Page 27 - Commercial Vehicle Engineer - June 2021

This means that transport managers or maintenance teams in dealerships can access the data and plan for maintenance. “For instance,
if you know a vehicle is coming in next Tuesday, you can take a snapshot of the vehicle’s health and plan accordingly,” explains Cussans. “We
can extract all manner of information from the vehicle without having to trouble the customer, simple things like the mileage of the vehicle, a basic health check, fault codes, brake wear etc, so that prior to any scheduled maintenance events, the dealer can equip themselves with all the information for that event, which means they will know what type of service is required and if any fault codes need investigating, so they can load the workshop more scientifically and pre-pick the parts for maintenance ahead of time so when the vehicle comes in the technicians have a clear work instruction before they see it.
“You can then contact the customer and say, for instance: ‘we have talked to your vehicle and it tells us it is going to need a major service and a brake realignment, but there are no other fault codes, so that is going to take us 3.5 hours.”
“Every truck is built with the Rio box, which enables us to access a whole mine of data”
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W henMANlauncheditsnew truck generation back in February 2020, one of its
major selling points was that it was billed as a digital truck,
with enhanced connectivity that could be used for a range of applications to enhance
the driver experience, as well as increase efficiency and save money.
A major part of that is predictive maintenance. “The whole electronic architecture and connectivity of the truck is state-of-the-art,” says David Cussans, head of truck sales at MAN. “Every truck is built
with the Rio box, which enables us to access a whole mine of data from the vehicle and that opens up huge opportunities and predictive maintenance is one of those key areas.”
Predictive maintenance is a technology that has been around for some years now and is something that all the major manufacturers are continuing to develop for their own vehicles, as well as telematics and other technology providers. In basic terms, predictive maintenance uses the data the truck provides to estimate when maintenance should take place – and what that needs to be. It can also use data to detect faults on a truck before the driver or technical staff are aware that anything is amiss so the truck can be brought into a workshop and repaired before the fault has chance to develop into something major.
Freeway's predictive maintenance interface