Helping logistics firms with vehicle, workforce, assets visibility

April 13, 2021: RoadCast is a tech-driven platform built for asset monitoring, fleet management, and vehicle tracking. Headquartered in Delhi, RoadCast helps businesses like Udaan and Lets Transport gain visibility and also allows them to improve operational efficiency in terms of their workforce.

In an exclusive interview, Rahul Mehra, co-founder, Roadcast Tech Solutions, talks to Indian Transport and Logistics News about how he, along with other co-founders, conceived the idea of Roadcast, how intelligent their platform is, how they help clients to track and monitor and their plans to expand.

What is your inspiration behind starting a digital platform to help companies track?
A few years ago, when we the co-founders Vishal Jain, Anshul Jain and I were travelling with our families, it was a classic situation of, “Where are you?” or “Are we there yet?” It was difficult to coordinate and track everyone in the family, while they were on the go. It was a common recurring question in the minds of all three as to how location sharing can be improved and more connected in real-time. That’s when we put our respective skills together to birth an Indian platform that connected people while they were travelling & attempt to resolve a host of pain points.

Tell us how this transformed into Roadcast?
During the development of this platform, we realized the inconvenience of location sharing was not restricted to personal and group travels but also kept people away from security, surveillance and better human management. RoadCast came into being in 2015. Using this idea, we, the founding team of RoadCast, worked on a set of business solutions. We strongly felt that logistics companies and those with delivery-based business models have been facing the problem of tracking their fleet on the road.

The aim is to enable businesses with constantly moving on-field resources, such as sales force and vehicles. Through real-time tracking of employees, vehicles or product orders, organizations can ensure the quickest, safest and most efficient handling of logistical operations while being in constant communication with the end customer.

"We help “IMS Medi” to provide medication on time PAN India. Our client shared a story where they were able to deliver an inhaler to an asthmatic patient at 4 AM."

Tell us how intelligent your platform is. What they do and how they do it?
We track everything that moves. From a cycle to big containers, when it comes to human beings, we even track employees with their consent. We can even track valuables assets like laptops and iPads. We have the highest location accuracy and the most compact devices which fit anywhere required.

Our software runs smooth, has an attendance module with facial recognition and tracks, and plots vast chunks of data in a few seconds backed up by the latest AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) technologies. They hosted on the most potent virtual machines.

We provide integration with almost all telematics devices present and provide excellent tracking solutions to our clients.

Give us an example of how you help your clients.
We help various clients from all walks of businesses. If we have to pick one, we would like to highlight our LM (last mile) Automation platform as a solution that enables our clients to deliver essential medicines on time to needy people. Yes. We help “IMS Medi” to provide medication on time PAN India. Our client shared a story where they were able to deliver an inhaler to an asthmatic patient at 4 AM.

Take me to your experience with other clients like Lets Transport and Udaan.
Let’s Transport: We provided our services to Let’s Transport in various verticals of their business models. Starting from having our IoT devices as well as fuel sensors installed in their vehicles, fleet management, dockyard operations management. RoadCast helped Let’s Transport keeping a constant record for all the vehicles and provided all the required reports like - trip time, number of stops, ignition on time/off time etc for analyzing their fleet and field staff closely and accurately. We also added the feature that helped complete the digital onboarding of vehicles and drivers.

Udaan: We help Udaan pan-India across all their business verticals. From food to fresh to pharma. We help them deliver all the items on time. We also help them with live tracking of their riders along with warehouse and dockyard management. We help them manage their payroll for their transportation partners at Udaan express.

We are also working on many pilots to help them with security (The Digital Guard Shack) and the latest Business Pickily by assisting them to deliver on time.

"We host more than 1 million vehicles on our platform, track more than 10 million delivery points a year and have 400 million kilometres tracked."

Give me an idea about the operations of Roadcast in terms of vehicles on your platform, geography as well as plans to expand.
We host more than 1 million vehicles on our platform, track more than 10 million delivery points a year and have 400 million kilometres tracked.

We always keep up with the digitalization going around. We are already developing modules based on autonomous cars and electric vehicles space as we all are venturing towards them. We are also working towards international expansion and help all our clients across the globe.

Since the last mile is so different in different cities give me an example of at least one Indian city and how Roadcast made some breakthrough.
The major breakthrough started when we started serving a B2B giant player called UDAAN. RoadCast started catering to UDAAN across 32 cities, starting with Bangalore which is considered to be the most congested city of India.

RoadCast started providing its services to various verticals of UDAAN such as pharma delivery, dockyard management etc, where our USP was route optimization. This helped UDAAN reduce cost up to 30 percent by creating efficient route maps basis real-time factors such as; traffic areas, distance, navigation through google maps and providing a sequence of how the deliveries are to be made depending upon the coordinates of the delivery address.

Also, we helped them in increasing delivery & data accuracy to near 100 percent.

How RoadCast is different from its competitors in the logistics technology companies like Fareye and Locus
At Roadcast, we offer state of the art solution when its last-mile operations. We have put ourselves in our clients’ shoes and designed many supporting modules like their data management of riders, vehicles and shops—attendance and payroll module for their employee. Warehouse and inventory management and customizable dashboard, and extensive reporting keep our clients on top of everything they do.

We also help match our clients’ requirements by offering the highest level of customization.

They need not use any other software to conduct their business. We even support our clients by going one step ahead with their applications, websites, digital marketing, chatbot, IVR and many more. We are always there to extend a hand.