When shopping online people want immediate access to current inventory, and real-time availability for products in a preferred color or size. Similarly, when a fleet manager wants an analytical report on thousands of vehicle locations with current mileage and maintenance records, she wants it fast and accessible as a web search.
With Xcelerate, a fleet management platform now available from Element Fleet Management, fleet managers will soon be able to tap into real-time, next-generation analytics and customizable reports, leveraging the same foundation technology that enables instant movies, online purchases and streaming media.
An advanced platform to simplify fleet management
With an intuitive user interface, the Xcelerate customer portal streamlines tasks including asset and driver management, maintenance and it generates reports. Additionally, the Xcelerate dashboard was designed to make it easy to identify trends and exceptions, such as higher-than-normal fuel spend, vehicle downtime and compliance risks.
The Xcelerate Report Center will provide comprehensive reports for all aspects of fleet management from vehicle orders to fuel usage and costs to accident management. With a user-friendly design and faster performance, customers can create, customize, schedule and share reports, even creating favorites for quick and easy access.
The Xcelerate for Drivers app and website (launched in Summer 2016) lets drivers automatically track trips, simplify personal mileage entries and find the best options for maintenance and fuel with just a few taps. The native iOS app takes full advantage of device security and GPS for an easier driver experience. Android and other mobile users can experience the Xcelerate for Drivers portal via a full-featured mobile responsive website.
A platform for proactive analytics
Xcelerate’s underlying Apache Cassandra database management system (the system that is utilized by companies such as Netflix, Instagram, Apple, the Weather Channel and many others) will allow companies to treat fleets as mobile streaming data sources to share data and optimize fleet performance.
Cassandra allows Element to seamlessly integrate massive interrelated data sets from millions of vehicles, fleet services and third-party sources, allowing fleet managers to benchmark their own performance against the largest fleet vehicle performance database in the industry. It also supports high levels of scalability and availability for business that simply can’t lose connectivity or data access, even in the event of a data center outage or natural disaster.
“Customers have talked to us about a need for real-time access to analysis and reporting, with a deeper base of data. We took this all into consideration when we designed Xcelerate,” said Michele Cunningham, senior vice president, Products & Services, Element. “By aggregating core fleet management tasks in one end-to-end application, customers can quickly act on the implications of key variables to make improvements in safety, cost and productivity.”
Enhancing the platform to deliver actionable fleet insights
Element opened the Xcelerate platform to all of its customers in early 2017, and is now adding powerful analytics tools to the core platform. The platform is designed to allow Element to integrate diverse data sets quickly, such as weather, parts data or geography, and combine them with Element’s vast trove of vehicle, accident, fuel, maintenance and telematics data on the platform. The system can then analyze millions of variables and deliver actionable insights. This increased volume of insights and the pace at which they are obtained can rapidly create an exponential impact on the ability to make performance improvements across the entire supply chain.
“Xcelerate will give fleet managers an advantage because it allows them to explore cross-connections across a wide range of fleet and third-party data. With Cassandra as the foundation, this can also happen very quickly,” said John Wall, chief technology officer, Element. “Our infrastructure is uniquely able to help customers uncover data connections that were difficult to prove, or insights on questions we didn’t know to ask.”
