Baylor Trucking has made significant investments in connected vehicle technology to be proactive in professional driver safety, productivity and customer service, says Cari Baylor, president of the Milan, Indiana-based 240-truck fleet.
Earlier this month, when its telematics provider Omnitracs pushed out a firmware update to its ELD devices, the company lost that connectivity, said Baylor, who adds that during the week of Jan. 20, about 10% of the fleet was “blacked out.”
On any given day that week the company had about 15 to 20 IVG units out of service.
“We would lose total contact with the unit,” she said. The impacts from the outage rippled through its business. One of the most immediate concerns was drivers calling in to ask how many hours they had remaining on their duty clocks and reverting to paper logbooks.
Omnitracs worked to fix the issue on Baylor’s IVG units. Vehicles needed to be routed to a service center or its home terminal to receive a software patch from a flash drive, which restored the units to functionality. Omnitracs said it generally saw no indication of issues with the IVG devices in use by other fleets.
“Pushing upgrades to our units is part of our standard business practice. In some cases, there may be a fleet using older OS and older IVG’s that could fail in the over-the-air upgrade process. In our most recent upgrade, the failure percentage was 0.006% and addressed directly once known issues were identified,” said Joe Ohr, vice president of customer support and technical operations at Omnitracs.
Omnitracs began selling the IVG platform to fleets in 2016. The first-generation IVG platform was shipped with a Windows CE operating system but was designed to be updated to Android without removing it from the cab.
