Download PDF
ULC Limos Keeps Customer Service High with Samsara's Real-Time Fleet Management
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Functional Applications - Fleet Management Systems (FMS)
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Fleet Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Vehicle Performance Monitoring
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
A vehicle running out of fuel or breaking down is a costly issue for any industry, but it's a nightmare scenario for limousine companies. With such a large fleet, the whole ULC team needs to ensure their custom-designed vehicles are in tip-top shape before going out to chauffeur guests. Before finding Samsara, Jacobian and the ULC team would routinely walk from limo to limo, manually checking and recording the fuel levels and check engine lights before each shift. Jacobian knew there had to be a better way. Jacobian tried fleet management providers with complex interfaces, but needed an easy to use solution. When a friend told him about Samsara, he knew he had to try it.
About The Customer
ULC Limos began in 2004 when Brandon Jacobian returned from service in the Air Force and purchased a single car. From its humble beginnings, the company has grown to a staff of almost 100 employees, 50 vehicles, and a service area of over 100 cities. The ULC fleet of limos and party buses now serves corporate clients and party-goers for special events across Southern California. With their growing customer base and ever-expanding staff, Jacobian works hard to ensure his team maintains their superior customer service standards. ULC's enduring focus on customer service keeps customers coming back and their reviews high.
The Solution
His maintenance team installed Samsara VG33 gateways in a matter of minutes. With Samsara in place, the ULC team can instantly see all their fleet operations in one place. From the Samsara Dashboard, the dispatch team keeps tabs on fuel levels and battery voltage, making sure that the limos are always able to complete their journeys. The operations team uses Samsara's real-time maintenance features to keep their vehicles in perfect running condition. The team can see all vehicles, check engine light status, and review details of any engine faults. Samsara gateways connect into vehicles' diagnostics ports. When a vehicle reports a fault, the gateway instantly sends the fault code to the Samsara Cloud, where they're translated into human-readable, actionable reports. The ULC team can even get an instant alert, by SMS and email, when a new fault is reported. This maintenance data is so valuable that the team now logs service notes directly in the dashboard, so the entire real-time and historical service status of a vehicle is available in one place.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
Case Study
Vehicle Fleet Analytics
Organizations frequently implement a maintenance strategy for their fleets of vehicles using a combination of time and usage based maintenance schedules. While effective as a whole, time and usage based schedules do not take into account driving patterns, environmental factors, and sensors currently deployed within the vehicle measuring crank voltage, ignition voltage, and acceleration, all of which have a significant influence on the overall health of the vehicle.In a typical fleet, a large percentage of road calls are related to electrical failure, with battery failure being a common cause. Battery failures result in unmet service agreement levels and costly re-adjustment of scheduled to provide replacement vehicles. To reduce the impact of unplanned maintenance, the transportation logistics company was interested in a trial of C3 Vehicle Fleet Analytics.
Case Study
3M Gains Real-Time Insight with Cloud Solution
The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”