Predictive maintenance buzz continues to swirl within conversations about data, connectivity and what it means to a fleet’s service network. As nebulous at the technology sounds, it’s far more grounded than peering into a smoke-filled crystal ball or pulling playing cards from a deck and trying to guess them. Troy Clarke, Navistar president and chief executive officer, brought the idea back down to earth with a simple explanation of how Navistar is approaching the development of its Live Action Plans—its predictive maintenance solution that the OEM plans to back up with warranty support once it’s launched. According to Clarke, comes down to answer two questions:
“Can you predict that that truck has a higher probability of breaking down? Then, can you intervene? Can you take an unscheduled event, and turn it into a scheduled event? That’s how we talk about it.”
As a fleet service manager, you likely have that sinking feeling that you’ll see a specific truck sooner than you like as it’s rolling out of a bay. It’s driven by years of experience and intuition. Predictive maintenance solutions aren’t so different—they’re enabled by years upon years of historic fault code data and increasingly intelligent algorithms that run complex probability models. A predictive maintenance solution like Navistar’s Live Action Plans aim to give you more information to make better service decisions.
“It all comes back to: How do I do a better job pulling this data together in an efficient fashion to support my service network?” Clarke said. “Think about it like the medical field. Say I’m on vacation; I have pain and I go to a hospital. The first thing the doctor wants to do is get on the phone with my doctor to get my medical records. It was a big effort to digitize medical records so that they can be available more readily.
“Now think about a truck breakdown—it’s the exact same thing. You have this extremely sophisticated truck that has a maintenance record. It’s got a life of its own. The truck had an appendectomy in Phoenix, but it’s actually from Rochester, Minn. The ability for our service provider to call up the entire maintenance history that truck is powerful.”
“It all comes back to: How do I do a better job pulling this data together in an efficient fashion to support my service network?”
—Troy Clarke, Navistar president and chief executive officer
The trucks of today and tomorrow are connected. The data is streaming off of the trucks, and OEMs and third-party service providers are making the service data readily available. Integrating the historic service data on your trucks into your service software would enable a host of solutions beyond predictive maintenance—from parts inventory needs to a clearer picture of truck lifecycle management. You could use it to streamline service approvals. They say that history repeats itself, but if you have a clear picture of what your truck has been through, you can better plan for the service challenges it may face down the road. And that’s what predictive, or prognostic maintenance solutions are all about: Not reducing service events, but reducing unplanned service events.
“Trucks aren’t on the road 24 hours a day,” Clarke said. “There’s plenty of time to fix a truck. You just don’t want to fix it while you’re doing work with it, right?”
