Perkins Pursues Plug-and-play Connectivity

October 1, 2018

Ryan Gehm

“This plug-and-play technology gives us hundreds, thousands, millions of real stories” that ultimately can be used to help design better engines, said Perkins’ Michael Wright. (Image: PERKINS)

Perkins has been pursuing engine connectivity aggressively the past several years, and many of their engines today come from the factory equipped with remote monitoring and communication capability. Yet there are millions of legacy Perkins engines in the field for which the advantages of telematics and connectivity haven’t been available. The majority of them are mechanical, which presents a huge challenge: How do you add connectivity to an engine with no electronic control system? Michael Wright, Perkins General Manager, Aftermarket, shared his thoughts on that conundrum in a recent interview.

How do you connect an engine without onboard electronics to the digital world?

Until recently, no one had solved the puzzle completely. In fact, there is a whole industry that came into existence trying to provide retrofit solutions for engines on older machines with limited success.

Connecting legacy engines is a two-part challenge. First, the monitoring device has to be inexpensive, easily installed, and compatible with as many different engines as possible. Second, the data processing software and user interface — the part of the system that communicates with the monitoring device, collects the data, formats it and presents it to the user — has to be easy to use and available on nearly any mobile device a user is likely to have. Today, that’s almost certainly a smartphone of some sort.

We set teams of engineers to work on both challenges and they came up with a pair of unique solutions.

What’s the solution for data generation across millions of different engines?

It turns out it’s simply to replace one component that is installed already on nearly every one of those legacy engines — the oil cap. Only three different oil caps have been used over the years on every Perkins engine from 0.7 to 7.1 liters — that represents a solid majority of the more than 5 million pre-digital Perkins diesel engines still in service.

The SmartCap is a simple, inexpensive component, at less than $50 per unit and has no subscription or other recurring cost, with plenty of room to package the miniaturized electronics needed to monitor the engine and communicate with the user’s device via Bluetooth. As you might expect, it’s offered in three sizes.

What do you do with the data generated by the SmartCap?

In today’s world you create an app, which is exactly what we did. The Perkins My Engine app communicates with the SmartCap via Bluetooth and formats the data for display on an Apple or Android smartphone. It’s free to download, and thus far there have been over 100,000 customer downloads in 195 countries.

The My Engine app uses SmartCap data to give the user information such as engine running hours, engine location, including multiple engine location data for fleets, and service reminders. In August we released an update with new functionality, including a completely new look and feel. Icons are used to identify a user’s different machines, and the user can now ‘tag’ engines to make them easier to find within the app if they have a large fleet. Another new feature is that engine data may now be shared with other app users. This is useful for coworkers and can, of course, only be provided with the approval of the engine owner.

Do opportunities exist to use the data to help design better engines?

We do a heck of a lot already to understand the operating parameters of different machines in different applications. This plug-and-play technology actually gives us hundreds, thousands, millions of real stories, and as the technology has evolved over the past year plus, the oil cap has been able to capture more performance aspects than just speed, start/stops and hours. It certainly has helped with our statistical analysis of usage.

Any other activities in the digital connectivity realm?

Connecting engines is important, but connecting with our customers is even more critical. They’ve been conditioned by the contemporary online experience to expect instant gratification and seamless support, and we need to meet those expectations to remain competitive. We’ve put perkins.com/ shop online for parts ordering and supported it with a new Regional Logistics Center in Kentucky. That’s the prototype for a global initiative that will eventually integrate maintenance and service functions, connecting Perkins to our customers and their local distributors.