Technology disruption in Transportation Industry and how to focus futuristic in terms of Marketing

Towards the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, when the Marvel family of superheroes mulls different options to evacuate the civilians of the city of Sokovia, Nick Fury arrives with S.H.I.E.D’s principal warship, the Helicarrier, to aid in the rescue operation.

It can be argued that our day-to-day urban transportation is moving towards the unstoppable singularity of ‘soft evacuation’. Except, of course, the commuters will not have the ability of Superheroes to defy physical laws and travel at the speed of light, nor will they ever have sci-fictional means at their disposal, which brings us to the issue.

What to expect in terms of technological disruption in the transportation sector, and how should the companies operating in it position themselves?

To adequately answer this issue, I am forced to make the following informed assumptions.

(a) Any disruption, technological or otherwise, can only happen at the end of service providers, not technology partners. In other words, a fleet intelligence solution will cause disruption, if and only if it is used to such an effect by the end-players such as Ola etc. Looked this way, the presence of technology partners can be construed to be incidental.

(b) By ‘transportation sector,’ I will henceforth be referring to urban mass transit systems, unless specified otherwise. This will help me define clearly the possibilities of technological disruption.

(c) The governments of our time are in favour of privatization and/or strategic public-private partnership models in the transportation sector, for improvements in efficiency.

(d) A disruption is considered successful, only if the given fleet management system takes a customer from point A to point B in the optimum possible time, compared to that of other similar services.

Cities as Determiners of Innovation in Fleet Management Systems

Thanks to Conurbation, the mega-cities of our time are expected to expand their jurisdiction — as opposed to getting modularized into small self-governing constituencies — in the future, and become conglomerations of neo-urban, urban, semi-urban and suburban blocks. Thus, travelling in a single vehicle across such multi-variance zones will eventually, if it is not already so, prove cumbersome.

Fleet intelligence solutions should incorporate zonal restrictions on service routes. The software should assign each vehicle its ‘coverage area,’ beyond which it will not be allowed to operate. This will pave the way for uniformity in tariff. I call it the fixed component. Further, the software should assess traffic conditions between zones, as well as inside each zone, and determine the variable component (of the tariff).

Customers as a Determiner of Innovation in Fleet Management Systems

The recent proliferation of portable computing devices such as smartphones etc. as well as their widespread penetration, combined with improvements in infrastructure, have led to the rise of the informed customer. The informed customer knows that her preferences, decisions, and pattern(s) of travel behaviour are being logged in a remote server, and are being studied by some algorithm to better understand and forecast her needs.

It is not rocket-science that she demands a level of service personalized to her requirements. Hence, it will no longer be sufficient for companies operating in fleet management industry to ask the question, how many customers can a given service transport from point A to point B? Rather, they should consider how many services should a customer avail to get from point A to point B?

Fleet intelligence solutions must aim for cross-vehicle integration, that is, they must accommodate the idea of ‘interoperability’. A given service — operating in a specific route — should be able to talk to other service-carriers operating in the similar route, and ‘port’ passengers between and among them. However, interoperability will require that the systems look at traffic routes as modal, as opposed to just nodal, networks.

For instance, the helitaxi service between the Bengaluru Internation Airport and the city of Bengaluru, not only ferries passengers from and to the airport but also provides them with options to cover the last-mile — between the drop-off points in the city and their places of residence — through cabs.

The advantages of interoperability will be manifold.

(1) It will lead to greater transparency in information across systems, as the processes (booking, payment gateways etc.) used by different service providers will be forced to handshake with each other to share passenger details pertaining to a particular instance of travel.

(2) It will lead to streamlining of customer schema, tariff schemes, and sharing mechanisms.

(3) It will give rise to a structural convergence of transit intelligence.

Technology as a Determiner of Innovation in Fleet Management Systems

Innovation can also happen due to the inherent developments in the technology sector. The recent trial of autonomous vehicle is a significant pointer in that direction, not to forget emerging concepts such as hyperloop.

Fleet intelligent solutions should develop capabilities that will enable them to respond to both human users and AI-processes. These include but are not limited to a complete overhaul of the user interface, disbursement of driver bata and so on.

Another factor that the systems should account for is cryptocurrency. For mnemonic-based medium of transaction (read ‘money’) is poised to alter the digital economic landscape in the years to come. It is important for intelligent solutions to incorporate payment gateways that would support crypto-transactions.

Summary: In the immediate-to-near future, unless customer insights translate into service intelligence — a capability that only fleet information systems can possess — the service operators will be left with no other option but to evacuate passengers to and fro the deep recesses of industrial corridors and residential areas; only, this time we will not have someone like Nick Fury to save us.