Backed by sound technology and innovation, 18-month-old logistic company Rivigo is eyeing a big share of the category in the next few years and hopes to become India's largest logistics platform by 2020.

“Logistics is one of the largest industries — more than $100-billion size — and there is enough to do in this market. Given our growth pace, by 2020 we can become India’s largest logistics platform, giving full stack of services — from cold chain to part loads to full truck loads,” Deepak Garg, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Rivigo, told BusinessLine .

Garg’s confidence stems from the fact that Rivigo has won major deals from players such as Abbott, Hero MotorCorp, ITC and Lupin for transporting their products; it has started transporting spare parts for Hero MotoCorp from Neemrana factory to all across India.

Rivigo’s drivers do not spend more than a day on the road. “Most truck drivers spend around 25 days in a month away from home. We wanted to change this phenomenon and introduced ‘Driver Relay’ — making sure drivers get back home on the same day (or within 24 hours) — and thereby saving 50-70 per cent of the turn-around time on long-haul routes,” Garg said.

For example, a truck taking goods from Delhi to Mumbai would have multiple drivers taking the wheels at the various pit-stops.

The company has installed sensors and devices to get information ‘real time’ to monitor operations better. “Lot of things are automated — there are sensors on our trucks, app with drivers and our 41 pit-stops across the country have tablet personal computers to check everything on real time basis,” he said.

The operation is totally paperless. The company has installed a variety of sensors in the trucks to keep a tab on the vital parameters of the vehicle, track their location, and even manage fuel theft. Most of the software has been developed by Rivigo’s in-house team.

The company is working with a global team of Wabco (Belgium based global supplier of technologies and services to commercial vehicles). It is experimenting with Wabco’s anti-collision devices, which have been fitted on a few of Rivigo’s trucks to see how they work on Indian roads. The company will do trial runs on the Delhi-Mumbai route, Garg said.

He said the company will use its core strength of technology, apart from adding trucks and drivers.

“India has around 60 lakh trucks on the road and one crore drivers today and we are running a miniscule part of that right now. We have 2,000 drivers and 900 trucks with 500 staff. We will add another 500 employees by next financial year,” Garg said, adding that the number of clients (customers) would also grow from 200 now.

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