RFPs will get you nowhere, Proof of Concept (POC) is the way to go for fleet telematics

At Railnova, we haven’t seen any successful Request for proposals (RFPs) in the last 6 years. Instead, we are seeing the same thing over and over again with Telematics RFPs. They get thrown into a decision nightmare and the reason is simple: as soon as engineers write something down in a specification, the whole industry will say “of course we can do that, look how clever we are”. But what RFP-addicted suppliers don’t tell you is when it will work and how much it will cost, because they don’t know it themselves. This makes choosing the right vendor solution for your problem a difficult task…

The array of problems to solve in Railway Fleet Management is gigantic and at Railnova we always check to make sure our client is clear on what they want to accomplish:

• is it energy consumption per traffic and driver fuel consumption you want to reduce?
• is it catastrophic in-line failures you want to prevent? (Each locomotive or train class has its own subtle way of failing, would your teams love to prevent that?)
• is it real time diagnostic retrieval so you can keep drivers running in case of inline faults?
• is it remote counters for condition based maintenance planning you want to retrieve?

It’s important that you define a set of high value problems you are trying to solve upfront because you can’t solve them all (and you can’t specify them all). Engineers are notoriously bad at answering this prioritisation question (I speak from my personal engineering experience here).

When we started Railnova back in 2010, it was based on a real perceived need and a vision for fleet management in the future. We didn’t wait on an RFP (!) from a large Railway company to create our product. We also didn’t raise venture capital money — our funding comes from our Clients. Clients that are happy to pay for a working solution and stellar service. Through Proof of Concepts, we’ve already equipped 700 locomotives and passenger trains, reading information and diagnostics from more than 40 different sub-components and sensors, thereby providing an array of use-cases ranging from CBM to real-time diagnostics and energy reduction.

A Proof of concept is as much proof that the solution works in your context as it is proof that your organisation is ready for change. At Railnova we have a very simple way to test if an organisation is ready for change :

• Do they acknowledge recent IT failures ?
• Did management change recently ?
• Are they prepared to pay for a POC ?

Not being willing to pay for a POC is the worse sign of all: it shows us that the old-fashioned company is used to free POCs from the industry.

But in the Railway, the old fashioned company doesn’t realize that Free has only 3 meanings:

• free as in “its free because no one would want to pay for it”
• free as in “it comes with a huge price tag later and the vendor hasn’t yet figured out how to tell you”
• free as in “it’s free because it’s bundled in a super-exciting full-service package”

If Clients are not prepared to pay for a POC to solve their burning and complex needs, it means that they are not committed to change and don’t value what a POC can bring them.

In the early days of Railnova I once cold-called a CEO and asked him :

“What problems do you have with your fleet, and what jobs are your teams trying to accomplish to keep your fleet running?”

He answered: “We have the usual problems, there is nothing we can do about it”. He almost laughed at me. We stopped visiting this client, because I knew there was nothing we could have done in this context. Years later, management changed, and we entered business with this company.

At Railnova we systematically recommend our Clients to perform a POC with a few vendors who say they have an “out of the box” solution available to cover 80% of the identified value points, from hardware to software. This will get you faster and cheaper to a decision point — and ultimately, to business value — than an RFP.

The questions you need to ask yourself when doing a POC, is “how far is the solution of a vendor today in order to cover 80% of my needs”, and “how evolutive is it later on”. You will not get an answer to these questions with an RFP (or at least not until it’s too late).