• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager
• Smartbuy

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth
• Events 2007

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• The Hindu ePaper
• Business Line
• Business Line ePaper
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

Srikanth Krishnamoorthy

Paromita Pain

The BPO industry is making as much news for its success as its graveyard shift and employee travel options.

The Chennai-based Dhanus Technologies has developed FleeTrac, a product that can, it says, help fleet owners track their vehicles at every moment. FleeTrac, which uses GPS technology, was launched in the market in November 2007.

eWorld spoke to Srikanth Krishnamoorthy, Executive Vice-President (Technical) of Dhanus, for the latest on this front.

Over to Krishnamoorthy:

What is your product all about? What made you develop it?

Dhanus has built the proprietary service FleeTrac for vehicle tracking across several industries — from BPO to fleet management for logistics.

The solution provides information about mileage, routes covered, and pinpoints locations up to the second with accuracy.

The location information, along with other data, is conveyed to Dhanus’ central data centre in Chennai through the Internet via GPRS service. The web interface is multilingual, available in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

FleeTrac was developed to enable the tracking of several thousand vehicles across multiple locations with the ability to monitor everything from fuel siphoning, overspeeding, unauthorised unloading to route deviations.

Fleet owners and companies can eliminate wastage and optimise their operations effectively.

The Indian transport sector is growing at a very fast pace and we foresee immense growth opportunities in this sector.

Fleet owners don’t have to invest in expensive GPS equipment — they pay for the service provided, which is a vehicle location, two-way communication system plus a web-based fleet management system.

What is the size of your market?

Dhanus projects to have 42,000 units deployed in India by the end of this year. Statistics indicate that the current fleet size in India is about 3,75,000.

Recently, Dhanus also secured an order of 20,000 units to be installed in private buses in Kerala. This will provide instant real-time information on the location, arrival and departure timing of every individual bus, via the Internet and SMS.

Can you give us an instance when your product was really useful to a client?

The product helped a customer in Aurangabad trace a stolen vehicle with consignment worth more than Rs 75 lakh.

A transport company identified its vehicle waiting for longer hours for a particular client. The client was informed that vehicle waiting beyond a certain amount of time would attract additional charges.

The system thereby helped in increasing the overall productivity of the company.

A goods transport owner was able to increase productivity by 30 per cent by identifying unnecessary idle time of drivers.

Following the use of FleeTrac services, the client was able to increase the number of trips from Mumbai to Nagpur to 20 from 16.

We are currently working on a Fleet ERP system aimed at small and medium-sized fleet operators.

The product is also seeing interest from the biggies, says Krishnamoorthy.

For BPO player Accenture, FleeTrac is a preferred mode of keeping track of third-party transport operators, he says.

“Accenture became our client primarily because of the ease we provide in terms of billing.

For example they use cars and call taxies for their employees. Our service enables them to keep track of the time and distance which they can submit along with the invoice.

We are signing up other big players next because of very different reasons. They want us for our latest security features.

We have installed panic buttons on the back seats that can help alert in case of any danger.

We were testing for the last four months a device with which we can completely immobilise the car with a remote SMS command. We launched it recently.

paromita@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Interview | Software | Roadways

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Printed page — and beyond

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line