The Sandwich Story: Telematics & Data 🥪

Photo by Sara Cervera on Unsplash

“White bread or brown bread? — hurry up young chap! make your choice” — The sandwich shop guy suddenly interrupted me and my co-founder having our lunch time catch up. Something, that has essentially become the ‘strategy time-out’ for both of us. “Use anything, but better make sure sandwich is tasty” I replied impatiently , been super hungry having delayed lunch by couple of hours already.

The sandwich indeed was damn tasty. The funniest part is, till the end I didn’t bother to know which bread he used. All that mattered to me was the taste and quality of the sandwich he delivered!

Telematics: Bread or Sandwich?

Just for a quick recap, I am CTO and co-founder of Carnot Technologies, an IoT startup based out of Mumbai. Our flagship product is Simha kit, which is a Telematics platform. We help tractor owners in India make 20–30% additional income.

Shuklaji proudly endorsing Simha kit!

Long story short, this is the fifth full-stack telematics hardware + software that I have built, including the very first I had built with IIT Bombay Racing, which eventually led to my journey with Carnot. In this hard journey of hardware, I had the unique opportunity to interact with most of the key players in the telematics space in India. Primarily these are hardware vendors, fleet companies, insurance/finance companies, and the OEMs themselves. The telematics scene in India is still relatively nascent, and no single mature OEM product comes to my mind. As a matter of fact, almost every OEM we have spoken to and worked closely with has shown interest in building their in-house telematics platform. Despite all of the growth stories, digitization, etc., why is connected cars / connected vehicles still a fancy concept for India?

Confused? If you are setting up a sandwich shop, your focus would be on making delicious sandwiches. You won’t spend months brainstorming which bread to use, which ketchup to use, how to organize the vegetables, and so on. You’d start making sandwiches as soon as possible, and keep improvising based on customer feedback. In less than a month, you’d understand what works and what doesn’t.

When it comes to the telematics industry, everyone is doing exactly the opposite. They are emphasizing the bread — device, hardware, 2G-3G-4G, and all possible hardware jargon under the hood! People are forgetting that what is required is a tasty sandwich, which bread is used doesn’t matter. Rapid prototyping and feedback-based improvisation are very much missing from the way the telematics industry operates. The very relevant axiom, that continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection, seems to be missing from their operational behavior. And what are the implications? The industry is missing out on the holy grail, “Data Insights”.

Data from customers can not only help the sandwich-maker create better sandwiches but can also tell him about the eating patterns of the population, what time slots are popular, how price sensitive are the customers, how many are willing to pay a premium for better quality and so on. The sandwich maker gets data that can help even a non-sandwich food stall in that location. Similarly, telematics devices’ data can not only help the industry make better telematics devices but also provide truck-loads (in our case tractor-loads ;) ) of domain insights, which have the potential to disrupt whatever industry the device operates in.

Solution? Telematics is currently being viewed as an additional service for customers. The industry needs to realize that it helps the OEMs just as much. It is in the interest of OEMs to join the digital revolution, and as soon as possible. The channel partners in the telematics industry need to open up their perspective, to start thinking beyond just hardware problems. They need to imagine a world where telematics data makes an impact, not on PPTs but on real business metrics. A classic example is what my colleague Yash talks about in this blog.

Connected vehicles and telematics needs a (not so) secret sauce, of meaningful data products built on top, and no doubt the tasty sandwich can then be consumed byte by byte :)

We are trying to fix some broken benches in the Indian agriculture ecosystem through technology, to improve farmers’ income. If you share the same passion join us in the pursuit, or simply drop us a line on report@carnot.co.in

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