WOODRIDGE, IL - The Morey Corporation (MOREY) announced the formation of the Rugged Telematics Alliance, a group of seven companies, each best-of-breed in their respective industries, committed to providing Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and other enterprises in the Heavy Vehicle & Equipment space with a turnkey telematics solution that will generate visibility, efficiency and cost savings. Simultaneously, the Rugged Telematics Alliance announced the creation of its "Rugged Telematics Quick Start Kit," an affordable, integrated, end-to-end solution that ties together the four pillars of a telematics implementation and can save companies up to 24 months in back office and embedded software development as well as significant time and cost savings to validate and verify a ruggedized hardware platform.

"The Rugged Telematics Alliance provides a streamlined solution for Heavy Vehicle & Equipment OEMs to engage Tier-One proven providers in each area of telematics," said Dana Morey, EVP for MOREY. "This significantly cuts development dollars and overall time-to-market to implement a customizable telematics solution that will put any OEM on a fast path toward a more differentiated brand and a more profitable operation."

The companies forming this alliance and the critical components each contributes in the context of the four telematics pillars include:

• Hardware - MOREY manufactures the ruggedized hardware platform that supports the CAN (controller area network) and is built to withstand the harsh environments of the heavy equipment and industrial industries. Methode's ruggedized biometric fingerprint reader provides reliable and accurate verification, available in any environment, to ensure that project managers know exactly who is operating equipment at all times and that all operators are authorized. Ruggedized tri-mode communication is provided through an industrial grade antenna from Hirschman that supports satellite, cellular and GPS communications.

• Software - LHP Telematics produces an OEM-based embedded software platform capable of custom CAN and sensor configurations. This ensures proper data capture and the delivery of desired data to a user's back office systems.

• Back Office Applications - AXEDA offers a robust, scalable back-office management platform, which provides configuration tools to customize to the user's business and ensure that data can be rendered in the desired format and in the context of existing business systems.

• Communications - ORBCOMM and Telenor provide communications, offering the unique opportunity to select a combination of terrestrial and satellite offerings and provide a mixture of high bandwidth data and global connectivity. Working together, the two providers ensure that equipment is never out of reach regardless of location.

Sending, receiving, and storing wireless information is becoming a necessity for heavy equipment users. The Rugged Telematics Alliance strives to make these users more efficient in monitoring their assets to improve equipment performance and utilization, cut overall costs and improve the bottom line. By presenting OEMs with an integrated, 'plug and play' telematics solution, the Rugged Telematics Alliance will significantly shorten OEM time to market and save significant Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs. In addition, it provides OEM's with an open platform to control each component of the solution. 

The "Rugged Telematics Quick Start Kit" is a preconfigured tracking and monitoring solution.  The Kit is equipped with all of the necessary hardware (TCU, antennas, biometric identification, and wire harness) needed to implement the telematics-based solution. Once the pre-configured ruggedized hardware unit is installed on a piece of heavy equipment, it will allow users to track the location of the equipment, monitor common CAN messages, and report the status of critical machine components using a powerful embedded software application.  This critical information will be sent to the back-office platform for analysis and action, such as a timely scheduling of preventative maintenance. Each user has the ability to customize the type of data and reports they will receive depending on their needs.

To learn more regarding the Rugged Telematics Alliance and the Quick Start Kit, please contact LHP Telematics or visit the Rugged Telematics website at www.ruggedta.com.