Telematics: Thought is to make it affordable and available to masses

Team CVF got the opportunity to speak with Mr. Sirish Batchu, an established Thought Leader in the industry and a distinguished speaker in various national and international forums in ‘Connected Vehicles & IoT Space’. He has to his credit, the creation of “Mahindra DiGiSENSE”, a unified Connected Vehicles Platform for the entire Mobility Sector across Mahindra & Mahindra. He shared with us some insights into how DiGiSENSE and other related technologies are set to transform not only fleet management and the CV space but also the passenger vehicle segment.

 

Q: With DiGiSENSE, Mahindra became the first Indian OEM to leverage one integrated technology platform for vehicle connectivity across a wide range of mobility products, tractors and businesses? How has the market responded to this revolutionary technology?

Sirish Batchu: DiGiSENSE was launched as a technology platform in the month of August last year. It was introduced in the market on small commercial vehicles in September-16; was made available on tractors in February-17 and for trucks its planned for launch in April-17 and other platforms are lined-up in the coming months.

In terms of the response, considering what we anticipated, it has been phenomenal, especially on the tractor side! We had very conservative expectations owing to the technology barrier and the fact that the front-end is a mobile app, but the farmer’s response has been exceptional.

On the commercial vehicle front, initially it was lukewarm response from the retail side and the individual owners. But the response has been very good from the enterprise perspective, who are buying vehicles in bulk. They see great deal of value in this new technology, where they can apply it straight away for their business needs and optimize their operations.  They are wanting lot more features apart from what we are offering at the moment. There is a good demand from their side.

Q: How do you see future of DiGiSENSE evolving going forward?

Sirish Batchu: The new DiGiSENSE technology is initially made available in the Mahindra Jeeto and Imperio in the small commercial vehicle, the Arjun Novo in the tractor space, Mahindra Blazo in the heavy commercial vehicle and Earthmaster in the construction equipment segment. Further, the this will launched across its entire line-up in the country.

In terms of the solution that we are offering – we started by looking at the commercial segment, which is a majority of M&M vehicle segment, more as a business enabler in terms of providing transparency from the usage perspective. We started with features related to vehicle tracking, vehicle health monitoring, service connect, emergency notifications such as breakdown etc. Going ahead more feature enhancements are planned from the end-customer point of view.

Looking at the personal segment vehicles, – it is implemented on the XUV, called the “Ecosense” – where driver behaviour analysis etc. is built- in into the Infotainment front-end and the complete trip data/analytics being available in the cloud. On the truck side – emphasis is on more on business productivity that includes the driving analysis, driver classification etc. adding value to the fleet owners in the CV segment. There are host of things planned, this is our  Generation 1 of the DiGiSENSE platform primarily focused around telematics based solutions. We have a roadmap for the future where we are planning for more integrated information management platforms (delivery management, online spares & inventory management to cite a few linked with our Customer Relationship Management) where different applications for different stakeholders will be available which will be more interactive and integrated solutions.

As per Dr. Goenka’s statement to the press, DiGiSENSE will become a single digital platform for all our mobility products in the future with a market penetration of about 20-25%.

Q: Do you see other large Indian OEMs introducing such capabilities in near future?

Sirish Batchu: DiGiSENSE has set a precedence in the Indian automotive industry and many other OEMs have taken cognizance and are under pressure to be competitive in the market. This has also catalyzed the connected vehicle ecosystem in India by creating the launch pad for mass proliferation and enabling the different players in the ecosystem to scale up their services. I see lot many OEMs likely to follow this trend. We hear it from the suppliers that other OEMs are approaching them for introducing such features or are looking to do so in the very near future. Lot of work is underway from the Indian OEMs owing to the competitive pressure. We are glad to have introduced it at such a large scale and the first ones to have done so. I’m also proud to that our pioneering activity has geared up the overall connected vehicle ecosystem, enabling other players to follow and join the telematics bandwagon.

Q: Telematics will not only help customers but will help OEMs in a big way through the insights that can help in designing a better product or a service. Will OEMs take a strategic call of not recovering the cost and treating telematics as strategic investment in the short run?

Sirish Batchu: Yes, DiGiSENSE is a strategic initiative. We learnt from the past, where the OEMs had tried to offer telematics as an additional product and their focus ended up on recovering the costs rather than focus on the value proposition to the customer point of view – that’s where we identified that we can bring a lot of value to the customers in the segments that we are operating.

In terms of the initial cost, it’s a strategic call to offer the solution free for the first year, where there is operating cost absorbed by us. Second year onwards we are aggressively working out how the billing will take place and maintain the subscriptions. Standard subscription based model in terms of pricing is our focus and we are working out as to how we will bundle that. As of now we are following an aggressive pricing policy and we are yet to see what’s the customer willingness is to pay for the subscription. But we are positive on that.

Q: Usage of telematics in India is characterized by basic services like fleet tracking and management. How do you think this will change going forward?

Sirish Batchu: What I see is that the use of even fleet management is also not so high in terms of the market penetration and the exposure point of view from the vehicle owners.

In terms of the future, remote vehicle health awareness could be a high value proposition as it can offer different value to different segments. Relating to this is also fuel monitoring and fuel theft and stolen vehicle tracking, also the predictive or the prognostic stuff (i.e.  warning or alerting the vehicle owners that something could potentially go wrong or something is set-up for a failure such as a component etc.), all of these are in the pipeline giving a different level of comfort to the vehicle owner. As an example, from the tractors and the trucks side, we are able to monitor the engine overheating which could be quite troublesome in the long run. We provide some predictive recommendations to the driver to overcome this.

From Mahindra, we are also looking at diagnostics for vehicle breakdown etc., where we can pull out the data and analyse what exactly has caused it rather than sending the vehicle to the service station to solve the issue. Now the service station can be prepared with the necessary repair related component or service on the spot. Apart from that what we also see is that there is a lot more scope in analytics for the end business customers point of view. If it’s an e-commerce set-up or a traditional business set-up it could lead to a different manifestation. We already have a platform called “SmartShift” which enables  logistics providers with effective data. It is load exchange platform for Small Commercial Vehicles, that enables the businessmen who wish to transport cargo & Transporters to find each other. There is a lot more integration In the pipeline closely with the real-time data generation taking place, enabling real-time decision making for example live parking update, live traffic information or location based services etc. on the personal segments.

All these will elevate the customer benefits to a different level when they get integrated into their respective businesses value chain. I see that there will be a shift towards considering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when it comes to commercial vehicles rather than the piecemeal advantages of the different features.

Q: In the developed economies fleet management involves significant applied science. In India that is evolving. What would be your key message for Indian fleet operators – to keep an eye for?

Sirish Batchu: Talking of fleet management, one key thing everybody looks at is the initial cost part of it. What they miss out on, is the part on what it can help save – in terms of efficiencies, transparency it provides to your data etc. So, the message from me would be “Don’t look at the initial costs – The ROI of this investment will come back to you in a month or two and beyond that it is all savings”

The second aspect of it may be the usage of data for making informed data oriented decisions and planning leading to much better efficiencies. Also, the other thing may be the disconnect between the owners and the drivers because primarily there is a penalty oriented practice rather than an incentive based practice. I would say that drivers should be motivated to do better by building incentives bringing a positive reinforcement in the fleet management space.

Q: How would you rate Indian CV industry on the technology adoption scale and Why?

Sirish Batchu: Indian CV industry on the technology adoption scale is towards the lower side compared to more developed markets probably because of the cost aspect as mentioned already and the fact that India is a very competitive market. Also, the industry still does not operate on the concept of total cost of ownership, everybody looks at the retail cost – I think that’s a huge shift which has to come in.

Fragmented aftermarket solutions in use in the CV industry, have prevented standardization and also lead to incompatibility issues thereby not being able to unlock the true value to the customer. This means that OEMs must take the baton and we are proud that Mahindra has taken the lead.

Q: Digitisation is the centre piece and may remain the same for next few years. Given your experience and exposure what kind of technological changes (read breathtaking) will the Indian CV industry witness going forward?

Sirish Batchu: Telematics as a given is a more of a digitisation journey. Capturing information not only on the vehicle but on the entire value-chain and using it to enable businesses and processes are perceived as digitalisation. Going into the future I see a lot of integration of real-time data in terms of business operations and decision making in the CV industry which would be more impactful where certain pain-points that we have today would be addressed. Going ahead, some specific ADAS features such as the accident-prevention, automatic emergency braking systems or lane keeping assist etc., would be more meaningful in the Indian Market where it will help the drivers overcome fatigue and make the driving more safer.

QYou are part of the IOT and Telematics panel at the upcoming Commercial Vehicle Forum (taking place on 18th May 2017 at the Westin in Pune). What are some of the key insights and themes you are looking to focus on as a part of this forum?

Sirish Batchu: There are two things, one is in terms of market sensitivity – the barriers of adoption where we are actively working on things like illustrating the benefits more quantitatively along with real life case studies to our customers.

Second thing is on the engineering side in terms of where to draw the line when we are looking at product versus platform approach and how we have been able to achieve a modular, scalable, flexible and robust connected vehicles platform that has been conceived and brought to life by bringing together an entire ecosystem of stakeholders.

We have consciously taken a decision to go the ahead with the platform approach – where we look at the way its deployed, across Mahindra’s offerings – all the products carrying digital solutions and this way we are able to bring in lot more economies of scale and at the same time enabling and making it accessible to all the customers segments and also able to differentiate and cater to the needs of the different customer segments through the manifestation of a Global Connected Vehicles Platform that is DiGiSENSE.

Q: What are your expectations from the Forum?

Sirish Batchu: Objective is to collectively bring the awareness along with the fellow panellists where different dimensions of the industry are addressed so that the participants get a good value add as a take away. Also, mutually how we are able to collaborate on things, making it more viable and bringing in more penetration. There are technologies being developed by many and not only Mahindra and we all can benefit from it. The thought is to make it affordable and make it accessible to everyone.