Maintaining a fleet of buses is a full-time job, with everyone from school bus manufacturers to supervisors constantly seeking effective ways to increase oversight and reduce unplanned downtime. Thanks to our increasingly connected world of people, vehicles, and transportation systems, solutions like remote diagnostics are now providing bus fleets with data and insights that can improve vehicle safety, on-time performance, and more.
At IC Bus, all new bus models come standard with factory-installed telematics and a 5-year subscription to OnCommand® Connection (OCC). OCC is designed to help school bus operators and districts stay ahead of vehicle health issues and maximize operational efficiency. Enabling vehicle health issues as early as possible has many benefits, including understanding when a vehicle fault may be minor and able to wait until its next scheduled service, or if there is a more severe issue that should be addressed immediately to avoid a more expensive repair or even a roadside failure in the future.
OCC is built to deliver greater uptime and a reduced total cost of vehicle ownership with a variety of useful tools and reports, including detailed fault code reporting including with severity rating assessments, comprehensive vehicle health reports, and fault code action plans that provide the most likely needed parts and services and detailed instructions for technicians on issue investigation and steps of service. Customers can also view on-hand inventory of parts at nearby IC Bus dealer, and GPS mapping to additional service centers in their area.
Before technology such as OCC, drivers and bus maintenance teams would first be alerted of a vehicle health issue from the check engine light on the driver cluster, and would often need to bring a bus into service for diagnosis before the nature of the issue could be identified. Today, transportation staff and maintenance supervisors can begin to diagnose buses while they are still on the road, enabling more efficient communication and informed decision making in the management of their fleet. In addition, fleets see value in being able to use OCC to do things such as recreate previously completed bus routes to check road speed, timing of doors opening and closing, and other events during the route.
Always Connected
One of OCC’s competitive advantages is that is the first remote diagnostics platform among OEMs that is built on an open architecture, meaning customers are able to connect not only their IC Bus models, but their entire fleet, regardless of make and model, into one convenient dashboard. And the tool is built to provide access to critical vehicle information in a variety of formats for user convenience, including the interactive OCC Go mobile app, a desktop interface, custom email reports, and data feeds through APIs for customers to integrate the information into their own fleet management systems.
Always Innovating and Evolving
IC Bus and the OnCommand Connection team are continuously striving to improve how we support customers. In the connected vehicle space, we recognize that the solutions landscape is diverse and fragmented. We’re building partnerships with select third-party connected vehicle fleet providers – one example being Gateway Integrations. This capability enables customers to access those third-party solutions using data from our factory installed telematics, saving customers on costs of additional telematics devices, which can include prewiring, aftermarket installation, and the cost of the device itself.
OCC will also be a key support tool as customers move into the electric vehicle space as well – with detailed tracking of EV buses that include state of charge, charging history, remaining estimated range and much more.
Matt Milewski serves as Connected Vehicle Marketing Director for Navistar. Visit www.ICBus.com for more information.