Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions Pvt. Ltd., with a fleet size of over 1300 vehicles, is known for its high level of service and maintenance standards. The company has placed its trust on Bridgestone, global tyre market leader and a trusted brand in the Indian TBR space, to improve tyre life and bring down maintenance cost. Rajesh Rajgor pays a visit to the transporter’s Head Office in Pune to find out details.
Prasanna Purple is one the largest bus fleet providers that operates with 1300 vehicles across India. Realizing the fact that almost 15% of a fleet operator’s total expenses is towards tyres and in order to extract more from the tyres and improve the TCO, the company looked to Bridgestone’s range of commercial tyres. Ever since they collaborated with the premium tyre maker in 2019, the company has seen very encouraging and desired results.
Some of the significantly noticeable benefits that Bridgestone tyres were able to provide includes long tyre life, improved fuel efficiency, very rare premature failures and best practices in support towards tyre maintenance. “For a large fleet operator like us that consumes around 2,400 tyres per annum, every penny counts and once we started measuring the Non-Skid Depth (NSD) at regular intervals, we were better prepared to optimize our tyre requirement. With Bridgestone, we were able to clock close to 95,000 to 1,00,000 kms (on the front-axle) with the original tyre life. After two remoulds, the Bridgestone casing gives a total life of 1,70,000 to 1,80,000 kms according to tyre monitoring done at our workshop,” observed Patwardhan.
End-to-end tyre solutions provider
Prasanna Purple boasts of an array of mobility solutions like city and intercity buses, car rentals, employee mobility and school bus services, corporate MICE movement, individual and group tours. Their city bus business on Public Private Partnership (PPP) basis is spread in various cities across India, with the operations conducted in partnership with the local authorities of the respective cities.
Prasanna Purple carries more than 240 million passengers by their city buses and 1.5 million passengers on intercity buses per annum, both operating on different road and load conditions. Thus, it is imperative for them to maintain a very high level of service standards and to achieve this they train their staff in various aspects from tyre management to vehicle management. With respect to tyres, the Bridgestone team has extended them excellent aftersales service support by regular monitoring and tracking the tyre performance and by conducting training for their staff on various tyre maintenance practices which have helped them realize the benefits of tyre rotation, wheel alignment, air pressure monitoring and other routine checks which they have been performing periodically. This has also helped them cut their tyre costs by around 20% over the course of the past few months.
“Every company wants to deliver the best service and offer best products to customers. However it also boils down to the regional on ground teams’ support in delivering results at client’s end. We have observed that Bridgestone’s local team has been very responsive to our needs and understands the problems of the customer as a partner and ensures we get more out of the tyres,” explained the CMD.
Future of mobility
In recent times, CV fleet operators have stepped up adoption on fleet management solutions starting from basic GPS tracking to more advanced telematics solutions. There is also a marked rise in the use of RFID tags to ensure smooth functioning of tyres without any hassle and to save manpower and time in extracting valuable data from tyres.
Some fleet operators are also walking the talk on electric vehicles, an area where Prasanna Purple has been one of the first-movers. Patwardhan beamed: “Already 130 vehicles, almost 10 per cent of our fleet, are electric and we believe that electric is going to be the way forward. Although not all operators make decisions based on safeguarding environment, going electric will also make economic sense in the next 5 years. In our case, we will see 70-80 per cent of EVs in our fleet in the next 5 years.”
With lesser number of parts to maintain, the life of an EV would definitely be much longer. Ride experience for passengers would be more comfortable with zero NVH and emission. As the demand increases, so would the scale of production, thereby bringing down the battery cost which would make EVs a more attractive option.
Be it electric vehicles or any other new technology, Bridgestone products are future-ready. The company’s R156 tyre has helped fleets with much better performance thanks to its low RRC technology. Prasanna Purple has also experienced the R156 tyre and has seen significant cost savings across its fleet.
When asked on the demand for tyres and their change in the overall scheme of things, Patwardhan shared: “The tyre manufacturers would have to work on longevity (original to scrap life) a bit more as the vehicles might be heavier due to the battery weight, which could be a new challenge for tyre manufacturers to address in the electromobility regime. In such a scenario, we would like to engage more with players like Bridgestone who bring in new technology to the market.”
The Bridgestone – Prasanna Purple partnership is a win-win one. While the tyre maker is proud to work with a forward-looking organization such as Prasanna Purple led by their visionary leader Prasanna Patwardhan, both brands share the same motto of delivering excellent customer experience through their products and solutions.
“Bridgestone’s local team has been very responsive to our needs and understands the problems of the customer as a partner and ensures we get more out of the tyres”
– Prasanna Patwardhan, CMD, Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions
Combating COVID
As the CV and automotive industry in India fights to overcome the COVID crisis, we at Prasanna Purple are committed to continue delivering the best service to our loyal customers. In such times, controlling costs becomes imperative for which brands like Bridgestone would be perfect partners in progress.