Even before the pandemic, the fleet management segment was at a nascent stage, highly fragmented, unorganized, and highly dependent on overseas hardware imports. As per a June 2020 report by Ken Research, the segment has been growing at a double digit CAGR for the past five years. Increased consumerism due to explosive e-Commerce growth has made the segment, the fastest growing industry.

When COVID-19 hit the global supply chains and a lack of economic activity hurt retailers and restaurants that rely on foot traffic, a soaring demand for home delivery of essentials, kept the country’s fleet management industry up and running, ensuring it played a critical role to aid and recover from the virus outbreak.

Location intelligence to the rescue

As COVID-19 exposed the limitations of the global retail and food delivery brands, to service their customers, the neighboring brick and mortar stores took on the mantle of ensuring the supply of essential services and products to people. Across countries, these stores, doubled up as hyper local delivery firms, leveraged location embedded mobile solutions and apps to manage their home-grown supply chains consisting of farm-to-table suppliers, local farms, and fleets to reach the customers and provide efficient safe and no-contact delivery.

For businesses and retailers looking to get back on track, while maintaining a competitive edge and overall employee safety, businesses that leveraged spatial intelligence during the pandemic, offer an evidence-based proposition to create self-reliant, resilient, and sustainable supply chains and fleets.

Power of spatial technology

Let us look at how spatial technology and data can power the future of fleet management in a post-COVID era.

Cost optimisation and asset utilization: India’s national and state highways can throw a lot of surprises owing to its inaccurate road engineering and lack of roadside facilities. With spatial tools such as isoline routing (the area from a given location which can be reached by driving for a given time or distance) and customisable geofences fleet managers can plan optimal delivery routes based on travel time, fuel costs and road tolls.

When COVID-19 hit the global supply chains and a lack of economic activity hurt retailers and restaurants that rely on foot traffic, a soaring demand for home delivery of essentials, kept the country’s fleet management industry up and running, ensuring it played a critical role to aid and recover from the virus outbreak.~

Businesses can also leverage real time geographic data such as split lane information, traffic safety alerts and weather conditions on road. An apt example of this in action could be seen in the strategy adopted by Volvo Eicher. Using open location platform, the company rolled out its on-road assistance service to vehicles immobilised en-route across India to quickly and effectively reach breakdown locations on a 24/7 basis with trained technicians. GPS service tools also allow fleet managers to record mileage and plan routes by the minute using truck details such as height and weight clearance, thus enabling full asset optimisation and reducing overall shipping costs.

Enhanced business communications: Integrating rich cellular network data into the company’s fleet telematics can offer insights into how your carriers, coverage and interface compare to your competitors, thus allowing you to tailor your marketing and expansion efforts accordingly. On the other hand, it can also help your fleet stay connected by informing your drivers in real time about unexpected events, reducing delays, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving business processes.

Ensuring driver safety: Professional drivers around the world are facing more and more scrutiny to ensure driver safety and enhance working conditions.

Meeting those requirements can be hard, unless fleet operators go digital, and embrace connected systems and data standards. With customisable mobile apps integrated into vehicle dashboards, fleet managers can identify better drivers in their fleets, safer fleets, in turn revolutionising the vehicle insurance industry.

In the past, while insurers relied on historical data and record of collision claims, location enabled fleets can provide better representation and predictive analysis of future risks, thereby helping business maximise returns on insurance.

Demand forecasting and enhanced customer service: Integrating emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and data from connected systems, fleet businesses can create virtual queuing systems to secure delivery slots, monitor real time spurt in demand, where they should place a new distribution centre to serve new locations, predicting safety risks to employees, where they need to arrange on-demand transportation for food delivery, etc. thus enhancing overall customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Businesses such as supermarkets, food delivery, distribution, and preparation centres will require enabling technologies for fleet management to serve a population that will always be awake and in need of goods and services that are always essential.~

The bottom line

In a ‘work from home’ era, people are likely to shift to more flexible ways of life. A significant segment of the workforce turn into “night people” and have off-hours during daytime while the other half rest.

This is likely to necessitate 24/7 operations for businesses that traditionally did not operate this way, such as supermarkets, food delivery, distribution, and preparation centres. All of these will require enabling technologies for fleet management to serve a population that will always be awake and in need of goods and services that are always essential.

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and perhaps spatially-informed technologies and data offer the fleet businesses this exact push to transform the industry.

(Nikhil Kumar is the Country Head, India of HERE Technologies )

(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author, and ETAuto.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETAuto.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.)

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