ATLANTA. Phillips Connect Technologies continues to leverage the Phillips Industries hardware base in an ever-expanding suite of telematics products. PCT CEO Rob Phillips outlined the company’s data communication roadmap for 2020 during a press conference here in conjunction with the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council Annual Meeting.
“Philips Industries is a hardware manufacture—we've been that way for 92 years,” Phillips said. “And we build really great hardware. But the telematics customers we’re talking to are not really interested in the hardware. They're interested in what comes off the hardware, the data, and the simplicity of all that data.”
So PCT’s goal is to satisfy individual fleet requirements, based on their unique operations, by receiving IoT sensor information in the most efficient format, under one data plan.
PCT hardware products unveiled during the press conference included:
- Smart7 expands on Phillips’ most popular trailer nosebox by adding powerful solar to the lid, a large-capacity battery, and an ABS decoder chip. It also includes PCT’s telematics gateway for GPS and communicating and reporting on multiple health sensors like light out detection, door open/closed, tire status, cargo status, air tank and trailer tail status, SmartLock Gladhand status, tractor pairing, and weight status. And on top of all of that, the Smart7 has PCT’s patented remote Pre-Check feature built-in.
- Pre-Check Smart System, functioning through the Smart7, it allows fleet operators to run a diagnostic on trailer status from a remote location. With the ability to view the trailer's health remotely, fleet operators can dispatch healthy assets and reroute flagged assets for scheduled maintenance.
- IntelliSense Harness System, an integrated 7-way smart harness that allows multiple sensors to connect to PCT gateways. A data communication harness is woven into the trailer’s main harness to speed up installation time and improve reliability.
- SmartLock Gladhand prevents unauthorized use of trailers by preventing the secure connection of the tractor air line supply to release the brakes. The sensor will allow the carrier to have the power to say who can and can NOT use their asset.
- SmartPair makes tractor/trailer pairing extremely easy. When the asset is attached to tractor power, the SmartPair will immediately start looking for nearby sensors. Any tractor with the SmartPair will be picked up by PCT’s tracking products. Multiple layers of logic are included when making the pairing—so if more than one tractor is present, the right tractor is paired with the trailer.
“We've had a lot of customers for the last two or three years saying, ‘I love what you guys are doing, but we got to find a way to pair trucks with trailers,’” Phillips said. “So we've integrated that [Phillips] QCS2 socket—which is on the back of every single truck that comes off the line in North America—with a smart sensor in the lid.
“It's really an important feature and it's a great development that our engineers have come up. There's a lot of fleets that are really pushing for this.”
Products created by PCT are designed to operate in an open platform, that can interface with non-PCT telematics gateways and with any supplier sensor, or with PCT supplied sensors or a combination of both, Phillips noted. PCT’s User Interface and ROI tools were also outlined. The User Interface is designed to provide a user-friendly environment displaying a dashboard of fleet assets, giving the ability to narrow in on asset data in order to diagnose components and sensors. PCT discussed the release of a new advance query tool that can be used in mapping, reporting maintenance scheduling, and can be optimized for messaging and alerting, customized to the individual fleet.
“Our product development criteria provide solutions that offer a massive ROI and competitive advantage to our customers,” said Phillips. “Trailer tracking and sensors are what everyone is talking about right now, but that’s just a tiny piece of what’s really going on. The most important piece of this pie is not, ‘Where are my assets?’ or, ‘What is their status?’, it’s what the collective data reveals that’s gold. This is our specialty; we have figured out the ultimate formulas to build customized strategies for each fleet customer.”