Patent ID: 8249910

Claim:
A method of integrating materials handling vehicles with enterprise computing systems for materials handling vehicle fleet management, the method comprising: configuring a processor on a materials handling vehicle to communicate with a transceiver on the materials handling vehicle for wireless communication to a server computer, the server computer having an application for managing data collected from a corresponding fleet of materials handling vehicles; configuring the transceiver on the materials handling vehicle to receive from the application of the server computer, condition data associated with an event of interest, wherein: the condition data defines when an associated action is required by the processor on the materials handling vehicle in order to perform a predetermined vehicle function in response to detecting the event of interest; configuring the processor to monitor information communicated across a vehicle network bus, wherein: the vehicle network bus enables communication between existing electronic controllers of the material handling vehicle according to a vehicle network protocol; the existing electronic controllers communicate with each other independently of the processor; and the processor communicates across the network bus according to the vehicle network protocol; configuring the processor to implement the predetermined vehicle function in response to detecting an occurrence of the event of interest, where the event of interest is detected using the received condition data and monitored information communicated across the materials handling vehicle network bus, by: wirelessly communicating information associated with the detected occurrence of the event of interest between the server computer and the materials handling vehicle via the transceiver, where the communicated information is collected from at least one electronic component of the materials handling vehicle across the vehicle network bus; and interacting with at least one component of the materials handling vehicle across the materials handling vehicle network bus to implement the predetermined function.