Each year, Assured Telematics drives innovation through its "What I'd Like to See" campaign. This proactive campaign encourages customers to contribute ideas for new applications or integrations, with the ultimate aim of streamlining fleet management across the Geotab platform.
One notable contributor to this initiative was Brent Ellis, the Vice President of Business Systems & Processes at Decker Truck Line, Inc, a powerhouse in trucking logistics. Brent shared two groundbreaking ideas that have since been developed and launched, demonstrating the power of customer-driven innovation and Assured Telematics’ commitment to listening to its customers.
Explore Brent’s thought process behind these suggestions by watching the video interview or reading the article below. This dialogue not only exemplifies the potential of customer feedback in shaping the industry, but also illustrates the remarkable advancements made possible through the synergy of Assured Telematics and its dedicated customers.
Hello, I'm here with Brent Ellis. I'm so excited to be interviewing the winner of our "What I'd Like to See" contest. At Assured Telematics we're always interested in receiving feedback and suggestions from customers.
So in this year's "What I'd Like to See" campaign, Brent, you had two valuable suggestions - a new speeding report and unverified logs reminder application to be integrated with the Geotab platform, which we have now developed. So could you please take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us how you came up with these ideas?
New Speeding Report
I'm Brent Ellis, Vice President of Business Systems and Processes here at Decker Truck Line. I suggested this year the speeding report. Safety is a big concern for us here, and we have always monitored speeding in some way or another. Sometimes it's been a manual process, sometimes it's been a combination of a vendor and a manual process. But at the end of the day, we want to be able to score a driver based on their percentage of speeding and several other factors.
Geotab obviously has that data readily available, but we needed something a little more than just a notification when a driver's speeding. We needed a report that would show us at the individual driver level, the number of events, the distance traveled, the distance speeding, and all this kind of stuff. With the new report, we can actually get down to a granular level and say, look, in the last seven days you drove 2000 miles, but for 300 of those miles, you were more than X miles an hour over the speed limit.
And of those 300, maybe 40 of those, you were more than 10 miles an hour over the speed limit or whatever the case is. Being able to actually tell the driver the distance that they sped and put some type of value with that, that's from here to Atlanta or from here to Chicago, whatever the case may be, that gives them a little better picture and a little more insight as to just how severe the situation is. It's been huge in the amount of manual labor that it saved internally with applying formulas and doing calculations and all this stuff in a spreadsheet.
Unverified Logs Reminder
Unverified logs are our number one CSA violation and when a driver is pulled for an inspection or just pulling in a weigh station, when the officer asks to see their current log and they haven't verified, well that's a trigger that they probably haven't verified yesterday's either.
So they're going to check eight days back and you can really rack up some points quickly. If a driver hasn't verified in the last seven or eight days, you're looking at 21 to 24 points for seven or eight days. So what we did was basically just used technology that's already there in Geotab with the reminders, but out of the box, the driver gets a reminder at sign-in to Geotab. They're only required to sign out and back in once every 14 days, so they're limited on the number of reminders they get.
We were able to leverage that same notification on a much more frequent scale so that anytime they're not in drive status, if they have unverified logs, they'll receive a reminder at status change and then it'll be a little bit persistent until they go and take a look at it. If you put it in front of a driver, more often than not, they're going to take care of it. So both have been huge.
The Assured Telematics Advantage
There are so many things that ATI already has, things that I've said for years, if we could just get this data together, and not necessarily from Geotab, because we're still fairly new to Geotab, we've only been on that for roughly three years now. But just over time, over the years, if we could just get a report that showed this or this and it's kind of been eye-opening, working with Frank and the team. Because day one, the first conversation that Frank and I had, I said, if we had a report that showed this, and he was like, “Oh wait”, and he shares his screen and he's already got it.
And there are so many of those things that they already have. And what I love about working with Frank and everybody at ATI is that they, 9 times out of 10, they already have something that's fairly close. And if it needs to be tweaked a little bit, it's usually a matter of minutes and it's done and you're good to go. I've told Frank several times that he should probably change the name from Assured Telematics to Awesome Telematics. Because the entire team is always ready to do anything that's needed and it's top-notch.
Inspired to make a difference in the way you manage our fleet? Assured Telematics invites you to be a part of our continuous innovation journey through our "What I'd Like to See" campaign. Your unique insights could be the next big thing that revolutionizes fleet management on the Geotab platform. Contact Assured Telematics to learn more or provide your recommendations.
"What I love about working with Frank and everybody at ATI is that they, 9 times out of 10, they already have something that's fairly close. And if it needs to be tweaked a little bit, it's usually a matter of minutes and it's done and you're good to go. I've told Frank several times that he should probably change the name from Assured Telematics to Awesome Telematics. Because the entire team is always ready to do anything that's needed and it's top-notch."
