One of many graphs on National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows the range of daily stops per mile of service vans
Acquisitions can be a challenging aspect of any job. While simply matching up the requirements of your work to the capabilities of a piece of equipment is easy enough, there are often many options that could each accomplish roughly the same things.
So how do you pick the one that’s the best fit for you and your business? By making the use of all the information you have available and asking the right questions.
Figuring out how to do that is among the aims of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a government-funded facility in Golden, Colo. The lab focuses on research and development in a variety of fields including sustainable transportation.
“NREL is looking to provide support and advocate for commercial vehicle partners in acquiring
“We’ve identified a need for a simplified tool set for free optimization focused on vehicle application and technology fit.”— Lauren Lynch, researcher, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
new vehicles within their fleet,” said Lauren Lynch, a researcher with NREL. “We’ve identified a need for a simplified tool set for free optimization focused on vehicle application and technology fit,” Lynch said.
No single best approach
She noted that multiple approaches to acquisitions are currently available in the market, and that depending on the decision, there is no one single best approach to new vehicle acquisition. However, fleet managers can take advantage of multiple tools to make more informed decisions and lessen the risk associated with their investments.
NREL advocates high-level methodologies for different levels of analysis and work to match fleet owners with the technologies they need to make data driven decisions at three levels of analysis. The highest level is more of a screening process, which Lynch suspects most fleets tend to do today. The second level utilizes telematics systems and software to better understand duty cycles. The third level is a more specialized data intensive lab approach.
“The telematics system and the lab or specialized data approach are a little more complex,” Lynch said. “Therefore, they are not as easy or accessible to free owners or operators to apply. The drawback with the screening process being more of a high-level analysis is that you don’t get some of the details that the telematics or the specialized data approach would allow you to do, such as understanding driving aggressiveness impacts or opportunities for hybridization/electrification.”
It can be difficult, though, to find the right balance between the depth of information and actually being able to make use of it.
“The challenge with fleet management and technology investment is you either have an easy-to-use tool that doesn’t always provide the information that you’re looking for, or alternatively, you have specialized engineering design-type software that can dive really deep into the details, but that 90 percent of the population wouldn’t know how to use or interpret,” said Adam Duran, a program manager with NREL who collaborated with Lynch on a presentation — titled “Designing Your Next Work Truck — earlier this year at the Work Truck Show in Indianapolis.
Three-step process
NREL advocates a three-step process, he said. First is data collection, which helps to understand how a vehicle is being used in order to determine the replacement vehicle needs. Second is to apply vehicle forecasting tools along with the collected data to explore opportunities for savings and improvement, including modeling new power trains, examining different ways of down or up-sizing, and different ways of driving, such as duty cycle smoothing.
“Then we have the third step,” Duran said. “I’ve understood how my vehicles work, I’ve designed
Amy Glickson Amy Glickson / NREL
“The challenge with fleet management and technology investment is you either have an easy-to-use tool that doesn’t always provide the information that you’re looking for, or alternatively, you have specialized engineering design-type software that can dive really deep into the details, but that 90 percent of the population wouldn’t know how to use or interpret.”— Adam Duran, program manager, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
and laid out what type of platform I’m going to need and what it’s going to look like. Now I need to optimize deployment. Where in the fleet should it fit? Is it the vehicles that accumulate the most miles? Is it the vehicles that I have the highest percentage return on investment? We answer these questions in the third step by performing payback period financial types of analysis on the back end.”
The goal is to answer three key questions – How am I using my vehicle? What would my replacement needs look like and how would it need to be performing? And where should I put it in my fleet to get the best bang for the buck?
The end goal of the process is to reduce risk. Vehicle acquisition timetables tend to be long, and an acquisition is an investment into a multiple year lifecycle. Moving from a conventional engine to a hybrid, for example, involves both costs and risks.
Informed decisions
“But using these tools we can help make informed, educated decisions that shrink the gray area of decision making where you might be saying, ‘well it looks really good and there’s a little bit of data that says this would be great for me, but I don’t know,’” Duran said. “Instead, a fleet manager can say, ‘We’ve modelled it. We’ve run the hypotheticals. We’ve found which vehicles in the fleet would be good candidates. And this is how we would roll them out and deploy the new technology in the best way possible.’”
Having that information, and being able to parse it correctly, allows fleet managers to go to manufacturers or vehicle providers knowing exactly what they want, how they’d use it, and knowing what remaining information they need.
“This is something that anyone can do,” Lynch said.
NREL is working to discover and develop new tools and new science, Duran said. The organization wants to build machinery, tools and capabilities so it can hand users an instruction booklet that shows exactly how to use it to improve the user’s experience.
“If you have telematics data and you generally know what the vehicle is that you’re looking to acquire or you’re operating right now, you can use these to start getting high-level answers to questions like, ‘Could I be getting 20 percent improvement in my fuel economy?’ or ‘Over the life of the vehicle, how much could I be saving based on the mileage that I drive and how much I could be saving in fuel?’”
Efficiency the goal
Lynch added that, breaking down the process is more about statistical analysis and understanding the different data and tools that perform said analysis.
“At NREL, we have a number of partnerships across industry, academia and government agencies,” Lynch said. “One of our projects is we’d like to offer the opportunity of using a tool that provides all those calculation in an easy-to-access and use format. It’s the kind of easy-to-use interface where a user would input the data and then visually select the type of analysis that they want. The tool would then conduct the analyses, (and) the outcomes would be reported with all those calculations already done for them.”
“NREL is focused on achieving the Department of Energy’s mission of energy security and prosperity through transformative science and technology solutions,” Duran added. “Our goal with this work is to provide opportunities for improved vehicle efficiency and pathways towards our transportation network of the future.”
For more information, visit www.nrel.gov/fleetdna.
— Matt Jones
Matt Jones is a freelance writer based in Fredericton, N.B.