Lessons Learned from A Decade of Telematics Projects

We love solving hard problems, and this industry delivers. Over the past decade, we've had the privilege of partnering with industry leaders to shape the future of telematics. Below are some highlights from our journey, including some of the key challenges of effecting digital transformation in an industry that’s complex and can be slow to change.

Insurance Innovation

We collaborated with Driveway (acquired by Earnix) to develop a white-label, usage-based insurance program, including mobile applications that track driving behavior in real time. The solution we created powers Farmers Signal application.

Challenge #1: Getting users over the trust hurdle

For a consumer setting especially, it’s not a given that people will install and use an app that allows their auto insurance company to track their driving behavior. And it’s not just about convincing the direct customers (the person setting up the policy)–they at least see the potential financial benefit—but getting all the drivers on the policy (including teen drivers), to willingly participate that’s tough.

To get it right, we partnered with Driveway to deeply understand peoples’ mindset around the experience so we could storyboard, prototype, and test the experience before building and releasing it to the public. Finding a balance between a background app that 

Challenge #2: White labeling is never that simple

The starting point of most white label solutions seems straightforward: change the font, a few colors, logos… how hard can it be? But it’s never that simple, especially if your perspective isn’t what’s the least we can do? but rather, what will feel like an integrated customer experience for the end user and ultimately make the third-party successful?

We knew from the outset that basic configuration-file based style changes wouldn’t hit the mark—that would quickly turn into questions about how to handle feature toggling, varying user flows, and code management for partners with different review processes and release cycles. If we hadn’t anticipated these concerns, we could have ended up in a painful cycle of delivery delays and refactoring work that wasn’t set up to scale.

Challenge #3: B2B2C and Integrating with the Enterprise

While building proper white label support isn’t straightforward, building apps that meet the requirements of large enterprises and integrate with their systems is several orders of magnitude more complicated.

As a startup trying to get large enterprises to launch innovative products, writing good code isn’t enough.

• Presentation and persuasion: Getting disparate internal groups to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and persuade them to work with you to find a path to joint success is critical. It doesn’t matter how good your product is if key stakeholders aren’t your enthusiastic advocates and if you can’t work with internal teams to actually do work on your behalf so that you can be successful.
• Creative problem solving: sometimes dropping CSVs into an SFTP folder is a better solution than trying to get a big company to build a new API endpoint for an unproven project
• Deep listening and understanding scale: working with enterprises means being able to rapidly make sense of how complex (often legacy) systems interoperate, picture how your new solution can fit into the puzzle and what work will be required to get there, and foresee risks and know how to mitigate them.

Fleet Management Excellence

Our partnership with Verizon Connect focused on elevating their user experience and design, helping transform complex telematics data into intuitive interfaces that fleet managers actually enjoy using.

Challenge: Understanding your customers

The importance of gaining an understanding of customers in order to develop useful products that deliver value is a well-worn mantra, but doing that in the fleet management space presents some unique challenges because there so many variables to consider, including things like:

• Size of the organization and the fleet. Some “fleets” are really just a few similar trucks, while other fleets include thousands of vehicles of all sorts, including equipment and other assets other than just tractors and trailers.  
• Job titles and roles aren’t standardized. Depending on where they work, a “Fleet Manager” might be a hands-on mechanic, someone who tracks routine maintenance and repairs, someone who buys equipment, someone who runs dispatch, someone who is truly a general manager, or at a small operation someone who does all of the above. That’s just one job title and a few of the many roles involved in what it takes to operate a fleet.
• Role of the fleet in the business. There are fleet operators whose primary business is managing and operating the vehicles and then there are businesses who have backed their way into maintaining a fleet as a byproduct of facilitating their primary business (the goods or services they are trying to deliver)..
• Fleet usage. At one end of the spectrum you have long-haul and open-ended, one-way routes and at the other end you have local/regional drivers on set routes that return to the same location at the end of each day. And there’s everything in-between, including operators who need to schedule routes to all new locations with unknown dwell times every day. Some fleets are used just as a mode of transportation, others have special considerations (refrigerated trucks for delivering food), and others are the business (construction equipment).   

These are just a few of the dimensions that make “understanding your customer” in the industry complex. Each of these factors influences a customer’s relationship with their fleet and what they need from telematics products. So, researching and modeling how different businesses operate in order to understand why they differ and what differences actually matter as they relate to your product is not as simple as it might be for a broad-appeal consumer product. To design a successful product that serves the unique profile of so many businesses, you need to sift through all those variables, identify the commonalities that should be served by the primary interface, and tease apart what is just a quirk at one company vs. a legitimate use case that you might need to address with secondary features (or even separate products).  

Smart Trailer Technology

We’re currently working with Phillips Connect to build innovative software solutions that leverage their smart connectors for tractor trailers. It’s exciting to  help translate hardware capabilities into powerful software tools that provide actionable insights for drivers and fleet operators.

Challenge: Bluetooth & working with hardware

The promise of IOT is that sensors everywhere means that customers can leverage the power of large amounts of data that they just didn’t have access to before. But ensuring the reliability of the connection to that data is no small task. Bluetooth communication even under ideal conditions is hard to manage, but add to that:

• Signal interference from a growing number of devices in the wild
• Range issues when you’re working with sensors across the length of a tractor-trailer
• Cloud syncing issues when you’re trying to synchronize data with the cloud while vehicles are traveling in and out of cell coverage   
• Hardware and firmware dependencies that may have long lead times to resolve—you can’t just hotfix bugs with a background software update if the underlying issue is that hardware doesn’t support what you want the software to do

All of these mean that what may seem like a simple app on the surface has a lot going on behind the scenes.

Building software that communicates with hardware always presents unique challenges and the idea promoted by some high-profile software companies that you should simply move fast, break things, and recover quickly, isn’t always appropriate.

What Sets Us Apart

Our deep understanding of telematics use cases combined with our expertise in designing and developing intuitive software creates measurable value for our partners. We excel at transforming complex data into actionable intelligence that drives business outcomes.

Looking to elevate your telematics offerings or create new software solutions that unlock the full potential of your hardware? Let's connect and explore how our experience can accelerate your vision.