Automated fleet diagnostics enhance supply chain resilience, writes DJ Oreb, President of Managed Services at DMI
Efficient supply chains keep our communities running. Billions of metric tons ship each year to keep shelves stocked and operations humming. The American Trucking Association reports trucks moved 11.27 billion tons of freight in 2024, and that excludes international trucking, maritime, and air cargo.
And now geopolitical shifts and tariff volatility are adding new friction and uncertainty into planning and execution. According to the latest McKinsey Global Supply Chain Leader Survey, nine in ten respondents report encountering supply chain challenges. The survey also revealed considerable gaps in organizations’ ability to identify and mitigate supply chain risks.
Disruptions can start at ports, in plants, on the road, or in software. Yet one frequently overlooked weak point sits at the edge of the network: mobile endpoints traveling with the fleet. Think in-cab tablets and scanners, ELDs and telematics gateways, and the vehicle systems that keep assets moving.
The question isn’t whether to act, it’s how.
Automated fleet diagnostics provide a practical, scalable path that includes:
- Continuously checking ECU health and fault codes
- Monitoring firmware, policy posture, sensor integrity, and connectivity
- Flagging anomalies before they cause delays
- Triggering playbooks that keep cargo and the economy moving
Why endpoint visibility is critical for shipping and logistics
Picture a normal Tuesday: a driver hits the dock, but the tablet won’t scan, the reefer (refrigerated trailer) sensor stops reporting, and dispatch can’t see location updates. One tiny endpoint hiccup cascades into missed windows, detention fees, and a line of forklifts with nowhere to put pallets. That’s what happens when your operation runs on mobile devices, and you can’t see what they’re doing.
Visibility is how you stay ahead of the curve. With automated fleet diagnostics, you can see health and performance in real time, spot trends, and intervene before issues become outages.
Meaningful visibility helps spots issues like:
- Health and performance: Abnormal battery drain, thermal spikes, storage pressure, repeated app/service crashes, CPU throttling
- Connectivity: SIM/modem status, dead-zone routes, GPS drift, high packet loss, roaming anomalies, 5G/LTE flapping.
- Security and compliance: Encryption/PIN status, jailbreak/root detection, OS/firmware drift, ELD policy non-compliance, missing patches.
- Utilization: Idle, duplicate, or underused devices; licenses that can be reclaimed; assets ready to redeploy or retire.
With meaningful visibility, you can detect issues early and quickly diagnose if it’s the app, battery, or policy at fault. You can then act automatically to resync or quarantine before the next shift.
Turning insight into action with automation
Spotting a tablet with runaway battery drain is helpful; swapping it before a driver misses a dock window is transformational. When telemetry from tablets, gateways, and sensors connects to ITSM, UEM/MDM, CMDB, and messaging tools, signals go from FYIs to triggers.
Closed-loop models—detect, diagnose, decide, do, verify—correlate events with context like vehicle state, route schedule, recent updates, and charge cycles. The platform selects the lowest-risk remedy and executes it automatically. This includes restarting a service, throttling a background task, pushing a configuration, rolling back a version, or scheduling a swap at the next terminal. And each step is auditable. The system opens a ticket with logs, notifies the driver and dispatch, confirms the fix, and feeds what it learned back into thresholds and playbooks to prevent another incident.
Automation adds value across the lifecycle. At deployment, diagnostics act like a preflight check to enforce baseline settings, enrollment, encryption, ELD posture, required apps, and firmware. For refresh planning, health and utilization scores replace guesswork, directing budget toward assets that threaten SLAs. At end of life, diagnostics flag devices for redeploy or securely wipe and document those ready for disposition.
Real-world flows make the value concrete. If a reefer sensor goes dark mid-route, the workflow prompts the driver to check power, fails over to a secondary gateway, alerts dispatch, and prepopulates an incident with telemetry. If an ELD policy drifts out of compliance, the device resyncs, restricts nonessential apps, and notifies safety. This defers heavy updates until the vehicle is stationary. The result is fewer roadside surprises, faster MTTR, and smarter operations.
Proactive fleet management builds a more resilient supply chain
You can’t steer the weather, reopen a port, or quiet a border dispute, but you can decide whether every tablet, gateway, and sensor in your fleet is visible, healthy, and compliant. Comprehensive, automated fleet diagnostics turn endpoints from liabilities into assets. Diagnostics provide a live, trustworthy picture of what’s working, what’s drifting, and what needs action. When diagnostics feed your service workflows, the gap between “something’s off” and “it’s resolved” collapses.
Resilience is engineered in early warnings, safe automations, and continuous learning. As vehicles become more software-defined and the edge grows denser with sensors, the fleets that treat diagnostics as a strategic data plane, not just a dashboard, will move freight more reliably at lower cost.
So, ask yourself: if you knew the health of every endpoint ten minutes earlier, and could act on it automatically, how many delays would never happen? If that question sparks ideas, you’re ready to map your visibility gaps, wire diagnostics into daily workflows, and pilot automation on a high-friction lane. Control what you can, automate what you should, and let proactive diagnostics carry more of the uncertainty.
DJ Oreb is President of Managed Services at DMI
Author bio: As President of Managed Services at DMI, DJ leads the Managed Services group, overseeing its operations, growth, and strategic market positioning. With extensive expertise in procurement, telecom expense management, and IT operations, DJ has successfully built high-performing, results-driven programs that enhance operational efficiency and business growth.
His expertise in mobile lifecycle management, telecom expense management, IT operations, and vendor strategy enables him to build programs that empower enterprises to optimize and scale their IT Managed Services.
There’s plenty of other editorial on our sister site, Electronic Specifier! Or you can always join in the conversation by commenting below or visiting our LinkedIn page.
