SAN DIEGO. After more than three years of development work on its next generation wireless system for trucking, Qualcomm’s Wireless Business Solutions (QWBS) has called fleet customers together for a users’ conference to kick off a series of public events that will lead to a commercial launch for the OmniVision system in the Fall.
In addition to previewing the new system for approximately 100 fleets, QWBS has also announced two new applications for its current OmniTRACS wireless system – a critical event recorder and a data-mining business intelligence platform.
OmniVision represents “a grounds-up design effort,” said QWBS president Joan Waltman, “but we also had to remember that we have loyal customers who have been using our original system for up to 20 years, and we had to be sure that they could migrate to the new one on their own timeline and without any disruption to their businesses.”
Not only will OmniVision be backwards compatible with the company’s OmniTRACS and OmniExpress system, but it has been designed so that fleets can mix all three systems seamlessly, she told FleetOwner. “We recognize that this (wireless) technology is embedded into the businesses of our customers. The new system offers many advantages, but fleets can try it first (in one portion of their operation) and choose the upgrade path they want. Of course, we’ll continue to support OmniTRACS for as long as fleets want us to.”
As part of the redesign of both its hardware and services, QWBS is expanding application development for the new system as well as broadening relationships with third parties to develop other new applications and services, Waltman said.
The Critical Event Reporting (CER) application released at the users conference will automatically record hard-braking and other driver-performance incidents. Records can be sent back to fleets in near real-time over the wireless network as well as stored for retrieval at a later time where it can be used to reconstruct and review driver performance.
DataVisor is a server-based platform that will allow fleets to search and analyze information collected by the SensorTRACS/400 performance monitoring application from vehicle sensor and data bus inputs. Organizing that data into “a flexible, scalable, centralized data warehouse,” the new platform will allow individual users to customize data views and reports with a browser, according to Norm Ellis, Qualcomm vp & gm for transportation and logistics. Possible uses include tracking operational trends by fleet operation, identifying top performers and analyzing specific performance factors.
