By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Oct. 6 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Qualcomm Inc. added an in-cab scanning service to its mobile computing system, and launched a new reporting module designed to help carriers monitor how much fuel their drivers are burning, the company said last week.
The addition of in-cab scanning is a first for the San Diego-based mobile communications provider. Qualcomm had been interested in the service for some time, but struggled with market apathy toward the technology, as well as compatibility issues, a company representative said.
“It’s quite a paradigm shift for the market to move to scanning [paperwork] inside the cab,” said Chris Silver, senior manager of product marketing for Qualcomm Enterprise Services, the truck telematics unit. “They’ve had scanning at the truck stops forever, and we really weren’t seeing a significant amount of” interest in in-cab scanning.
Because trucking companies did not rapidly migrate away from established truck-stop scanning services offered by companies such as Pegasus TransTech and TripPak Services, Qualcomm held off on adding the technology, Silver said.
That gave the company time to vet third-party scanners for compatibility, he added. Qualcomm eventually settled on a portable scanner manufactured by Syscan Imaging, San Jose, Calif.
Qualcomm users who want to add in-cab scanning will have to purchase and install their own scanners, Silver noted.
Mobile communications provider DriverTech, Salt Lake City, is another proponent of in-cab scanning. That company has offered the service for several years. As with Qualcomm systems, DriverTech’s in-cab hardware offers support for third-party scanners.
Besides in-cab scanning, Qualcomm also touted its new fuel-reporting module, Fuel Manager. The module is an addition to the company’s Performance Monitoring service.
Qualcomm users already could use performance data gathered by their telematics systems to create fuel-use reports, but steep increases in the price of diesel fuel prompted Qualcomm to create a module that could generate fuel reports out of the box, Silver said.
The module was designed primarily for fleets with-out “all the resources needed to integrate and build customized [fuel] reports,” Silver said.
