How vehicle fleet management helped in boosting managing operations by 50%

To travel is to live.” This line by HC Andersen explicity puts together the thoughts of people
who love to travel, explore new places, cultures, traditions, etc. And to ease these travel
plans, Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions started their passenger mass transit operations more than 25 years ago. Today, they operate around 1,000+ vehicles of different categories and carry 5 lakh passengers per day by city buses and 5,000 passengers on intercity
buses every day.

Under the public private partnership, they operate city buses in Pune, Indore, Ahmednagar, Bhopal while in Delhi, they operate metro feeder services with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. They are also the pioneer in starting inter-city luxury bus service all over Maharashtra. However, the fleet operators were struggling with the ERP that they had deployed to manage their inventory.

The software required exceptionally trained manpower which was extremely expensive to bring on-board. The primary business objective of this project was to minimize downtime of vehicles and improve inventory management, thereby increasing revenue. Some of the
areas that they wanted to address through this project included monitoring the consumption pattern of spare parts (vehicles, depots, and vehicle systems like engine,
transmission, electricals, etc), forecasting of spare parts, quick and cost-effective implementation, and efficiently managing multi-part inventories.

After a year full of struggle, when they failed to reap any benefits out of their existing ERP solution, the fleet operators decided to explore the inventory module in Tally. ERP9, a software they had so far used only for financial accounting.

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
“We were facing challenges with the ERP that we had deployed earlier to manage our inventory and the vendor we were working with was unable to deliver the solution as per the set expectations. The software also required exceptionally trained manpower which was extremely ex-pensive to bring on-board,” says Prasanna Patwardhan, Chairman & MD, Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions. However, Tally’s integration partner, Dexterity Techsys, understood that conventional solutions for material planning were of no use in spare parts management as the requirement would arise only when the spare parts fail.

They took up the challenging task of customizing Tally’s inventory module by making provision for capturing data related to Odo Meter reading, daily running, and standard
life of spare parts in kilometers. This helped in generating a unique report that could forecast the replacement of spare parts thereby helping the management in preparing
their monthly procurement plan.

The consumption of spare parts takes place only when they are issued to individual vehicles. In the default Tally software, this consumption entry has to be created manually.
Creating such entries manually every day was a task in itself as they have more than 200 vehicles. Thus, every day about 300-400 consumption entries needed to be created. This created a backlog and naturally the purpose of timely availability of stock position was defeated. Dexterity Techsys found a brilliant solution to this: They automated the consumption. The procedure for auto consumption entries set by them can now be performed in 5-6 minutes at the end or at the beginning of the day.

On implementing the solution of auto consumption transaction, the system started giving them the basic data of spare consumption and the cost. Using this information on spare parts consumption and the cost of spare per vehicle per kilometer running, the staff started to compute these using spread sheets. However, backlogs were created again and time was lost.

The information on running of each vehicle is generated at depot level and every depot sends it the next day. This information was available in MS excel sheets. The solution for uploading the same in Tally’s system was then developed and combining it with the consumption data, Dexterity developed a daily report of spares cost per vehicle per kilometer which helped them to better understand the pulse of maintenance operations. On similar lines, they developed a report of fuel consumption giving cost of fuel per kilometer running for each vehicle. The above phases generated the key indicators for their DSS/MIS.

THE FINAL OUTLOOK
With the help of Tally.ERP 9, Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions achieved their objective of reducing downtime of vehicles and significantly optimized their revenue within six months of solution deployment. Cost towards spare parts also reduced by 10% and the life of spare parts and mileage of each vehicle can also be easily tracked. Fuel consumption which was earlier at 40% has decreased by 2% as the lifespan of each spare parts could be tracked and replacements could be done well in advance. Money spent on spare parts alone has reduced from over `50 lakh to about `35 lakh and they now enjoy full visibility
of their inventory. With the ability to handle 4,000 spare part records for their Pune office itself, procurement has become extremely smooth and streamlined for them.

While the time taken to manage their multipart inventory reduced by 80%, the overall efficiency in managing operations increased by over 50%.