Penske Leasing introduced a new fleet management platform that uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time insight into fleet performance, benchmarking against a group of similar fleets, and the ability to identify opportunities for improvement.

Catalyst AI combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and real-time data from Penske customers to create a decision engine that helps heavy-duty trucking fleet managers compare, diagnose, and take action to improve fleet performance.

Without metrics to compare your own performance data to, how do you know what “good” actually looks like?

Dynamic Fleet Benchmarking

More than three-quarters of transportation professionals in a recent survey tend to rely on historical, annual forecasting and industry benchmark reports to help them make planning and purchasing decision.

The Transportation Leaders Survey: A Road to AI Adoption Survey was conducted online in March by Big Village among a sample of 259 U.S. transportation and logistics executives involved in truck fleet management-related decisions at their business/organizations.

Penske said this process is often manual, time-consuming, and relies on data that may not holistically compare to their specific fleets.

The Catalyst AI platform compares a fleet’s performance to similar fleets across Penske’s live database of hundreds of thousands of vehicles in real-time. This allows benchmarking using apples-to-apples comparisons.

Targeted insights based on that data can help identify opportunities to improve fuel efficiency, utilization, and business performance.

Apples-to-Apples Benchmarking for Trucking Companies

At the heart of Catalyst AI is a patent-pending algorithm that identifies the most-similar fleets by evaluating key dimensions of fleet operations and composition. This provides highly customized operational KPI benchmarks tailored to each fleet's specific performance needs.

“Catalyst AI was born from our vision to harness the power of AI to meet the needs of today’s fleet managers,” said Ann Walsh, senior vice president of digital and customer data at Penske. “By integrating over 57 billion data points with AI, our patent-pending algorithm and industry expertise enables fleet managers to better optimize their operations using leading-edge technology.”

Penske Truck Leasing operates and maintains more than 442,000 vehicles and serves its customers from more than 980 maintenance facilities and more than 2,600 truck rental locations across North America.