Phillips Connect has unveiled ROIAssist—billed as a highly advanced and un-biased tool for accurately projecting cost savings and revenue impacts that come with various smart-trailer sensors. The big fleets have learned that taking advantage of smart-trailer technologies (above and beyond basic trailer tracking) has a fast pay-back, and a major long-term positive impact on their bottom line, Phillips Connect suggests. But upgrading specs and retrofitting old trailers is expensive; ROIAssist is designed to provide customers with an accurate cost forecasting tool for selling this investment to top management. Developed by Jessica Smith, director of business intelligence and analytics at Phillips Connect, ROIAssist pulls from decades of fleet management experience to provide realistic and accurate expectations for an investment in smart trailers.
“Several times, we’ve had customers that request a sensor made by a specific supplier, but after plugging in their actual numbers, we find that the ROI is very low or even negative,” says Jim Epler, general manager of Phillips Connect. “We’ll be the first to tell them it won’t save money. However, Phillips Connect ROI results regularly produce hundreds of millions in expected savings and revenue with the potential for greater than $1B for the largest, most aggressive fleets. ROIAssist goes much further than standard inputs for ROI, like number of trailers or replacement cycles, Epler adds.
“We look at value generated with every sensor by themselves, as well as total system efficiency gains that fleets can expect. We also compare ROI impacts from multiple suppliers of one type of sensor (for example, TPMS) and let fleets know which suppliers’ products will have the greatest impact for their business based on install time, useful life, product cost, and other attributes.”