Speech by Mr. Stefan Buchner, Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks
I’ll focus on the topic ‘connectivity’ and will explain how logistics sector can use networked truck to become even more efficient. I also want to show how we are driving this forward at Mercedes-Benz Trucks, with very specific service packages.
Let’s briefly turn to the starting situation. We are not starting from scratch. We have long concerned ourselves with this topic. Our focal point when it comes to connectivity is FleetBoard. It is under this name that we have consolidated our telematic services. FleetBoard helps throughout the entire transport process. It supports fleet schedulers: via FleetBoard, they have their fleet displayed on a monitor in real time, and are able to plan its movements to best effect. Using the Dispo-Pilot they can inform their drivers about any changes to the cargo, loading point or customer.
FleetBoard also supports the driver, via the driver.app, he is informed about his driving style and how he can make improvements. Already today, this is saving our customers up to 15 percent in diesel fuel and wearing parts. We have been on the market with FleetBoard for over 15 years and very successfully too. We have around 6000 fleet customers in 40 countries and we have networked more than 180,000 vehicles. It may be surprising that these also include six other brands. This is because we quite deliberately designed FleetBoard as an open system. We want our customers to use FleetBoard for their entire fleet, also in cases where they have a fleet with various brands.
FleetBoard is by no means a start-up. On the contrary it is a thoroughly tried and tested, dependable system. We already use it to help our customers to employ their trucks more efficiently. But in the future we will be offering our customers much more than this. I want to present two new services which we will be launching in the next few months. Both of them use real-time data from the truck. Big Data is another one of those buzzwords. Many talk about it but we make very specific use of the real time data from our trucks.
Our first new innovation is called Mercedes-Benz Uptime and will be available as of the IAA show in September. Mercedes-Benz Uptime minimises the downtimes of a truck and thereby maximises its availability. This is of decisive importance to our customers because even the best truck is of no use if it is for some reason not ready for the road.
Let’s take a closer look at this new service. Mercedes-Benz Uptime helps our customers in three ways. Firstly with minor servicing jobs which customers can carry out themselves. With MercedesBenz Uptime they can immediately see whether the tyre pressure is too low or the AdBlue or oil needs topping up, for example. So they can take the necessary action before it becomes a problem. Secondly, with repairs that must be carried out by a workshop. With Mercedes-Benz Uptime, customers can optimally plan such workshop appointments and for example ensure that replacement parts are available in good time.
Thirdly, Mercedes-Benz Uptime also helps with acute technical problems when on the road. This is an area that is of the great importance to our customers. When a fully loaded truck breaks down and fails to reach its destination, things get very expensive. That is why we have always given our customers very good support in the past. Our 24-Hour Service resolves over 80 percent of all immobility cases directly at the roadside. Now Mercedes-Benz Uptime offers our customers a great deal more. Instead of just reacting to breakdowns as before, we can take preventive action and avoid breakdowns with Uptime. The connected truck can detect the signs of an imminent problem and reports the problem in good time so that together with the customer, we can prevent a breakdown from happening.
How does this work precisely? The truck is connected to our Mercedes-Benz service network. This means that via 400 sensors the truck sends real-time data about its technical status to our servers, the tyres, engine, cooling system etc. The servers continuously analyse the data and detect typical fault patterns. When the software finds that a truck looks likely to suffer a breakdown, the system immediately alerts our Customer Assistance Centre in Maastricht. It also informs our colleagues there on how the impending breakdown can be prevented.
The service personnel then immediately make contact with the customer and explain the problem by telephone. They estimate how long the truck can still remain on the road, and whether it will be able to deliver its load before visiting a workshop. This is because the team in Maastricht knows which service centres are nearby and whether they have the capacity available at short notice. The personnel even check whether the workshop has all the necessary parts in stock. When all the facts are known, we recommend a course of action to the customer. But the final decision on what should be done always lies with the customer. If he opts to make for a workshop, the experts there receive all the important information in advance. This means that they can make perfect preparations for the repair. That saves time.
Thus Mercedes-Benz Uptime offers an unprecedented level of quality when it comes to availability. It enables customers to noticeably reduce their downtimes and therefore their costs. I think it is also clear that our new MercedesBenz Uptime service is truly a pioneering achievement. We are proud that we are the first manufacturer able to generate instructions for action automatically from real-time vehicle data because the know-how and many years of experience of our best service engineers have gone into it. Without their expertise we would not have been able to develop precise evaluation methods of our Uptime service. We also put the findings we obtain from Uptime to good use ourselves. The data are continuously analysed by specialists in our plant in Wörth. This tells us what changes we can make in development to prevent faults in the future.
We now come to the second innovation with which we aim to provide our customers with real added value. We’re launching an app store of the kind all are familiar with from the smartphone. Our app store is naturally called FleetBoard Store for apps and will go online at the beginning of 2017. It will be a kind of iTunes for truck transport. Our FleetBoard Store will become the central platform for our industry. It will be the place where customers can find all the apps they need for their business. That’s because our Fleetboard Store will be open. Open to anyone who has good ideas about how we can make road freight transport even more efficient. We extend an invitation to all software experts to contribute useful apps. We also invite logistics specialists. Or bodybuilders: For example, they can design an app to allow extremely simple control of a tipper. At the IAA show we will provide further details of our FleetBoard Store.
As one can see, what we announce, we also deliver. In March, at our Campus Connectivity event, we promised that we would continuously bring out new connectivity services to make our customers even more efficient and that our platforms would remain open to third-party providers. We’re now delivering on those promises. With the FleetBoard Store for apps we are creating a central repository for all good ideas leading to more efficiency in truck transport. Our customers can quite easily benefit from this pool of ideas. With Mercedes-Benz Uptime, we’re making sure that our customers benefit from the maximum possible availability of our trucks, which means that they are on the road and earn money.
Connectivity is definitely an area with a great potential to bring about change for our industry and for logistics as a whole. At present we are unable to estimate the full extent of the effects. But we can already see one thing clearly, we can use it to make our products a great deal better still and that’s what we are doing. We supply trucks our customers can depend upon in line with our slogan “Mercedes-Benz – Trucks you can trust.” Always online, always on the road, we are making the truck even more efficient. Not just tomorrow, but already today.