Scott Blair, senior digital program manager for Lynx Fleet telematics, a platform by cold chain transport company Carrier Transicold, has a story that convinced one customer of the value of telematics built into transport refrigeration units.
“They had a very high value seafood-based cargo sitting in a parking lot. The truck had detached and the refrigeration unit was still running, but they couldn’t unload it at the time. Well, somebody went out and turned it off. In the middle of summer — in the South,” he says.
“They didn’t discover it until a couple of weeks had gone by.”
Blair adds that, whenever he’s having a bad day, he tells himself it could be worse.
“I could be the guy who had to go in there and clean that out,” he says.
Ever after that, the customer was interested in understanding where their equipment was and knowing the state of their cargo, Blair says.
Now, more shippers who rely on the cold chain, including the fresh produce industry, have increased options when it comes to knowing and controlling the state of their cargo.
Updates to Lynx Fleet Telematics
In mid-July, Carrier Transicold launched an update to its Lynx Fleet telematics platform, what Blair calls a fleet management system. The update includes new analytic and diagnostic capabilities, according to the company.
Key among these updates are:
- The “TRU Health” feature, which constantly collects performance information on equipped transport refrigeration units such as active alarms, battery voltage, fuel levels and other details. These are used to develop a TRU health score for the unit. The feature displays the scores across a fleet on a single dashboard.
- A new module that supports up to five temperature sensors for multi-zone reefers.
- The ability to support GPS and sensors for dry vans and other equipment, including TRUs built by other manufacturers.
While Lynx Fleet was developed specifically for Carrier Transicold TRUs, which come “Lynx Fleet ready” with telemetric hardware already installed, Blair says the move toward support of non-Carrier equipment is not common for telematic programs, but he adds the technology has been evolving alongside the industry.
“A lot of companies like to have multiple sources for their suppliers and transport refrigeration is no different,” he explains. “Some fleets are heavily mixed with carriers and other manufacturers, but they still want to know where and how their assets are doing, but they don’t want to go to three or four different systems. They like to be able to have it in one place, so it’s becoming more common now.”
The company says customers with fleets including different vehicle types and TRU suppliers can track location, reefer temperatures and more using the Lynx Fleet platform. It added that the update’s new API tool kit allows Lynx Fleet data to be shared with most major transportation management systems.
The Why Behind the Update
Like many software development teams, the Lynx Fleet telematics team uses the agile system. This approach to project management is an iterative, adaptive style that ideally delivers a usable product rapidly while continuing to fine-tune the product to customer needs.
Blair says being agile “allows us to recognize and integrate customer input quickly.” That’s how and why the most recent Lynx Fleet update happened, he adds.
“It’s a natural evolution,” Blair says. “This next-gen platform really helps us put something in place that gives us room to grow. We’re not just looking at what we do now; we’re looking at what we’re going to do in two, three, four, five years from now.”
Looking to that future of telematics needs, Blair says he sees the industry at an inflection point when it comes to connectivity devices and programs. Everything, from the stove and vacuum droid in consumers’ homes to cars and reefers on the road, is increasingly connected and trackable. The volume of data, Blair says, is getting overwhelming.
“I think that we are, right now, asking ‘How do you turn all of this data into actionable information? How do you give people information that they can base decisions on? Decisions that helped them run their business. Decisions that help them reduce their costs and increase their efficiencies. How can we do that?’” he says.
Blair says the new features, like TRU Health, give owners more control to go along with the greater volume of data about what is happening with the TRU itself.
“If you’re an operation that’s moving products across the country, knowing the health of that unit before you spend all the time to cool it and to load it and to put it out onto the road, you have some level of confidence that it’s going to be OK until it gets to where it’s going,” he says.
But TRUs aren’t just employed in keeping products cold while getting them to where they need to be. They also get used as short-term cold storage. Blair notes
that “we see that a lot in a lot of places, especially in farmers markets and those kind of settings.”
“Those trailers will sit for a long period of time, and if they’re not connected to a tractor or the telematics unit is on the tractor, there’s no way of understanding or knowing the conditions or what’s going on inside of that trailer, which is where all the valuable freight is,” explains Stephen Petit of SiefkesPetit Communications, which represents Carrier Transicold.
“So, having telematics on the TRU is a benefit in terms of cluing you into what’s happening where the freight is as opposed to just tracking the tractor or the driver and their mobile device,” Petit says.
Data: Whose Is It and What To Do With It?
As more and more data is being generated, there are more opportunities for questions about data ownership and handling. Blair says the Lynx Fleet telematics team has had discussions with its customer base about concerns such as how long data gets held and who gets to see it.
“We take every single one of those inquiries and those desires very seriously, and we accommodate everything that’s humanly possible to alleviate those,” he says. “Our stance is: If you own that trailer, you own the data that goes with that asset. If you have a policy for how you want that data handled, we will abide by that.”
Petit says having the data to offer to potential customers is beneficial for trucking companies.
“Even a small food distributor can have requirements when it comes to data and being able to verify things like time in and time out or detention time or waiting times and certainly temperature — there are all kinds of compliance issues,” he says. “Having telematics today that go beyond location and temperature and are able to get down to more of a remote monitoring and control setup and sharing that data as you wish with your customers — those
are pretty important advantages for a carrier today.”
Blair says the main point behind Carrier Transicold having Lynx Fleet and putting out the recent update is “really about serving our customers and allowing them to make critical business decisions with the best data available.”
“We live in this world now where there are answers in the data that come from these assets to questions that we haven’t even thought to ask yet,” he continues. “That’s the purpose: How do we help you? How do we give you actionable information? We designed and built those TRUs, so we’re best suited to give you those answers.”
