The fleet management ecosystem has undergone a serious technological transformation over the past several years, leading to more data being collected than ever before. This information holds the power to analyze – and optimize – the way fleets operate today.
The problem, however, is that much of this data is stuck in silos, making it difficult to access and impossible to conceptualize in the context of other datasets. This limits fleets’ ability to take action and improve their own operations, which ultimately stimies improvement on an industry-wide level.
“With the abundance of fleet management technology solutions available, and abundance of data they generate, you would have expected the job of fleet managers to become easier,” said Ran Mayroz, founder and CEO of Roadz. “But in reality, their job has become more difficult. Mid-to-large fleets use between 10 and 20 different technology solutions to manage different functions. How to make those different solutions work together? And how to make all that data they generate work for you?”
Roadz – a Silicon Valley fleet-tech company – was created to solve that problem by helping transform the siloed industry into an integrated open ecosystem. The company likens itself to a ‘connective tissue’ for the fleet management ecosystem.
Roadz takes a three-pronged approach to accomplishing its mission: Connecting the data, connecting the user experience and connecting the commerce. To do this, the company partners with best-in-industry solution providers, bringing a plethora of top-notch solutions and services together into a central platform.
Currently, the company partners with providers across more than 30 categories.
“Due to problem of siloed data, many mid-to-large fleets routinely make sub-optimal business decisions. Some of them have manual processes to periodically download and collate data from many systems. This is not only inefficient and error prone, but also does not lend itself to taking action in real-time,” said Roadz co-founder and COO Amit Jain, “The Roadz platform brings together the data from many solutions in a “single pane of glass” which allows, fleets the ability to drive sound business decisions based on holistic actionable intelligence. We call it a unified-fleet-workspace.”
In addition to unifying data and user experience, the Roadz platform also enables larger fleet management solution providers, the ability to unify commerce for their fleet customers. Today, Roadz powers the marketplaces of large automotive suppliers, telematics providers, commercial-auto insurers, and other fleet-related companies.
Fleetstore, a Bosch Initiative, is one such example of what is possible when an organization utilizes the Roadz platform to power its own marketplace. Fleetstore is a one-stop-shop of curated and pre-integrated fleet management solutions, allowing fleets to discover, purchase – and manage – many of their solutions in one place.
“Rather than spending years and millions of dollars building a marketplace, Bosch leveraged the Roadz platform to launch Fleetstore within a few months”, said Jain. They bypassed the whole process of developing the marketplace frontend and the backend; evaluating, contracting and onboarding third-party fleet management solution providers; integrating with the third parties’ APIs and last but not least developing a marketing program and collateral to launch and promote the marketplace and the solutions!
Fleetstore offers fleet-tech solutions and services across many categories including:
- Asset tracking
- Cameras and ADAS
- Driver behavior
- Driver training
- Field services
- Fuel management
- Insurance and warranty
- Maintenance and diagnostics
- Maintenance Services
- Regulatory compliance
- Telematics
- Tires
Fleetstore customers benefit by purchasing pre-integrated solutions which are the “best fit” based on their fleet mix, fleet size and business vertical from the Roadz-powered marketplace.
One example which illustrates the benefit of data integration is – when a fleet is utilizing both a GPS tracking solution and a routing and scheduling solution, the data from those two tools would typically exist in separate applications. Due to the integration on the Roadz platform, customers can share their GPS tracking data with their routing and scheduling provider or vice versa. Hence, either party can show a comparison of scheduled plans against what actually happened. This enables fleets to identify areas of improvement which ultimately leads to fewer miles traveled and lower gas consumption.
By bringing a fleet’s entire suite of solutions together, Roadz also eliminates the need to make changes across multiple platforms every time something changes within the business – like buying or selling vehicles or hiring drivers. Fleets can make a change one time in the Roadz platform and see it reflected across all the solutions that are integrated with Roadz.
“Research shows that 50% of fleet managers identify fragmentation of technologies and resultant data silos as their biggest technological challenge,” said Mayroz. “A shift to an open and integrated fleet-tech ecosystem is inevitable. Roadz is building that backbone.”
Unlocking the power of today’s technology lies in embracing integrations and eradicating data silos. Roadz-powered unified-fleet-workspace is one of the simplest ways to do just that.
Click here to learn more about the Unified Fleet Workspace and Fleetstore.