January 6, 2021

Integrating Data from an Infinite Number of Partners

Over the course of the last 92 years, Phillips has built strong partnerships with a wide variety of companies including truck and trailer manufacturers, component makers, manufacturers of auxiliary equipment, and many others.

Phillips has established such strong relationships that its products are on 100% of new North American truck builds and 60% of new Northern American trailer builds.

Phillips Connect is leveraging this history of partnership to connect sensor data from different components and equipment to tell a holistic story of fleet health. Since it does not have proprietary agreements with any supplier, the company will continue to add new sensors as they are introduced to monitor additional components or assets.

Phillips Connect is always looking at the viability of new sensors. If a potential customer is using a component the system is not currently integrated with, the company will look into adding it. Once a new sensor is integrated, that same integration will be offered to future customers. Nothing is really out of the question, which is a unique benefit to working with the company.

The application can gather data from all the sensors and send to the platform or direct to the customer’s TMS via API. The company expects that all products can be updated over the air and is working with partners to make that a requirement. This is extremely important to the transportation industry as it reduces downtime that would otherwise occur if the vehicle had to be brought into the shop for an update.

Phillips Connect has long recognized that when it comes to integrating sensors, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—meaning there is exponential benefit when sensors are integrated together that goes beyond just adding together the benefit derived from each sensor. Unless the data from these sensors are looked at together, the real cause of the problem might not be uncovered.

A lot of the sensors are going to amplify each other from a management standpoint and anytime you can amplify data you are also amplifying your return on investment. When you have all the data in one place you can monitor the systems to see if they are healthy in ways that are not possible when the sensor was a standalone.

Moving into the future, analytics are going to become a larger part of the heavy duty trucking industry to drive change and improve the bottom line for fleets around the world.