I’mHere 24×7, a unit of Meridian Tracking Pvt. Ltd. (MTPL), offers a wide range of solutions such as vehicle tracking, fleet management and asset tracking for commercial & personal vehicles, trucks, vans and car fleet operators. Having seen excellent response for its products, the company is confident of increasing its engagement with customers by delivering a superior and wider range of offerings.
Mr. Saurav Arora, Co-Founder, MTPL, talks about how his company’s commitment towards its customers has brought it glory and how technology is helping to enhance the efficiency of the logistics sector.
Excerpts:
FY17 performance and FY18 plans
FY16-17 was overall a good year for our company with healthy growth and addition of marquee clients. The three months from November to January were challenging due to demonetization as most of our clients are from logistics, transport and auto sector. We used that period for planned marketing and outreach activities and participated in three exhibitions, one in Guwahati and two in Delhi during December, following which business resumed normally from February. Last year, there were many cases wherein we were able to assist our clients in recovering their vehicles following a theft. We are focused on reaching 200,000+ subscribers in the next 18 to 24 months and are building value-added services to support our clients. ‘Apni gaadi ko track kare apne mobile se, kahin bhi, kabhi bhi’ is our assurance to our customers.
GST impact on logistics sector
We see a short-term impact as companies and their clients need to update their IT infrastructure and build billing mechanisms. Accordingly, we might see impact for one quarter in terms of business and even liquidity pressures. However, GST will be very positive for the sector in the long-term as the feedback is positive and clients are seeing growth in their respective sectors. We might also see some consolidation in the market wherein some players combine operations or start new joint ventures with foreign players.
Company’s GST-readiness
We have built e-transportation for our clients under our platform www.truckbridge.com, connecting various players in the ecosystem, whereby clients can manage their transport across branches including truck booking, sending requirements to their vendors and to their branches on a single dashboard, uploading proof of delivery documents, etc., which helps save time, eases reconciliation and payments from final clients. We have also started on-ground activity to help our clients with GST filings and getting professionals on board to ease their transition and help them get e-way bills and file returns according to GST norms.
Role of technology in improving logistics efficiency
It is a big market and we are still in early days in the country. The technology has been there for many years now but it’s not hardware play but more a software and service play. Our products are user-friendly, light weight and competitively-priced and are hence high on value proposition.
As a service provider, it is our responsibility to make the product/service easy to use for our clients and also ease the adoption of technology like telematics, fleet connectivity, and fleet management. We also offer assisted technology solutions whereby our team members train the client teams at their site and we hand-hold the client till they have confidence on the technology usage. We have started giving our clients asset trackers that can run without charging for over 25 to 30 days and can be placed in their cargo or containers and can be tracked on long haul routes easily.
The emerging trends we see are traditional logistics and transport players adopting technology even faster, needing partners like us as system integrators across technologies. Also, corporate clients are looking for integrated solutions whereby they can track the vehicle and also the driver/their team member, collate the data and use the reports in real-time for better logistics & supply chain management. And today, since the end-users want transparency, their transport/logistics partners share this information accordingly through separate logins or provide direct API links through which only the vehicles operating for a particular end-client are visible.