page 4 fleet Vans and Trucks December/January 2009/10 www.fleetbusiness.com

telematIcs project

Charlie Guthro is the director, equipment ser-vices for Hydro One, which operates a fleet of some 6,000 pieces of equipment ranging from ATV’s to helicopters. The fleet includes about 3,900 utility, trouble trucks (emergency and spe-cial response vehicles) and light vehicles.

His internal customers at Hydro One include: grid operations (transmission distribution mainte-nance, and transformer stations), customer oper-ations (forestry, poles and wires across Ontario) and engineering and construction departments responsible for new construction.

A very nomadic fleet by necessity, with work programs changing rapidly sometimes day-to-day requires that a lot of people and equipment have to be moved quickly. The ability to know in real time where all units of the Fleet are at any given moment, what the immediate application is and what it’s costing are constant requirements and a major challenge.

Hydro One’s everyday need to manage real time information was the catalyst for a telematics program. Guthro and his team built a business case around the value of a tailored telematics system for Hydro One.

The team first assured buy-in within the orga-nization to acknowledge how a telematics pro-gram would compliment the asset management side of the business. Concept approved and fund-ing secured, a Request for Proposal was issued.

Vendor submissions were reviewed and short listed. Presentations were requested to dem-onstrate what a proposed system would bring Hydro One on a partnership basis. Hydro One needed a system which would deliver, not simply re-invent a costly wheel. ARI in conjunction with WebTech were the winning team.

Next, meetings with the team to establish priority measurements most important to Hydro One were conducted. The top criteria were: idling, discretionary and required, such as oper-ating boom truck equipment using engine driven power take off, utilization, kilometres travelled, fuel consumed and vehicle location.

For the pilot project, 500 vehicles were select-ed to represent a broad cross section of the fleet. These included tracked units, utility bucket trucks, and supervisor and general staff vehi-cles.

Guthro recalls, “We looked at a variety of pilots, in some areas it’s about optimizing where the vehicles are, in others understanding comple-ment and how much work is done. With multiple people driving multiple vehicles it can be hard to get a handle on what is the best complement required and the project is a way to get a real-time handle on when your vehicles are running, when they’re stopped, when they’re idling and variety of other behaviours.

“We wanted a way to measure the value we

were getting out of the initiatives that we were implementing through the fleet; anti-idling, driv-er development, technology testing, what are the real values when you purchase hybrids, things like that. You need the appropriate information to manage that.”

Installation of GPS locators in vehicles required for capturing and transmitting data presented some unique challenges recounts Guthro: “The installation process was probably more com-plicated for us than it might be for the average fleet because our equipment is moving all across the province and doesn’t always come back to a home base at night. You have to understand that the primary barrier to us doing any work is that we have to impact the customer through power outages and making sure that we are minimiz-ing the impacts to the customers that need the power.

“So we are very cognizant of minimizing down-time. The vendor arranged for installer staff to travel around the province to install units quickly in short time frames so that we ensured we were not impacted in our ability to provide service. It’s a very mobile fleet that you have to catch up to and we worked with both ARI and WebTech to get the installation done.”

In addition to scheduling and locating vehicles, the characteristics of the vehicles involved in the Pilot Project presented challenges as to how best and where on the vehicles to install locators and information feeds.

“There were some complications due to the fact that hardware was going into some unique pieces of equipment that traditionally you wouldn’t see

Like any utility fleet, Hydro One’s diverse range of vehicles frequently must operate in remote, severe and sometimes hazard-ous conditions. Employee safety and secure vehicle operations while working at keeping lights and power operating in Ontario is the priority. A recently formed partnership between Hydro One, fleet management provider ARI and WebTech, which engineered specific telematics processes for the operation, was constructed to enhance driver and vehicle safety, increase productivity and cost effectiveness, and identify possibilities for reducing the fleets carbon footprint.

productivity, driver safety and the environment are Targeted in hydro one’s pilot Telematics/gps project

The Detailed Report Option Allows For Effective Route Optimization of ‘Trouble Trucks.’

Charlie Guthro, Director, Equipment Services.

www.fleetbusiness.com fleet Vans and Trucks December/January 2009/10 page 5

telematIcs project

telematics being installed on, like our off-road tracked vehicles. There were some units we piloted that weren’t compatible with the plug and play nature of the hardware so we went with alternatives, but at the end of the day the process was a success.”

Most units in the designated test fleet were appropriately dealt with within three months from the start. But, according to Guthro, there were some stragglers that had to be caught up with and that pushed the entire installation time to six months.

In most cases the system utilizes cellular tech-nology for information transmission. However, Hydro One’s off road units must employ a com-bination of cellular and satellite feeds because of poor cell coverage in many areas of operation. Varying by unit and information type, data from the vehicles is sent to WebTech at appropriate intervals.

Guthro explains, “The system has a suite of options you can pick from and we are experi-menting to tailor those options based on the needs of different equipment. It can be active or passive reporting, we have a combination of both. Active reporting is critical for effective route optimization and trouble truck response, those are the units that are dispatched for week-end calls, night calls, and we want to know where they are. Passive reporting is better suited to units we need to find for maintenance, some of our off road tracked units can be 20 kilometres or more in the bush. Some pieces of equipment have a lot of regulated, required mandatory inspections and maintenance that must be done and because the vehicles are off in the bush, in different locations or remote areas, the system enables us to know where they are, who has the unit, who moved the unit, and answer where did the unit go?

It’s really important, it’s not just a matter of an oil change for a pickup truck. We have mobile mechanics and satellite work centres so once we

find the vehicle we decide if it’s better to send it to our local repair facility or send a mobile mechanic to do the work in the field.”

The telematics system transmits data from the vehicle electronic control unit (ECU) regarding kilometre readings, fuel consumption and diag-nostic trouble codes to ARI who manage the data for Hydro One. The data is available over vari-ous time periods, year-to-date, monthly, weekly and in some cases daily. Within the Vehicle Performance Report the data is split by vehicle type, more specifically on road and off road. The base data can be customized within the report to accommodate Hydro One’s requests. The ability to manage data at this level allows the tailoring of precise service programs for the vehicles as opposed to simply using broad measurements of time or reported kilometres.

Guthro acknowledges the challenge to the

service providers, “We openly admit that we provided them with a significant challenge not only because we have multiple types of vehicles in multiple situations, performing multiple jobs, we wanted different types of information from different units so we let ARI and WebTech know their work was cut out for them.”

As in any new system there was a learning curve and the Hydro One team has had to learn to trust the information from the system as opposed to the “old” way of gathering data.

“What the GPS telematics gives us is the abil-ity to manage real time information as opposed to anecdotal assumptions,” says Guthro.

As the Pilot continues, Guthro is consider-ing its expansion. “As we get further down the pilot project in understanding the value that this brings, I think that we’ll do a better job of under-standing where it best fits and we certainly see it continuing to grow. Do we anticipate that our entire fleet will be on it? No. It will certainly be bigger but we don’t know to what degree. The key issue is that we want to positively impact the behaviour of 5,000 to 6,000 operators in a way that we can create a safer environment for everyone to operate in and we think that GPS telematics can help us do that.

“We feel the success in any fleet green program is the combination of employee engagement and technology and the hundreds of staff that have signed up as green fleet champions help us to develop and promote our program every step of the way.

“GPS telematics provides us with the evidence we need to explain to people why we are doing the things we do. Whereas before we could only say, ‘we think we idle too much,’ ‘we think we drive too fast;’ now, we don’t have only the thoughts, there is actual evidence. In our opinion, that’s the best way to change behaviour. You put the evidence in front of really skilled people who will buy into the process if you give them the right information.”

Multiple Vehicles Doing Multiple Jobs in Multiple Locations Added to the Challenge of Implementing the GPS Telematics Program.

Vehicles in Remote Locations Can be Tracked to Ensure Timely Inspections and Maintenance.