Bsquare partnered with Kenworth, the global leader in heavy-duty trucking, in order to help its customers maximize fleet uptime and speed repairs and warranty processing. Kenworth utilizes the DataV Predict and DataV Repair applications in order to implement predictive failure and adaptive diagnostics within their operations.
For fleet operators, unplanned downtime is expensive, disruptive, and potentially tarnishes service reputations. These expenses cut directly into revenue mile profits. With an eye towards reducing unplanned downtime to zero, Kenworth sought the best way to improve the uptime and reliability of their vehicles, starting with their MX-13 engines.
For decades, engines have displayed warning lights for a variety of conditions but these failed to provide drivers with sufficient information to determine whether the issue was an imminent failure that would disable the truck or a minor condition. Service centers used equipment connected directly to the truck that could help diagnose a single condition, but didn’t take into consideration related events or conditions that might accelerate meantime-to-repair (MTTR) and get the truck back on the road more quickly. This manual approach ate into uptime as technicians spent hours troubleshooting and fixing problems. Finally, lengthy and imprecise warranty processing resulted in high warranty costs for Kenworth and lengthy reimbursement periods for its third-party service centers.
To create a holistic system designed to continually improve truck uptime, Bsquare worked collaboratively with Kenworth over a period of months to fully understand their goals and explore what was possible with Bsquare’s DataV IoT software stack. Several requirements emerged from this collaboration:
Tying in to the existing telematics system that collected and transmitted engine data to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud instance, Bsquare used its DataV software stack to implement predictive failure capabilities and data-driven diagnostics.
Kenworth has been able to become proactive rather than reactive, and tie multiple relevant data sources together with business logic to create a user-friendly, holistic IoT system that scales to hundreds of thousands of trucks. Fleet operators and drivers can now schedule truck service at times and locations that minimize disruption thanks to the insight provided by predictive failure analytics. Revenue miles increase, providing faster ROI on truck investment. Service centers experience multiple benefits: