Penske Truck Leasing has replaced its manual vehicle inspection process with voice-directed technology that is improving fleet inspection and repair accuracy, while delivering more uptime to customers.
Victoria Kickham started her career as a newspaper reporter in the Boston area before moving into B2B journalism. She has covered manufacturing, distribution and supply chain issues for a variety of publications in the industrial and electronics sectors, and now writes about everything from forklift batteries to omnichannel business trends for DC Velocity.
Using technology first applied in its warehouse, Penske Truck Leasing is streamlining its preventive maintenance inspection process by going paperless—a feat the company says is delivering big improvements in productivity, quality, and equipment uptime.
The transportation and logistics services provider is applying voice-directed technology to the preventive maintenance inspection process across its fleet of nearly 300,000 trucks, eliminating the manual, largely paper-based process its technicians traditionally used. Today, Penske technicians have traded clipboards and laptops for headsets and software that converts spoken information to text that is communicated directly into the company's data system. Going digital has allowed Penske to improve inspection efficiency—cutting a two-hour inspection down to an hour and a half in some cases—and has dramatically reduced the number of customer shop visits for service. Gregg Mangione, Penske Truck Leasing's senior vice president of maintenance, says the company is seeing about 60,000 fewer shop visits annually since implementing the system in 2017.
"[That's a] tremendous benefit for our customers," Mangione explains, noting that the less time a vehicle spends in the service bay, the more time it spends in service for the customer.
The system is yielding big benefits internally as well. Mangione says it streamlines technicians' jobs, saving time, improving the quality and accuracy of their work, and allowing them to tailor the maintenance inspection process to each of the many different types of vehicles in the company's fleet.
It also helps create a better work environment, according to leaders at Honeywell Safety & Productivity Solutions, which partnered with Penske to develop the voice-directed system.
"With this solution, workers make fewer errors, have higher job satisfaction rates, and are more productive," says Taylor Smith, president of Honeywell's Workflow Solutions business. "Penske's transportation expertise and Honeywell's software and hardware are delivering gains in compliance, quality, and productivity."
DEVELOPING THE SOLUTION
Penske managers worked with Honeywell and technology partner Vitech to customize the voice-directed maintenance and inspection system. The partnership stretches back to 2012, when Penske Logistics, a Penske Truck Leasing subsidiary, implemented voice-directed technology from Honeywell and Vitech for warehouse picking operations. Mangione says Penske was immediately interested in using similar technology to guide technicians through the vehicle inspection process but soon learned it would require a fair amount of research and development because the technology companies hadn't yet applied the solution in that way.
"We spent a few years going from concept to [implementation], working in teams to develop it," says Mangione. "There are similarities in how we use it for warehousing, but a lot of customization has been built in the background."
Penske's system combines a robust, high-speed indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi network with rugged mobile tablet devices, supplemented with Honeywell's voice-directed preventive maintenance and inspection (M&I) solution, which uses voice-directed technology from Vitech. Wearing a headset, technicians are guided through the vehicle preventive maintenance inspections via voice prompts—basically, the voice M&I solution walks them through a series of checklists, incorporating voice commands and technicians' verbal responses. Technicians interact with a display on the rugged tablets to review images or descriptions. Their spoken responses are then converted to text and communicated back to Penske's data system with real-time updates.
Mangione says Penske's technicians were a crucial part of the research and development phase, providing insight and feedback along the way.
"We were careful to involve technicians in the development process," he says, pointing to concerns Penske had about technicians' reaction to having to wear a headset on the job, for one thing. "But we found that they like that more than they like carrying a clipboard. They say they enjoy being hands-free as they work."
REAPING THE BENEFITS
Improved uptime for customers is the main benefit of the system, and Mangione emphasizes that several factors contribute to Penske's ability to keep vehicles in the field. First, the automated voice-directed system streamlines and standardizes the preventive maintenance inspection process, he says, leaving no room for technicians to "do their own thing," as was common with the previous manual system. This not only speeds up the inspection process but also reduces the potential for errors, Mangione adds. Going digital has also helped Penske streamline the compliance and regulations portion of its work.
"A preventive maintenance paper form is a legal document. Some of these serve as highway inspections and some serve as state inspections and regulations," Mangione explains. "If there's any kind of issue with the vehicle, those records are critically important. We've digitized the process and streamlined all of that."
The system also allows Penske to customize its inspections to the specific vehicle, an important benefit for a company that has a variety of makes and models of trucks in its fleet. Instead of performing the same inspection points on all vehicles, this allows the company to tailor inspections to certain types of trucks and certain manufacturers' engines, making inspections more efficient and targeted, and allowing Penske to be more proactive when making repairs and maintenance updates.
"And that all drives uptime for customers," Mangione explains. "Which is, quite honestly, what we're doing this for."
LEADING THE WAY
Leaders at Honeywell and Vitech say Penske Truck Leasing was way out in front in applying voice-directed technology to the preventive maintenance inspection process. Honeywell developed its Voice Maintenance & Inspection Solution based on its work with Penske and is marketing the technology more broadly for fleet maintenance applications today. Mangione says he expects the solution to go even further, moving beyond commercial trucking to related fields such as railroad and airline maintenance. For its part, Penske says it performed its one-millionth voice-directed preventive maintenance inspection last May and as of late 2018, had nearly doubled that figure.
"We really believe in this, [and] we want Honeywell to be successful with it," Mangione says. "This will probably continue to evolve as a capability. What we're doing, we believe, will be the future."
Warehouse automation orders declined by 3% in 2024, according to a February report from market research firm Interact Analysis. The company said the decline was due to economic, political, and market-specific challenges, including persistently high interest rates in many regions and the residual effects of an oversupply of warehouses built during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The research also found that increasing competition from Chinese vendors is expected to drive down prices and slow revenue growth over the report’s forecast period to 2030.
Global macro-economic factors such as high interest rates, political uncertainty around elections, and the Chinese real estate crisis have “significantly impacted sales cycles, slowing the pace of orders,” according to the report.
Despite the decline, analysts said growth is expected to pick up from 2025, which they said they anticipate will mark a year of slow recovery for the sector. Pre-pandemic growth levels are expected to return in 2026, with long-term expansion projected at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% between 2024 and 2030.
The analysis also found two market segments that are bucking the trend: durable manufacturing and food & beverage industries continued to spend on automation during the downturn. Warehouse automation revenues in food & beverage, in particular, were bolstered by cold-chain automation, as well as by large-scale projects from consumer-packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. The sectors registered the highest growth in warehouse automation revenues between 2022 and 2024, with increases of 11% (durable manufacturing) and 10% (food & beverage), according to the research.
The Swedish supply chain software company Kodiak Hub is expanding into the U.S. market, backed by a $6 million venture capital boost for its supplier relationship management (SRM) platform.
The Stockholm-based company says its move could help U.S. companies build resilient, sustainable supply chains amid growing pressure from regulatory changes, emerging tariffs, and increasing demands for supply chain transparency.
According to the company, its platform gives procurement teams a 360-degree view of supplier risk, resiliency, and performance, helping them to make smarter decisions faster. Kodiak Hub says its artificial intelligence (AI) based tech has helped users to reduce supplier onboarding times by 80%, improve supplier engagement by 90%, achieve 7-10% cost savings on total spend, and save approximately 10 hours per week by automating certain SRM tasks.
The Swedish venture capital firm Oxx had a similar message when it announced in November that it would back Kodiak Hub with new funding. Oxx says that Kodiak Hub is a better tool for chief procurement officers (CPOs) and strategic sourcing managers than existing software platforms like Excel sheets, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, or Procure-to-Pay suites.
“As demand for transparency and fair-trade practices grows, organizations must strengthen their supply chains to protect their reputation, profitability, and long-term trust,” Malin Schmidt, founder & CEO of Kodiak Hub, said in a release. “By embedding AI-driven insights directly into procurement workflows, our platform helps procurement teams anticipate these risks and unlock major opportunities for growth.”
Here's our monthly roundup of some of the charitable works and donations by companies in the material handling and logistics space.
For the sixth consecutive year, dedicated contract carriage and freight management services provider Transervice Logistics Inc. collected books, CDs, DVDs, and magazines for Book Fairies, a nonprofit book donation organization in the New York Tri-State area. Transervice employees broke their own in-house record last year by donating 13 boxes of print and video assets to children in under-resourced communities on Long Island and the five boroughs of New York City.
Logistics real estate investment and development firm Dermody Properties has recognized eight community organizations in markets where it operates with its 2024 Annual Thanksgiving Capstone awards. The organizations, which included food banks and disaster relief agencies, received a combined $85,000 in awards ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.
Prime Inc. truck driver Dee Sova has donated $5,000 to Harmony House, an organization that provides shelter and support services to domestic violence survivors in Springfield, Missouri. The donation follows Sova's selection as the 2024 recipient of the Trucking Cares Foundation's John Lex Premier Achievement Award, which was accompanied by a $5,000 check to be given in her name to a charity of her choice.
Employees of dedicated contract carrier Lily Transportation donated dog food and supplies to a local animal shelter at a holiday event held at the company's Fort Worth, Texas, location. The event, which benefited City of Saginaw (Texas) Animal Services, was coordinated by "Lily Paws," a dedicated committee within Lily Transportation that focuses on improving the lives of shelter dogs nationwide.
Freight transportation conglomerate Averitt has continued its support of military service members by participating in the "10,000 for the Troops" card collection program organized by radio station New Country 96.3 KSCS in Dallas/Fort Worth. In 2024, Averitt associates collected and shipped more than 18,000 holiday cards to troops overseas. Contributions included cards from 17 different Averitt facilities, primarily in Texas, along with 4,000 cards from the company's corporate office in Cookeville, Tennessee.
Electric vehicle (EV) sales have seen slow and steady growth, as the vehicles continue to gain converts among consumers and delivery fleet operators alike. But a consistent frustration for drivers has been pulling up to a charging station only to find that the charger has been intentionally broken or disabled.
To address that threat, the EV charging solution provider ChargePoint has launched two products to combat charger vandalism.
The first is a cut-resistant charging cable that's designed to deter theft. The cable, which incorporates what the manufacturer calls "novel cut-resistant materials," is substantially more difficult for would-be vandals to cut but is still flexible enough for drivers to maneuver comfortably, the California firm said. ChargePoint intends to make its cut-resistant cables available for all of its commercial and fleet charging stations, and, starting in the middle of the year, will license the cable design to other charging station manufacturers as part of an industrywide effort to combat cable theft and vandalism.
The second product, ChargePoint Protect, is an alarm system that detects charging cable tampering in real time and literally sounds the alarm using the charger's existing speakers, screens, and lighting system. It also sends SMS or email messages to ChargePoint customers notifying them that the system's alarm has been triggered.
ChargePoint says it expects these two new solutions, when combined, will benefit charging station owners by reducing station repair costs associated with vandalism and EV drivers by ensuring they can trust charging stations to work when and where they need them.
New Jersey is home to the most congested freight bottleneck in the country for the seventh straight year, according to research from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), released today.
ATRI’s annual list of the Top 100 Truck Bottlenecks aims to highlight the nation’s most congested highways and help local, state, and federal governments target funding to areas most in need of relief. The data show ways to reduce chokepoints, lower emissions, and drive economic growth, according to the researchers.
The 2025 Top Truck Bottleneck List measures the level of truck-involved congestion at more than 325 locations on the national highway system. The analysis is based on an extensive database of freight truck GPS data and uses several customized software applications and analysis methods, along with terabytes of data from trucking operations, to produce a congestion impact ranking for each location. The bottleneck locations detailed in the latest ATRI list represent the top 100 congested locations, although ATRI continuously monitors more than 325 freight-critical locations, the group said.
For the seventh straight year, the intersection of I-95 and State Route 4 near the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, is the top freight bottleneck in the country. The remaining top 10 bottlenecks include: Chicago, I-294 at I-290/I-88; Houston, I-45 at I-69/US 59; Atlanta, I-285 at I-85 (North); Nashville: I-24/I-40 at I-440 (East); Atlanta: I-75 at I-285 (North); Los Angeles, SR 60 at SR 57; Cincinnati, I-71 at I-75; Houston, I-10 at I-45; and Atlanta, I-20 at I-285 (West).
ATRI’s analysis, which utilized data from 2024, found that traffic conditions continue to deteriorate from recent years, partly due to work zones resulting from increased infrastructure investment. Average rush hour truck speeds were 34.2 miles per hour (MPH), down 3% from the previous year. Among the top 10 locations, average rush hour truck speeds were 29.7 MPH.
In addition to squandering time and money, these delays also waste fuel—with trucks burning an estimated 6.4 billion gallons of diesel fuel and producing more than 65 million metric tons of additional carbon emissions while stuck in traffic jams, according to ATRI.
On a positive note, ATRI said its analysis helps quantify the value of infrastructure investment, pointing to improvements at Chicago’s Jane Byrne Interchange as an example. Once the number one truck bottleneck in the country for three years in a row, the recently constructed interchange saw rush hour truck speeds improve by nearly 25% after construction was completed, according to the report.
“Delays inflicted on truckers by congestion are the equivalent of 436,000 drivers sitting idle for an entire year,” ATRI President and COO Rebecca Brewster said in a statement announcing the findings. “These metrics are getting worse, but the good news is that states do not need to accept the status quo. Illinois was once home to the top bottleneck in the country, but following a sustained effort to expand capacity, the Jane Byrne Interchange in Chicago no longer ranks in the top 10. This data gives policymakers a road map to reduce chokepoints, lower emissions, and drive economic growth.”