Using the truck driver's feature phone to enable better visibility of assets carried through the truck in the supply chain & enabling efficient route planning for small and medium fleet owners
Teammate:
Sowmiya Nagarajan, Full Stack Engineer
My Role:
UI Developer
Product Designer
Deliverables:
A fully functional progressive web application for both truck owners and truck drivers for optimal fleet management suiting small and medium-scale business owners.
Time Period:
June 2019 [1 Month- Part time]
@ CodeGladiators 2019 - India's Biggest Coding Competition
Background
As a majority of the truck drivers in India don't use smartphones during their trips due to safety and security concerns, it's being harder for the truck owner to promise delivery timing in new locations. Especially in long-haul trucks, this is a major issue as the truck drivers will be stopping and asking for routes frequently which will increase the delivery time significantly.
Vision
Make navigation more accessible to the truck drivers in their feature phone itself and ease the process of communication between truck drivers/owners, field staff, and the industry managers regarding the location of the goods.
Scenario
Problem Statement
Owners / Industries facing difficulty in getting updates from field workers (drivers or transport contractors)
Drivers facing difficulty in tier-2 & tier-3 city navigation without a smartphone as most of the trips are to a new industry location or region
Opportunities
Jio's feature phone has a 21% market share in India with 40Mn+ devices (as of April 2018)
Very less proportion of long-haul truck drivers use smartphones due to threats during the night drive
No proper truck routing, tracking & fleet management software support for feature phone
Proposed Solution
Note: All functionalities mentioned here are fully supported with Jio Feature phone (Browser), Android Device (Progressive Web App), iPhone (Progressive Web App) & Desktop/ iPad/ Laptop Browsers.
For Truck Drivers:
Organized & easy communication with the truck owner, by knowing the trip details and updating Payment status/ signed bill copy status or adding remarks and notifying owner/ transporter
2. Notify Owner & Transporter after reaching Pickup/ Drop location on single click and Navigate to destination based on their truck size
For Truck Owners:
Easy management of fleets, transporters & drivers on a single platform
a) Truck owners can add trips through the application where they can single-handedly track the details of the contractor through whom the trip was sourced, the driver who is driving the truck during the trip, pickup & drop points, and the payment status with any remarks associated with that trip.
b) All the added live trips and archived ones can be viewed at a single glimpse. The location icon on each trip navigates the user to the live location of the truck which is sourced from the GPS provider application.
c) All the staff who are on payroll including the drivers, cleaners, and port men are added to the application, which would make the job easier for the truck owner to keep track of the associates who are on a particular trip.
d) Majority of the trips for small truck owners are sourced from agents or transport contractors rather than the industry itself. So, through this page, the truck owner can add all the transporters/agents and this data can be used to project on through whom the majority leads were generated.
2. Analyse on-time trips with accurate location and track payment status with date, to project cash cycle and equip better business
a) Through the trip calculator, the truck owner can plan the trip route, know the duration based on traffic, estimate the toll cost, driver cost, and vehicle dep. cost through which he/she can quote a competitive price which will be a mutual win for all stakeholders.
b) Through the scheduler, the contractors and agents along with truck owners can plan the route based on the demand and requirement for part-load or full-load. This also takes the minimum and maximum arrival time of the goods to the location with support for up to 5 drop points. Also, the fuel factors state-wise along with route traffic is considered and they can be used for city navigation also.
3. When the driver drives illegally, a notification is sent to the truck owner stating that the truck driver is violating the traffic rules. This includes opposite lane driving, improper u-turns, and overspeeding. All with the data from GPS device.
Feature phone support
All the features above which are applicable to the truck drivers are completely accessible through the Jio phone or any feature phone with browser support.
High-level solution architecture
Innovation & Impact of the solution
What's new?
Solution built on one of the Smallest & Fastest frontend frameworks - VueJS, which gives an advantage of 5X faster loading, than Google Maps in JioPhone
Single window fleet management & field-level staff management software for fleet owners, where the dependency of field staff having the smartphone is eliminated
The driver gets a lightweight application (<250kb) in Android Phone/ iPhone, where tier-2 and tier-3 Indian users are more phone storage-centric this brings advantage to the table
Organized tracking & communication tools for the stakeholders in the chain (Truck Owner, Driver, Transport Contractor, Brokers & Industries). This helps them to track on many metrics like onTime Trips.
How big is the addressable market?
India has more than 1 Crore (10Mn) goods carrying vehicle on road (as of 2016), out of which around 30% vehicles are into long haul movement
75% of the truck fleet in India are with those who own up to five trucks (more unorganized market)
Unorganized long-distance fleet owners/ travel companies will also get benefited from this solution
Presentation of this product in Vue JS meetup - Bangalore (16 min)
Product feature recording - no audio (5 min)
Gallary
During the event at Reliance Corporate IT Park, Navi Mumbai
While receiving the award from Here Maps South Asia CTO
#Logistics #Software #Transportation #Phones #Maps #Navigation