There is a famous saying in the trucking industry: “If the wheels aren’t turning, they’re not earning anything.” Any downtime-trucks broken down or in the service workshop -- can lead to loss of earnings for the truckers. So, ‘uptime’ is the buzzword among truck manufacturers.
VE Commercial Vehicles, a joint venture between Eicher Motors and Sweden’s Volvo Group, claims to be ahead of its competition in the delivery of uptime for trucks. Thanks to the company’s uptime centre, set up in 2020 at the company’s Pithampur manufacturing complex in Madhya Pradesh, the deployment of new technologies in its after-sales service business has led to maximise uptime of its customers’ trucks.
Real-time support
As all VECV trucks are now sold with telematics solutions (trucks are connected vehicles now with full of sensors and processors), the company’s Pithampur uptime centre remotely monitors vehicles and provides real-time support to the vehicles being attended by its channel partners and Eicher’s certified workshops across the country. It is manned by subject experts for 24X7 service support. The expert team is well-equipped to proactively monitor truck data to predict potential failures before they occur irrespective of time and place. The team attends to more than 5500 queries every month.
The uptime centre focused on six services – remote diagnostic services, parts-related support, Eicher on-road service (during breakdowns etc), field support, vendor support and onsite services. Now, the centre is equipped with three more services - predictive diagnostic services, live support and data analytics.
“Probably, we are the first truck OEM to come out with these services in this space. Now we get huge amounts of data and as a result, we are moving from experience-driven decisions to data-driven decisions,” said Ramesh Rajagopalan, Executive Vice President & Head - Customer Services and Network Strategy, VECV.
Uptime centre is now an integral part of Eicher’s after sales service network, comprising 820 plus touchpoints now, up from 420 plus three years ago. These touchpoints include sales and service outlets, on-site support locations, parts retailers, and trained technicians across all the major highways. The centre provides tangible benefits to customers, dealers and the company’s product development teams.
“For customers, the clear tangible benefit is the uptime availability. We are now able to deliver 98 per cent uptime across product lines, up from 80-85 per cent two years ago. It is a result of uptime centre, augmented network, deployment of mobile service vans, efforts to keep the right mechanics and parts, etc, Also, there is more fleet efficiency for customers now,” said Rajagopalan
The data also comes in handy to convince prospective people who intend to invest in VEVC dealerships. “We can tell them about the vehicle population, movement of vehicles and assured business available for them. For existing dealers, a click of a button will provide a list of the vehicles moving around his area – within 25 or 50 km and the dealer can initiate service activity, thereby increasing its business prospects, said Abhishek Jakhotia, Head – Uptime Centre, VECV.
Working on data
Data collected by uptime centre also helps the company’s product development team to effect improvements in order to offer dependable trucks.
VECV has also been able to penetrate faster into new geographies. Based on the data collected, it could map the areas of goods movement and establish containerised workshops in those regions, the northeast in particular. These workshops are attached to mobile service vans. These play a vital role in providing service support to trucks that play on highways in NE regions.
“Now, our dealership network will only grow in the North East, thereby boosting our presence and sales in the region, said Rajagopalan.
(This correspondent was at Pithampur at the invitation of the company)