IN FOCUS / A1A SOFTWARE
TAMING TELEMATICS Tawnia Weiss, President A1A Software provides five tips for taming the “wild west” of data collection and effectively putting telematics data to work. TAWNIA WEISS is President of A1A Software which creates software and interfaces for the heavy construction industry. The company got its start by developing the well-known lift planning program called 3D Lift Plan, and it now offers other business management tools specific to the needs of crane and construction equipment owners. Telematics is a data collection system that allows owners of machinery to view the current operation and function of their assets. Its true value is when you take the data and turn it into useful information. Owners can then make decisions to optimise their fleet. When the data is shared with the OEM and is kept for the lifetime of the asset, it allows owners and OEMs to partner in analysing this data. Engineers for the OEM and maintenance personnel for the owner can better predict and make adjustments to improve productivity and reliability of the asset. In some ways, telematics development is like the wild west. As the technology and its application has evolved, there was not much consistency from manufacturer
to manufacturer or machine to machine in what data was measured. The Association of Equipment Management Professionals and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers developed a standard that identified 19 consistent 19 data points and 42 fault code points to be measured, bringing some order to the “wild west.” In 2016, that standard was published by the International Standards Organization. The ISO mixed-fleet telematics standard specifies the communication schema designed to provide mobile machinery status data from a telematics provider’s server to third-party client applications via the internet. Standardisation reduces the amount of code that software developers have to write. That time and cost savings can be passed onto the user. However, cranes in their complexity, require far more data points to be collected. AEMP and AEM are currently working on a similar standard for cranes. According to an update published on AEMP’s website in September 2018 from the AEMP Technology Committee, AEMP’s Advanced Standards Committee
This chart provides a comparison of the number of standard data points currently identified by AEMP and AEM with the number of data points that can be collected by a crane OEM telematics system, in this case the Link-Belt Pulse system. 54 / CAL May 2019
Tawnia Weiss President A1A Software.
in collaboration with AEM, is in process of “finalising data points for the upcoming crane telematics data standard.” Until that time, telematics for cranes have either been developed by the OEM or customised from third-party systems to meet the needs of crane users. iCraneTrax was the first, and is currently the only, cross-platform crane telematics system available. It provides a portal for Link-Belt crane owners to access Link-Belt Pulse and for Manitowoc crane owners to use Manitowoc’s CraneStar. As proprietary telematics systems, these OEMs each feature their own exclusive data points. A1A’s aftermarket GPS and telematics features are not exclusive to these crane brands. But when combined with access to these OEM telematics systems, iCraneTrax makes for a very robust and user-friendly tool. Although the integration of telematics in construction equipment is not new, it’s still often a misunderstood tool. Regardless of the kind of equipment you have or the telematics system you use, these five things are common ways you can put your data to work. Alert: Like the Fitbit or other activity
