The advent of cloud computing has changed the whole dynamics of IT, and it has coined a new definition of computing. Getting the best solutions using the power of IT is no more the preserve of large enterprises that have huge capital to invest in IT. Even the small companies who are not IT savvy are going for the cloud solutions. In a way, the cloud is now becoming a level-playing field for the large enterprises and small businesses alike.

Delhi Freight Carriers (DFC), which doesn’t even have its own website, is a classic example of the cloud penetration in Indian business. DFC is a Bangalore-based mid-sized transportation having operations across the country. It is spread over 40 locations and use over 200 trucks carting essential cargo such as Oil.

Transportation woes
Managing the data of a transport company having over 200 carriers is really a tough task if you are not using the power of IT. DFC faced challenges of a typical transport company—delay in data reception, trouble in vehicle tracking and most importantly, revenue leakage. With all possibilities of using manual techniques, it failed to justify the calculated revenue and the actual revenue. Also, there was drop of nearly 30 percent in capacity utilisation. The company was using basic computing applications like Microsoft Excel and other manual documents which were piling up gradually. Business Intelligence (BI) was out of the question for DFC.

The company wanted a solution that could provide truck movement, cargo monitoring and collaboration capabilities between supervisors located in different customer plants, responsible for difference trucks and customer accounts. Also, a systematic alerting mechanism was required to generate different vehicle related payment alerts to avoid payment penalty on the company. Other requirements included keeping track for all vehicle. On top of it, the system had to be simple enough to be used by its non IT savvy workforce.

The Solution
In order to get rid of these problems and to increase customer satisfaction, DFC decided to automate the entire fleet movement, back office reporting and tracking functions. The company decided to go for Jamcracker - a Bangalore-based cloud solutions integrator.  Jamcracker in turn got the solutions developed from Wolf Frameworks using on demand ‘Platform-as-a-Service’ (PaaS). PaaS was used for developing and deploying DFC’s multi-user, cloud-based fleet management SaaS business application.

Fleet Management Systems help to manage a fleet of vehicle by gaining control of travel records and time. They eliminate the time-consuming task of manually completing mileage logs, trying to track down missing data or verify hand-written information.

Jamcracker along with Wolf team helped DFC to develop a web-based logistics and fleet management SaaS application accessible through a web browser. The application interface was designed similar to excel sheets currently being used, thereby enabling non-technical users to easily adapt to the system. Introduced the categorisation of the various vehicle related alerts and created a process for easily monitoring and adding-updating of new alert items. ‘‘The moment we finished the application design, our fleet solution for all trucks was up and running with no coding at all,” says Kishan Agarwal, MD, DFC.

“The field staff is able to enter data using the excel-like interface, and we have activated vehicle specific alerts. This is an impressive platform,” adds Agarwal.

The Benefits
The solution was taken as a subscription by DFC from Jamcracker for which it pays a monthly fee of Rs 5,000. Jamcracker estimates, had it been an on-premise solution, the total expenditure including the initial set up cost and utilization cost over a period of three years could have been close to Rs 17 Lakh. “But it just cost Rs 3.3 lakh for the same calculation for the same period,” says Lakshmi Narayan Rao of Jamcracker.

The web application further enabled collaboration of geographically dispersed teams and streamlined the process of data consolidation by replacing the existing excel sheets and minimising the use of printed paper records. It also automated the process of report generation based on custom criteria and predefined business conditions via locations or trucks. Moreover, the cloud solution implemented custom interfaces for viewing and printing of the expenses based on different criteria.