‘Let’s use disruptions as an avenue to do even better’

Vinod Dasari breaks into a huge smile when I ask him if he is worried about the spate of disruptions happening lately. Be it demonetisation or the Goods and Service Tax, the system has seen a few shockers including, of course, the Supreme Court verdict in March on the Bharat Stage IV transition.

You would expect the Managing Director of Ashok Leyland to articulate his anxieties but he springs a surprise by insisting that this is the best thing that could have happened. “I keep telling my people and team here if we were making the same 10 models and selling 10,000 units month after month, life would be boring,” he says.

From Dasari’s point of view, there is so much uncertainty and disruption that this is where his team’s creativity and talent can come into play. “Let us use the disruptions as an avenue to do even better. I think this is the most exciting time,” he adds.

As he puts it, with Bharat Stage VI emission norms scheduled to be mandatory by April 2020, there is no telling what kind of vehicles Ashok Leyland will be producing 3-5 years from now. For instance, there could be a greater emphasis on electric options instead of internal combustion engines. Likewise, solutions could take precedence over products. “The game is going to change considerably,” says Dasari.

The Ashok Leyland chief is in Mumbai for the unveiling of four digital solutions under an umbrella called the Digital Market Place. “The underlying fact is that we are not doing digital for digital sake,” he reiterates.

In the commercial business, there are only two things which are important. “One, you must have a vehicle that performs better than somebody else’s,” says Dasari. “Two, you need to have a network to ensure that it continues to perform well.” By the end of the day, if the wheels are not rotating, it simply means that “you are not making money”.

It is in this context that Leyland’s latest digital initiative becomes an important part of the growth story. Even as the company has expanded its network to about 2,700 outlets across the country, nearly 60 per cent of vehicle servicing is done in local garages. The latest BS IV trucks have electronics and the challenge is to make the customer’s life easier.

This is where the four pillars of Digital Market Place come into play. The first, iAlert, lets customers track and trace their vehicles. The dashboard displays information on its health and if remedial measures are needed.

Should this be the case, he clicks a button, which goes to an app called Service Mandi where a whole bunch of trained and rated mechanics are on hand to help out. “You can be sitting anywhere and not worry about his expertise or if he is overcharging you,” says Dasari.

With the third pillar, e-Diagnostics, all vehicles now come with a Bluetooth attached, which helps the mechanic or driver resolve the problem through an easy-to-follow visual process. “The idea is to get the vehicle running as quickly as possible,” says the Leyland boss.

The last part of this digital drive is called LeyKart, which offers 24x7 availability of spares. All that needs to be done is to enter the vehicle registration number and select the relevant part. For this exercise, the company covered the entire spectrum right from the customer to mechanic to ensure that everything could be done from a mobile phone.

The more important part of this initiative is the tremendous revenue potential on the aftermarket side. Yet, Dasari adds that Digital Market Place was not launched to grow the aftermarket or due to the fact that digital was the “hot thing”. “The idea was to first fix the customer’s problem where the top priority was to do something right,” he says.

This involved a marathon exercise where the competencies of nearly 20,000 mechanics were individually mapped. They were trained and their infrastructure reviewed before a star rating on their capabilities was assigned to each of them.

“This is the underlying work we did over the last six months to a year,” says Dasari. What was even more interesting that it was youth power at Leyland that led the way into making this a reality.

One of the main spurs for this exercise was the recent transition to BS IV, which naturally posed a fair degree of concern to fleet operators. After all, this meant added technology and this digital drive is expected to go a long way in easing customers’ woes.

“We will come up with more innovations for BS VI as in the case of BS IV and this include a host of innovations,” says a visibly excited Dasari. He believes that this is where Indian creativity and competence in the digital space could be leveraged to the hilt.

The Leyland chief is also of the view that some of his company’s technological initiatives like iEGR (intelligent exhaust gas recirculation) to meet BS IV norms cannot be flippantly dismissed as “Indian jugaad ” given that it is serious hardcore innovation. “Rather than be proud of it, people tend to discard it as jugaad . Have some respect for Indian engineers, sometimes they are very creative,” says a tongue-in-cheek Dasari.

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