Maximize the value of your fleet data, by implementing this simple data quality assessment checklist

Fleet Data Quality Assessment Checklist

Reliable fleet analytics begin with reliable data. The Uptake Fleet Data Quality Assessment Checklist helps public transit agencies, government fleets, commercial operators, and other fleet organizations evaluate whether their data is accurate, complete, consistent, timely, and ready to support operational decisions.

This practical self-assessment includes 126 fleet data quality checks across ten essential areas:

The checklist helps fleet maintenance, operations, information technology, safety, finance, and data teams identify gaps that can undermine reporting, preventive maintenance, asset management, regulatory compliance, and predictive maintenance programs.

Each quality check is rated using a consistent maturity scale, ranging from Not in Place to Standardized and Consistent. Fleets can calculate individual section scores and an overall fleet data maturity score to determine whether their data practices are Foundational, Developing, Managed, or Advanced.

The assessment also includes public-transit-specific checks covering vehicle assignments, routes, blocks, trips, service interruptions, accessibility equipment, passenger-counting data, spare ratios, and Transit Asset Management reporting.

After completing the assessment, organizations can document their most important data gaps, assign corrective actions, identify responsible owners, and establish measurable target dates. Suggested performance thresholds provide practical starting points for monitoring vehicle mappings, required fields, duplicate records, telematics reporting, fuel and charging transactions, integration failures, and safety-critical exceptions.

Use the Uptake Fleet Data Quality Assessment Checklist to establish a baseline, prioritize improvements, and prepare your fleet data for more dependable reporting, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and predictive maintenance.

Uptake_Fleet_Data_Quality_ChecklistDownload

The presentation focuses on AI and data strategies for fleet management, exploring why AI is revolutionizing fleets, key use cases (with a focus on predictive maintenance), and practical takeaways for implementing AI in fleet operations.

Transcript of Adam McElhinney’s Talk – Uptake (uptake.com)
Topic: AI and Data Strategy for Fleets

Hi everyone, thanks for coming to my talk—especially late on the last day of this great conference!

My name is Adam McElhinney, and I’m the CEO of a company called Uptake. Today, we’re going to cover a lot of ground about fleets and fleet data, with a particular focus on AI strategy.

Here’s a quick overview of what I’ll be discussing:

A Little About Me

By day, I’m the CEO of Uptake, where we help customers reduce unplanned downtime.
By night, I serve on:

I hold 19 patents in machine learning and AI—mostly in industrial applications—so this is something I’m deeply passionate about.

Why AI Is Revolutionizing Fleets

Let’s talk about what’s changed to make AI practically useful in the past five years:

  1. Theoretical Breakthrough
    In 2017, Google released a groundbreaking paper: “Attention Is All You Need”. It introduced the Transformer model—the “T” in GPT (as in ChatGPT).
    Most of the authors have since left Google to start AI companies, showing how commercial this space is becoming.
  2. Computing Power
    New neural networks scale almost linearly with computational resources. Unlike older models, you don’t hit diminishing returns as quickly. That’s why we’re seeing huge investments—up to $500 billion—in computing infrastructure.
  3. Data Availability
    Models are being trained on vast datasets like Common Crawl (a publicly available index of the web). Companies are now signing exclusive data licensing deals—Google and Reddit, for example—to feed proprietary AI models.

Two Key Axes for Evaluating AI Use Cases

When thinking about where to apply AI in your fleet, consider these two dimensions:

  1. Impact – If fully automated, how much would this transform your fleet?
    (0 = no impact, 10 = game-changing)
  2. Viability – Can this realistically be automated using today’s tools?
    (0 = not feasible, 10 = plug-and-play)

AI Use Cases in Fleet Management

Use CaseImpactViability
Autonomous Driving102
Predictive Maintenance7–88–9
Routing Optimization6–77
Customer Service AI49
Driver Behavior Monitoring6–76–7
Warranty Processing5–66
Inventory Management66

The Predictive Maintenance Deep Dive

Objective: Detect and alert on potential failures before they happen.

Current standard is preventive maintenance (PMs)—based on miles or hours.
Predictive maintenance takes it further by using fine-grained data from telematics, fault codes, and sensor readings.

Why Fault Codes Alone Fall Short:

Uptake’s Predictive Approach

We use:

  1. Work order data to identify historical failures
  2. Telematics & fault codes to match events leading to those failures
  3. Sensor data (especially from Geotab, a partner of ours) for real-time insights

Think of it like Netflix:

“If these combinations of fault codes and signals appear, that likely means X failure is coming.”

This leads to longer lead times, fewer breakdowns, and higher fleet availability.

AI Use Case Checklist

Use this framework before launching any AI project:

  1. Can you quantify the current cost?
    If not, you can’t measure improvement.
  2. Is the business impact material?
    Don’t spend AI resources on $10K/year problems.
  3. Do you have lots of data?
    Rare events are tough for AI.
  4. Can you validate outputs?
    Always back-test with historical data before deploying.
  5. Can a human do it at small scale?
    If no one can do it manually, AI probably can’t either.

Final Recommendations for Your Fleet’s Data Strategy

  1. Standardize Your Metrics
    Agree on how you measure things like downtime. Definitions should be consistent across departments.
  2. Accept Imperfect Data—but Improve It
    Everyone has dirty data. Use scorecards. Check if devices are on, properly assigned, and if technicians are entering codes meaningfully.
  3. Write a Data Strategy
    Align your data approach with your business goals. Data should be treated as a horizontal asset, not a siloed IT concern.

Closing & Q&A

That wraps up my talk. I’d love to take any questions—whether it’s about AI, fleet data, predictive maintenance, or anything else.

If not, thank you so much for your time.
Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn—I love talking data, AI, and fleet maintenance!

Right now, we’re all feeling the summer heat. Uptake is looking to cool down many of the issues that fleets have to deal with in their day to day duties, as well as providing data to enable quick and easy decision making.

We’re excited to take the next steps in enabling fleets to have access to more data driven Insights with our new Uptake Tire Insights. TheTire Leak and TPMS Sensor Issue Insights give as much lead time as possible before a failure occurs. Recently, we have seen examples Tire Insights was able to capture data indicating an issue over a month before a tire fails resulting. Stopping a future on-road failure.

Want a sneak peak into the next release? Soon we will be releasing models to capture under and over inflation. Helping to extend the life cycle of a unit’s tires, fuel economy, but also puts the vehicle at higher risk of experiencing a blowout. Another great step into viewing holistic vehicle data, we can capture from multiple different TPMS systems. No more worrying about monitoring various other platforms.

Uptake has partners whose vehicles travel 50 miles a day and others that travel 500 miles per day. We understand that different issues have different priorities and having the ability to tune the guidance and severity that comes with each of our Insights is very important to end users. In comes Insight Preferences, a new feature that moves towards further customization which we know is very important to organizations.

Those that know me know that empowering users with as much data as possible is extremely important to me. I’ve done a great deal of work recently building out the Recommended Actions that come with each of our Insights, I’ve personally revised and expanded on 120+ Insights to provide additional layers of prescriptiveness that ultimately provide our users with more data to make informed, quick decisions. Just another example of how our users seamlessly interact with our system in their day to day responsibilities, without spending any great deal of time.

We recently announced our partnership with Lynden Transport. I’ve personally had the pleasure of working with various teams that keep their trucks on the road and even more excited to continue to meet more fine folks in their organizations.

What’s new in the news? Fleets are starting to brace for upcoming 2027 regulatory changes, proactively ordering model year 2025-2026 trucks as they continue to map out the replacement strategies for their fleets. I begin to wonder if fleets will start to extend the life cycle of their assets in the wake of the upcoming changes. From an operating cost perspective, what is the trade-off for keeping an asset, compared to significant cost increase when buying a new asset. Does your fleet have a pre-buy strategy ahead of 2027?

On the heels of Samsara Beyond, I was very impressed with Samsara’s new, ultra compact, asset tracker that can be attached to high value loads to prevent theft and mitigate lost freight, as well as making contributions to inventory management. I definitely see this device making an impact for fleet operation.

Want to see what Uptake can do for your fleet? Looking to utilize your TPMS data? Reach out to us or stop by and see us at our upcoming fall shows, Insight and IFDA.

Y’all stay cool and stay safe!

Fleet Owner, May 2024

Uptake and Geotab are charting an innovative course in the transportation industry with groundbreaking fleet failure prevention data.

Embrace a bold new era of unrivaled excellence in predictive fleet health. This partnership is powered by state-of-the-art telematics data technology.

Customers can access a powerful tool to harness top-tier, predictive models for safeguarding their fleets against breakdowns and potential catastrophic incidents. Leveraged by an extensive input of top-tier engine data and apply exclusive data science models to distill information.

Uptake’s cutting-edge predictive maintenance technology helps empower customers to:

– Monitor data and identify deterioration

– Diagnose vehicle issues near real-time

– Gauge driving habits, encompassing speed, idling duration, and more

Together, Uptake and Geotab are fortifying the trucking industry. Visit uptake.com for more information.

Uptake, a Geotab Premier Marketplace Partner

Learn how Uptake’s solution adds value to the Geotab experience.

As TMC rapidly approaches, I’m excited to see the future of our industry and the outlook for 2024, as well as connecting with my colleagues and friends.

Looking forward to TMC 2024, also means looking forward to some new technologies. It’s important to look forward and discover what’s next in the transportation industry. Below are a few predictions for new technologies at the show.

Technicians are more in demand than ever. At TMC 2024, I hope to see how companies are investing in their technicians’ future. For instance, what industry technology will be showcased to help technicians more effectively, efficiently, and safely perform their duties.

Industry technology improvements are top of mind this year. While attending the show, be on the lookout for who’s doing what and how it impacts the industry.

Beyond the show this year, what are some new tools we can work towards for future advancements?

What are some things you are looking forward to seeing at TMC and what predictions do you have on the outlook of our industry? Be sure to stop by the Uptake booth #4241 to continue the conversation and connect all things TMC, trucks and more!

Uptake continues to drive forward innovation in our product, our new Fleet Insight Assessment Dashboard was designed with fleet & maintenance managers in mind to grant a high level overview of Insight’s produced by their fleet over the past 90 days.

Using our newest tool, users are able to see how many assets have produced Insights over the past 90 days as well as how many Insight’s have been produced by their fleet. Empowering your maintenance team’s with they need to make smarter decisions. Give them the power to identify potential pain points in your fleet, highlight targeted campaigns that need to be run against problems centric to your trucks, and explore potential enhancements that need to be added to the current preventative maintenance process.

Our mission at Uptake is to cut through the noise and help you make smarter decisions faster. This new feature allows you to view an immense amount of data with the click of a button, in an easy to use dashboard. If you want to learn more about predictive maintenance and how it can improve the health and operations of your fleet, drop us a message!

Download the Fleet Insight Assessment overview here.

With TMC 2024 having come and gone, it was a pleasure reconnecting with old friends and meeting up with new colleagues. Not to mention, enjoying all that beautiful New Orleans has to offer!

Early on I noticed quite a few companies offered TMPS equipment and the tools needed to service that equipment from mounting, hardware, to calibration. This coincides with more and more OEM’s installing TPMS equipment on their trucks from the factory, as well as an uptick in auto-inflation devices being installed.

The Uptake booth was located very close to the Cummins & Eaton stations, so I was able to get a look at the Cummins-Eaton-Meritor complete powertrain solution. It was great to see in person! Very impressive in and of itself, but the fuel agnostic X15 is what really caught my eye being alternative fuels are becoming more and more popular. International has introduced an interesting concept with their S13 engine which utilizes 2 DEF Dosers and does not rely on aftertreament fuel injection or a DOC to burn off soot deposits in its DPF.

With ever growing expansion of EV trucks in the transportation industry, I was able to get a check out the Orange Blossom EV Yard Truck. In my opinion, this is a perfect application for EV’s, considering the troubles that come with a diesel that routinely has low operating temperatures as well as high idle times. The concept of electrification in trucks is not new, but it really stood out to me that there are a lot of benefits that can be had in the electrictrication of trailers. Through regenerative braking and solar harvesting and not limited to self powered TRU and bi-directional charging, I think this can be another very useful application for EV’s in our space.

Reflecting on TMC 2024, the Uptake team and myself had a blast. If you weren’t able to stop by the booth, reach out to discover what Uptake can do to help your fleet!