While traditional telemetrics and tracking systems accumulate a lot of data about an organisation Matt Minor, director of business intelligence at Navman Wireless, says the Adaptive Intelligence solution takes it a step further. It allows users to wrap company-specific KPIs around the data they already collect and to track progress against performance benchmarks for the ‘people and plant’ aspects of fleet management.

“We give them the platform to allow them to take advantage of that data – now we can put the data in a KPI that makes sense for them,” he explained.

Minor said that Navman Wireless first saw the opportunity in the ‘people and plant’ part of the tracking equation for enterprise fleets nine months ago. “For most enterprise organisations, their fleet is the third biggest cost to the business – behind wages and rent,” he said. “All the mention of big data in the media is pushing companies to think about how they can put BI around their business.” According to Gartner the worldwide BI market opportunity is currently $14.3 billion and projections indicate it will be $18 billion by 2017. Gartner also indicated that application spending this year is expected to be concentrated on industry-specific products; upgrades to important systems within customer environments; products that securely link mobile devices to ‘established systems’; and SaaS (software as a service) deployments that either extend or supplant existing systems.

This has driven Navman Wireless to invest a significant amount in R&D for the Adaptive Intelligence product. Although Minor would not be drawn on an exact figure he did say that “the market opportunity for us is massive, both in terms of new sales and our existing customers”.

During the development of the solution Navman ran a parallel early adopter programme to pilot the solution. Between members of the programme and some lucky clients who received the product early, Minor said there are already 30 customers using the tool across Australia and New Zealand – “there’s huge appetite,” he said, especially because it offers BI for a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.

Smith and Davies one of the early adopters is already seeing the benefits. Its managing director, Graham McKinnon, explained: “Managing fuel consumption and safety is critical to our business. Using Navman Wireless Adaptive Intelligence has enabled us to measure fuel consumption, fuel spend, idling and utilisation so that we can quickly identify areas for improvement, set targets for the fleets and implement and monitor the results of our policy implementations. As a demonstration of our ACC Fleet Saver Gold status, we’ve seen a 79 percent reduction in speeding and had a 10 percent improvement in distance travelled per litre of fuel purchased so far. We are now able to see, monitor and measure the key KPI’s that we use in our business and this has allowed our senior management to engage more with their management teams.”

Adaptive Intelligence is a subscription-based cloud solution billed on a per vehicle per month payment schedule. It integrates within other systems and software, allowing businesses to capture data and process the information into the platform. It has a built-in reporting suite of over 30 different reporting options and pre-supplied business rules. The reports are also fully editable to reflect different companies’ naming conventions. Other business rules can be added and customized through Navman Wireless at an additional cost.