IntelliShift released findings from a survey of 227 customers across a variety of industries. The 2021 State of Connected Operations Report: Customer Insights and Trends reveals the pain points that drive investments in transformative technologies and how successful implementations of technology platforms are translating to safety, efficiency and productivity improvements, as well as increased ROI.

According to IntelliShift, the report demonstrates how those that fail to act – continuing to operate with siloed data – struggle to meet rapidly changing business conditions and fall behind their more proactive peers.

Disconnected systems have long plagued the telematics industry, preventing data from being leveraged as a strategic asset in delivering business value. This sentiment clearly emerged in the survey as the most important determinant in selecting a platform – having access to real-time, non-siloed data. Three in five respondents labeled this factor as their top priority and 86% noted that access to non-siloed data has provided deep insights for their organization, drastically improving operations.

Additional priorities identified as critical are ease of use and/or implementation (55%) and leveraging a unified, all-in-one platform that not only collects data, but synthesizes it to provide actionable or predictive insights (40%).

When asked what is most important for this data to help within their organizations, the responses reveal that cost reduction and resource management of people and/or assets rose to the top at 45% and 38% respectively, followed closely by increased monetization of vehicles and assets (30%), connecting operations processes (20%), and business intelligence (17%). Connected vehicle and asset operations platforms make it possible to eliminate redundant, inefficient or error-prone processes to drive cost-savings across organizations.

“Access to on-demand data and end-to-end operational intelligence is critical, particularly in an industry where assets are constantly on the move,” said Ryan Wilkinson, Chief Technology Officer, IntelliShift. “As we’ve seen with our customers, gaining these actionable insights through the right technology platform can increase agility and speed. It also sets the foundation for intelligently predicting and optimizing business performance, as well as understanding how individual and departmental KPIs ladder up to create a winning organization.”

Additional findings highlight key benefits of connected vehicle and asset operations platforms:

• Streamlined processes. Seven in 10 respondents (70%) say that process optimization has increased since deploying a connected vehicle and asset operations platform.

• Significant time savings. Over half of respondents (57%) say they save one to five hours per week on process or workflows, with almost one in five (16%) saving six to 10 hours and one in 10 (10%) saving over 10 hours each week.

• Enhanced visibility. Almost four in five respondents (78%) say they have more visibility into fleet operations now that they are using the platform while almost two in five (38%) have greater visibility into safety and one-third (33%) into maintenance.

• Increased focus on improving the bottom line. Nine in 10 respondents (90%) say these platforms allow them to focus their time on other tasks to improve the company’s bottom line, while four in five (80%) say they’ve seen increased ROI with a connected vehicle and asset operations platform.

In a crowded market, having the right connected vehicle and asset operations technology partner is key to success. IntelliShift’s customers have noted top improvements over other solutions, including process optimization (70%), increased use of operational data over the past six to 12 months (71%) and ability to track and monitor vehicle routes (19%). Most notably, 94% of IntelliShift’s customers would recommend its platform, with ease of use, real-time data and customer service each ranked as top reasons.