Every decision can impact the bottom line, says Terri Lucas, vice president of sales at SkyBitz Inc.
“Customers want to be sure their return on investment (ROI) is there before moving forward,” Lucas said. “We are working every day to provide the right data set so that they can derive those ROIs.”
Lucas, along with Debbie Sackman, SkyBitz’s senior product manager, took part in a “Technology in Action” talk during the FreightWaves Carrier Summit, which is streaming live Thursday on FreightWavesTV and on freightwaves.com.
SkyBitz, which has its headquarters in Herndon, Virginia, provides companies in the oil and gas industries, as well as transportation and logistics companies, with real-time asset tracking and data analytics from sensors and remote monitoring solutions.
To develop its products, SkyBitz has worked with everything from the largest fleets to midsize and small fleets, Sackman said.
“It’s really led to a unique approach toward developing solutions,” Sackman said. “I really love that we take the time to listen to what our customers are telling us, taking their input as the fuel that feeds our fire for bringing effective solutions to the market.”
SkyBitz’s next generation of telematics products builds on lessons learned from all of the company’s best-selling products, Sackman said.
“It has to still be affordable, convenient, quick and easy to install, along with supporting a wide range of customers’ types of assets and the ever-growing market of sensors that’s out there,” Sackman said. “At the end, it’s really all about that actionable data as the driving force.”
Lucas said one example of how SkyBitz develops solutions using actionable data is working with fleets to understand how they manage their trailer pools.
“We’ve learned they have contractual commitments to have a certain number of trailers at each of their customer sites. If those trailers were not moving, they weren’t making any money. So we developed our trailer pool feature that enabled them to identify and address when a site had a trailer shortage or overallocation,” Lucas said.
Another more recent example has been the development of SkyBitz’s SkyCamera volumetric solution, which grew out of the company’s LTL relationships, Lucas said.
“We quickly learned that a picture by itself in the LTL space produced interest, but it wasn’t until we coupled the picture with the artificial intelligence layer that actually interprets what the picture means, that it brought the solution to life,” Lucas said. “Companies could see how that information could be automated into their business and aid them in decision-making.”
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