Abhijeet Konduskar talks about Fleetain to Sarada Vishnubhatla and reveals how the one-stop cloud-based software platform for fleet management works hard to solve fleet owners’ issues. Having faced a variety of issues in their family-owned fleet of vehicles, the personal nature of problem-solving capabilities of Fleetain have proved them reliable and efficient to their discerning customers.
Working towards smoothing over their own pain points at Konduskar Travels ultimately led to the birth of Fleetain 2.5 years ago. It is a cloud-based fleet management platform that uses algorithmic intelligence. Previously, the family-owned travels business was plagued by frequent on road breakdowns. When they investigated for the root cause, it was found that the vehicle part maintenance was irregular leading to frequent downtimes. The maintenance schedules were manually documented and somehow were left unattended more often than to the management’s liking.
Abhijeet Konduskar, Founder & CEO, shares: “We explored ways to solve our fleet problems and gradually gained a clear picture about how we wanted the solutions to be, and how they can be tested to prove their worthiness over and over again. My wife, Supriya, who is an IT professional has spear-headed this entire initiative and we developed Fleetain as an asset management platform based on deep learning. It is a state-of-the-art solution and I believe it is one of its kind in India as on today. It is an all-in-one ERP solution on the cloud. Today, Fleetain has increased the life span of our vehicles and they average at 16-17 lakh km because we know which critical part needs to be replaced before it wears out.”
Fleetain came into existence solely to make profits for the fleet companies. It was developed in-house from the scratch, and having proved successful on the home turf, the management had a choice to offer it as a solution to help other companies.
Konduskar says: “My father inspired us to take Fleetain to the world. We believe that there is a huge amount of national wastage happening merely because vehicle inspections are not happening regularly. So, even though software development was not our core business, we created a solution from the scratch and now we are building it into a unique solution backed by our huge domain knowledge.”
Vehicle Part Tracking – A Big Clue
A vehicle is only as good as its healthy parts. Fleetain keeps track of each vehicle part and documents every aspect of maintenance that is performed on it and the information is relayed to the customer on the smartphone as a notification, live update or an alert. When a part is inducted into the inventory, Fleetain gives it a unique identification number, which can then be tracked and tapped into to reveal relevant data throughout its lifecycle.
According to Konduskar, there are three ways a vehicle can be maintained. One, when a complaint is filed by the driver or the mechanic; two, when there is an actual breakdown.
He elaborates on the third way: “We do preventive scheduling by monitoring for change of each part or aspect. For example, we can schedule an oil change after every 50,000 km. We can schedule inspection of a part after a certain periodicity to see if it is still be used or should it be replaced before it gives way. Fleetain’s inspection module offers a checklist that can be accessed on the mobile before taking the vehicle out and all the vitals can be cross-checked.”
He firmly believes that fleet companies and their employees learn ‘discipline’ when working with such a platform.
He says: “Fleetain brings discipline to an organization which eventually saves money. Since the inspections are reported online, the maintenance is accounted for because the managers can view the reports. He can then make a requisition to the purchase department through the Fleetain app and a work order can be placed using the same.”
Money-saving Modules
It is in the small but significant actions that overheads can be saved. And Fleetain modules have become popular with customers, not only because they make vehicle maintenance easy but also because the solution is highly customizable.
The tire maintenance module of Fleetain indicates regular inspection of each tire leading to fixing of the problems immediately without them snowballing into huge issues. The module also helps match which tire works better with which model of vehicle by which maker. The checklist module leads to quality inspections which can be programmed to daily, weekly, pre-trip and post-trip inspections and the trip module will calculate the income.
Konduskar adds: “Fuel is the biggest money guzzler in any fleet operations. Fleetain helps the fleet owner make intelligent decisions by calculating cost per kilometer of each vehicle part, which may lead to lowered cost and increased profits. We get the APIs from the telematics providers. So, Fleetain is essentially a base for all of them to integrate and we track the key parameters of the vehicle and then offer the data to the fleet owner.”
Fleetain also offers warranty tracking, run driver analytics, and the employee management module keeps track of each team member’s performance, while the document management module has a whole list of reminders and alerts to be taken care of. The most popular module, of course, is the one that offers preventive schedule and vehicle status management – which enables an efficiency level of zero breakdowns.
Unique Offerings
The USP of Fleetain software is two-fold. According to Konduskar, ‘there may not be any other company in India right now who is doing what Fleetain does on the same scale’. Konduskar recommends any fleet owner with more than 20 vehicles to opt for Fleetain, and to encash its magic.
“We offer a month’s worth of free trial of our software to all. If they decide to come onboard, Fleetain guarantees them a smooth and profitable fleet-owning experience,” he says.
Headed by their principle architect, Sachin Patil, the 15-member strong software team sits in Fleetain’s Pune office. Their teething-troubles were many – from identifying and zeroing-in on the ideal software, to finding ways to get their ideas right the first time.
Konduskar recounts their major challenges in creating this unique solution platform: “We majorly strive, even today, to continuously ensure that we are solving every fleet owner’s unique problems all the time. But initially, one major challenge was customizing our solution to suit a plethora of problems that will broadly cover most, if not all, issues of our clients. And to this effect, we kept learning as we built on the solution and as a result, today we have a highly flexible software.”
India is a highly cost-conscious market. But big companies have never had a problem in getting onboard with Fleetain, feels Konduskar. It is the medium to small companies that are still not comfortable using software and so continue to depend on traditional accounting methods. Convincing them is a challenge majorly because decision making is an emotional action for them and not based on data, says he. Though gradually, things are changing. With new generation of modern heirs coming in to take up reins of businesses, dependence on softwares will be higher.
Konduskar agrees: “They embrace ideas better and are more technology-savvy. We have designed our software in such a way that within five minutes the intended task is completed – from the time the customer logs in and the first work order is tackled or accesses any module of the software. In fact, we have held developer team competitions to make sure that we achieve this efficiency level.”
Going Forward
In its short yet fruitful existence, Fleetain has learnt to solve many a unique problem and the team is humble enough to give the credit to their demanding yet prestigious clients. The learning experience has made Fleetain’s journey more robust and well-rounded.
He says: “One particular client, who is a major player internationally and in India, ferries industrial gases and has a fleet of 3000 vehicles. They were highly concerned with the security of the data. We developed unique applications to perform penetration tests, to find security vulnerabilities and ensured that our software is 100 % reliable. Today, it is a standard built-in feature that we offer to each one of our clients. Then on the other extreme is another customer – a cement company with RMC plants – whose challenge was to impart basic training to his staff to ensure that they were judiciously documenting data. Since they were documenting on paper, the owner was unaware whether his company was in profit or loss at the end of the day. But today with Fleetain, this client has at his fingertips the number of vehicles running, kilometers covered and income of the day and knows where the company stands.”
Each customer is assigned one wholly dedicated ‘Customer Success Person’, to guide and hand-hold through every step of the journey with Fleetain. Free online tutorials are offered on udemy.com to its customers who can get their staff trained for a better understanding of the nuances of working with Fleetain.
As on today, Fleetain caters to 10 major customers and is working on a few partnerships abroad. And the management feels that the ‘building mode’ that the software continues to be in will make it robust and the most user-friendly software in the times to come.
Afterall, every second spent on solving fleet owner’s problems is a second well spent in Fleetain’s dictionary!