Rand McNally estimates that more than 1 million trucks on the road have some form of the company’s digital solution – from navigation to telematics.
Now, the company is working to bring new technologies to market with its recent acquisition of Australia-based fleet management and vehicle insights company Fleetsu.
Rand McNally CEO Aaron Dannenbring told the CCJ during a recent call that the company was looking to acquire a technology company to enhance Rand McNally’s existing products.
“Rand McNally has been involved in commercial transportation since really the advent of over-the-road commercial transportation,” Dannenbring said. “However, when we looked at where we were, we have a very strong footprint, good customers, good hardware, good products out there. But we realized that the next generation of these kinds of connected services really goes a lot deeper into the areas of fleet efficiency, fleet safety, fleet security and, generally speaking, fleet performance.
“So the kinds of services that vehicle fleets want now, especially commercial carriers given the price of diesel fuel, given the need to manage fleet efficiency, required us to have a set of developments on our platform that were more sophisticated than what Rand McNally had to start with.”
He said were Rand McNally to develop the technology itself, it would have been a multi-year process.
And that’s where Fleetsu came in.
