LISLE, Ill. — The analytics team of Navistar, the parent company of school bus manufacturer IC Bus, is among the winners of the first Analytics 50 Awards.

Drexel University and CIO.com recently announced the winners of the awards program, and Navistar’s analytics team, represented by Dan Pikelny, vice president of analytics, was named as one of the honorees. The goal of the Analytics 50 Awards program is to honor 50 companies using analytics to solve business challenges.

“We are committed to providing our customers with the best trucks and buses in the industry and as such, we employ comprehensive data analysis to help our customers optimize their fleet maintenance and uptime,” said Phil Christman, senior vice president of joint strategic operations and planning at Navistar. “We’re proud of Dan and the analytics team for achieving this honor precisely for their work to help customers proactively manage their fleets by detecting major issues four to six months earlier using our predictive model.”

To be nominated for the award, Navistar described how it came up with an analytics-based solution to address a current business challenge. The analytics team has developed algorithms to predict the lifetime failure rate of vehicles and sets alerts on future risk, instead of focusing on historical experience, which means they are helping fleet managers to detect problems and prepare accordingly, according to Navistar.

“Navistar needs to be able to support our trucks while they are out in the field,” Pikelny said. “And from an analytics perspective, our challenge is detecting problems in the vehicle before customers experience issues in the field. Our OnCommand Connection remote diagnostics system has given us the ability to predict which vehicles are at risk and which components are potentially problematic.”

The Analytics 50 honored leaders from a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, software, pharmaceutical, healthcare, government, financial services, and others. By identifying leaders in analytics, the program aims to share best practices and recognize innovation. Learn more about the Analytics 50 winners at CIO.com.

Learn more about Navistar’s remote diagnostic system, OnCommand Connection, at Navistar.com.