The headline of this post is easier said than done. All data-driven service providers are aiming to help fleets reduce downtime through better use of truck service information, but the above three points of focus are specifically what Navistar is driving toward, according to Brian Mulshine, director, customer experience, Navistar. I caught up with Brian at TMC 22 in Florida last month, and he walked me through the latest International 360 and OnCommand Connection truck service-related features.
At the show, the OEM announced connected vehicle solutions, Intelligent Fleet Care, and Advanced Preventive Maintenance offerings that use data collected from Navistar’s connected services platform OnCommand Connection to calculate fuel economy and identify the maintenance intervals for each make and model of vehicle in a fleet. Watch the video above for all of his insight.
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Here’s the transcript
Jason Morgan:
Hey, everyone. Jason Morgan, content director for Fleet Equipment. Welcome to Fleet Equipment Unscripted. Believe it or not, I am still going through all the info I got back at TMC. So TMC was held early in March. Lots going on, it was a busy show, and this is kind of what happens. I run around like a madman, and I get a million things, and then I have to work through those later that I find out.
Jason Morgan:
But this is really cool. I got something very cool for you. I stopped by the International booth. I talked to Brian Mulshine, Director of Customer Experience at Navistar.He took me on a tour through the latest service minded offering through On Command Connection and International 360, all the updates that have gone through on the platform, and there’s been a lot. It’s connecting Navistar and International trucks to the service network, and even beyond their name plates in some ways, as their On Command Connection strategy has proven here in the past and going forward. Walking through preventative maintenance planning, increasing the connection between the dealer, the service, the fleet, so you can get a better picture of what’s going on, and manage those trucks in a holistic way. So I stopped by the booth, he took me on the tour. Check out the video again. Here’s Brian Mulshine, Director of Customer Experience at Navistar at TMC this past March.
Brian Mulshine:
Okay. What we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about International 360 and On Command Connection. With our solutions, as we discussed in the past, we have two different solutions. We have intelligent fleet care that bundles it all together. All of our class A trucks come with this at no charge for five years. With that, On Command Connection comes with the vehicle for five years. That gives you visibility to the vehicle health. It’s also an all make solution across all makes and models of vehicles. International 360 is the service communication layer that we’ll go into live in a moment.
Jason Morgan:
Right.
Brian Mulshine:
But really, what we’re doing is we’re talking about making data visible, actionable, easy to understand. So what we want to do is make sure customers keep the trucks on the road at the lowest cost of ownership. Also with our applications, there are any type of computer. They’re cellphone, it’s a responsive design, it’s not an app. So it’ll work on any device.
Jason Morgan:
Okay.
Brian Mulshine:
It’s a mobile device, it’ll work on your computer, any browser. It has three languages already, English, French and Spanish. We actually rolled out all of our dealers in Mexico. By June, all of our locations in Mexico will be live.
Jason Morgan:
Oh, cool.
Brian Mulshine:
I’ve already got Puerto Rico live. So it’s really exciting to see the Latin American market, because we have a global business. And especially within the North American space, a lot of customers come north/south, so we’re able to take care of the experience.
Jason Morgan:
Right.
Brian Mulshine:
Also, we have email and texting in the solution as well. Each month our dealers are… It’s communicating nearly 750,000 emails a month coming in and out of the system. So that’s fantastic.
Jason Morgan:
Yeah. I loved how you had not an app up there in big, bold [inaudible 00:03:02].
Brian Mulshine:
Yeah. Not an app.
Jason Morgan:
Are you feeling a little what, some fatigue? App fatigue, maybe out there?
Brian Mulshine:
Yeah. It’s app fatigue. It’s like the thing is every… I was even asked by some competitive solutions, “Well, what do you have in your solution? What do you have in your app based solution?”. Well, everything. It’s because I don’t want to try to play catch up, we’re on an agile process. We release something every three weeks. You can’t do that on an app. It’s hard to say, “Let’s do a web solution and an app.”, then you got to get Android and Apple. So we’re always up to date with our technology.
Jason Morgan:
Very cool.
Brian Mulshine:
Also on the 360 side, it’s included with our vehicles, and now we’re growing over or 430 fleets just on the 360 side. And some of those fleets are on direct integration. We’re also integrating service tools. This is what’s kind of neat. Our product is an open architecture platform. We want to provide all the details for our customer in one spot. So AutoMeter is a test equipment, but has great data about the vehicle health. So with that, it actually stores and records the information from the test. Also what we’ve done is we’ve integrated Cummins engine company. This is a big one. Our dealers are going to be able to click a button and it builds a work order in Cummins Guidanz.
Jason Morgan:
Okay. That is very cool.
Brian Mulshine:
So the dealer doesn’t have to go in and have a technician create the other work order. What happens is they would have a button, create Cummins Guidanz. They select what job, and it builds a work order automatically in the other systems. So it works really well. Yes sir, that’s a big customer. He uses the stuff.
Brian Mulshine:
So we also say meet the customer where they need to be met. We have our own solutions, our own websites we have off of our 360 portal. And also we have On Command Connection. We also integrate to all of our dealer management systems. Our dealers are integrating their systems, so as soon as they create a work order, it’ll come directly up to 360. And now we’ve just announced recently where we have Trimble Live. Yep. So customers that use Trimble as they build a work order in their Trimble system saying they’re out of service, it’ll auto-magically create a work order in 360 for them. So they don’t have to go to our portal. And larger fleets have said it saves them 12 minutes just in setting up a work order, and then it saves them 10 phone calls per service event. It improves their uptime by nearly 30%, just by having that information. We’ve also taken other customers, like JB Hunt, Werner, and Heartland, and made direct integrations where their system hooks directly to ours. So our dealers are doing updates, it’s updating their system.
Jason Morgan:
So their proprietary in-house systems you’re integrating there.
Brian Mulshine:
Yes.
Jason Morgan:
Very cool.
Brian Mulshine:
Well, I didn’t, they did.
Jason Morgan:
Okay.
Brian Mulshine:
We have an open layer. We provide all the documentation, and then this way we can accelerate our path. What we do is we provide them credentials to our open architecture. We call it a digital service engagement layer, and the customers can go to our layer and start pulling information out and get the information. Really critical for customer experience.
Brian Mulshine:
And then for small customers, we just worked even with a small company called Truckmore. A lot of our dealers, I started seeing used Truckmore for parts marketing and they had a service request button, but it sent the dealer an email. No, that’s crazy. Make it a work order in 360. And they did it. We already have dealers going live. If you go to our dealer’s website, Carolina International, if the customer puts a service request in, it builds a work order in 360 for the customer, and they can see all the updates on their own website at Carolina International or others. Really slick.
Brian Mulshine:
What we’ve done is we’ve reduced where some call centers, they have multiple brands of vehicles. They can all stay in one system, and they don’t have to be in our platform. It’s about the digital engagement layer.
Jason Morgan:
Very cool.
Brian Mulshine:
You know, Trimble, they have about 900 fleets. It’s not no cost to them to have that integration, but really the sweet spot is the maintenance side. That’s the newest piece, where small customer strategy, if they want, they can run our advanced preventative maintenance platform from International that they can go in on fuel economy based schedules and track their maintenance on the vehicle.
Brian Mulshine:
This is an example of Werner Edge. What’s interesting here is our dealers show up with a lightning bolt, and what it does, it indicates if they choose that dealer, they don’t have to make a phone call. They don’t have to. So what happens is they end up using our dealers more, because it makes a digital experience. And that’s all about open layer communication. And also they’ve seen, it went from 12 phone calls to two, reduced their case creation time by 10 minutes, and also increased their, 26% increase to connected locations. So they’re going there more frequent because it gives them a better experience.
Jason Morgan:
Very cool.
Jason Morgan:
Okay, hi everyone. Sorry, I’m back and sorry to cut in. But at this point in the interview, Brian jumped into some very specific examples of the International 360 dashboard. That was very cool, but also very, let’s just say sensitive. This was not a test case, this wasn’t a demo fleet. It was actual fleet information, and I don’t want to put anyone on blast. So I want to just give you an idea and overview of what we walked through here, right? So he went into the International 360 dashboard. He logged in as a dealer, he selected a customer, so if I’m a dealer, then I have my customer. And it showed any truck down situation that fleet was dealing with. It showed its location, its dwell time, all the communication of fault code data associated with it. So within the International 360 dashboard, he walked me through how they track maintenance.
Jason Morgan:
You could see what vehicles are overdue for maintenance, like an oil change. You can see the truck’s status, if it’s on its way, if it’s waiting for a bay, if it’s in service. And that’s on a single truck. And then Brian zoomed out, and you could see a whole holistic view of that fleet. For example, the customer example that Brian showed, showed that six trucks were overdue for its PMs, 13 were due soon, and one truck wasn’t communicating. And for that one, it meant that the telematics device wasn’t working.
Jason Morgan:
So this is the kind of visibility and even actionability that it offers. All that information was presented in the now tried and true red, yellow, green kind of dashboard design that calls the user to make an action to do something. Clear that red indicator, the red. So those six trucks that were overdue for PMs, that was in red. The 13 that were coming up soon, those were in yellow. So it gave you a visual indication of, okay, where do I start and what’s my pecking order and what do I deal with today?
Jason Morgan:
Now, keep in mind, this is all visible to the International dealer. So let’s cut back over to Brian for his take on the dealer’s role in the fleet service process.
Jason Morgan:
What’s the appetite overall for dealers wanting to basically help manage fleet maintenance? Is there a lot of education that needs to happen? Are there some that get it, some that don’t? How do you go about doing this?
Brian Mulshine:
Some are better dealers. What they do is they get somebody that has really good customer service skills, and we actually do training. We have job descriptions and training to help them onboard. And they usually start small, but what’s happening is some smaller customers, they just support them and give them the tools to help manage the business better. So it’s a great solution for dealers that want to help their local fleet customers a little bit more.
Jason Morgan:
Very cool. Well, thanks for walking us through.
