehicle inspections carried out by fleet maintenance providers or in-house specialists. Ongoing and open communication between the drivers, fleet management, and maintenance providers likewise helps improve overall vehicle and fleet performance. 

A New Threat: Cyber Attacks

With the rise of vehicle connectivity, today’s fleets now also face increased challenges of unprecedented vulnerability, operational complexity, and regulatory compliance. Hand in hand with those challenges are cybersecurity threats, which have become more sophisticated, more frequent, and an unfortunate mainstay of the reality in which connected fleets operate. While many fleets have adopted cybersecurity solutions, until now there has been no solution purpose-built for the unique needs and challenges of fleets.

Without real-time access to vehicle health data, fleet managers have had no choice but to rely on proactive maintenance and prevention when possible, and damage control when not. 

A New Approach 

The only way to revolutionize fleet operations and significantly reduce downtime is by giving fleet managers a clear picture of the overall health of their fleet – both in terms of physical operations, and in terms of security and data protection – in real time. This includes:

• Data-based insights into equipment condition to identify performance abnormalities to anticipate failures, and address functionality degradation before it becomes problematic.
• Feedback about driver behavior and habits to address patterns of behaviors that contribute to unnecessary wear and tear, and to identify careless, unsafe, and reckless driving patterns at the individual and/or company level. 
• Deep data access and insight to turn unplanned downtime (due to unexpected problems) into planned and coordinated downtime, to implement proactive and predictive maintenance, and reduce ongoing impact. 
• Real-time need alerts to unsolicited remote access, tampering, and unauthorized hardware additions in order to achieve truly effective cyber monitoring.

Now, with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and integrated systems that allow for different assets and systems to connect, work together and share, analyze, and action data, technology solutions can help fleets execute predictive maintenance and protect against cyber threats to significantly reduce unplanned downtime and more efficiently coordinate maintenance needs.

Enigmatos is the first fleet-dedicated cyber monitoring, data mining, and vehicle insights solution. By applying its proprietary, AI-based vehicle deep profiling, Enigmatos makes it possible to identify security breaches, address upcoming failures before they occur, and anticipate maintenance tasks to avoid breach of service. Enigmatos empowers you to seize that opportunity, directly protecting against damaging downtime by accessing your vehicles’ data and leveraging it to improve both cybersecurity and operational performance and achieve next-level protection