In 2016, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved the mixed-fleet telematics standard submitted by the Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP) and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM). In the six years since, the number of custom-built and third-party solutions integrating mixed-fleet data outstrips the success rate within equipment organizations themselves.
The move to a standard originated within a group of end users, yet few end users are using the standard.
Rental firms are the exception. They own a diverse range of machine types, and many now market fleet-management benefits to their customers, so a standard is key to their service strategy. Some of those companies, though, remain frustrated by the inability to smoothly integrate data, even with the ISO standard in place.
One rental manager said that the manufacturers (OEM) in his fleet are not using the same version of the standard. Another said fields that would allow more data to be integrated have not been added since the original 19 covered in ISO 15143.
Most of the major earthmoving OEMs have years of experience with telematics data transmission—many of them worked alongside AEMP in developing the standard and helped enlist AEM in bringing it to ISO. But the reason equipment managers pushed for a standard was so that every machine brand that had telematics capability would feed into the same system, not just the major OEMs. They recognized the value of the data and knew that all OEMs would ultimate embrace the technology.
This is happening. In fact, ISO working groups are currently working on data from mobile elevating work platforms and cranes.
But the standard is stalled at 19 data points. The ISO update in 2020—ISO/TS 15143-3:2020—added a capability to add data fields. Any fleet wanting to integrate data point #20 can. According to the ISO working group, however, nobody has. It is simply a matter of testing the data flow between the fleet and the manufacturer.
AEMP itself has not addressed the issue for several years. Perhaps data has taken a back seat as fleets have worked through the pandemic. Perhaps the rush to electric has pulled manufacturers’ resources from machine data technology.
In response to the latter, fleets will want to track battery health via machine data. To the former, more than $500 million is coming for infrastructure. As inflation threatens to deflate the real value of those dollars, organizations that deploy equipment to build will need to squeeze every cent of cost-value into equipment operations.
Regardless of why we’re six years later with slow integration, the time to restart the push toward a standardized flow of machine data is now.
