How customer experience is driven by product insight at Ashok Leyland

Ashok Leyland is an Indian automobile company and owned by the Hinduja Group. Founded in 1948, it is the second largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in India and headquartered in Chennai. Ashok Leyland started its telematic journey in 2005, which is now addressed as connected vehicles, under a broad umbrella. Until 2015, Ashok Leyland embarked on its Telematics 2.0 journey and provided deep insights on the vehicle performance.

Talking about the maturity levels of Telematics 2.0, Venkatesh Natarajan, Chief Digital Officer & SVP-IT, Ashok Leyland says, “We initially began with providing the vehicle diagnostics and track and trace features. Whereas, the humongous amount of data emitting out of sensors gave information beyond the track and trace information. The IoT sensors helped us move from health monitoring to prognostics and diagnostics, where the sensors would give out the alerts in advance.”

Under IoT, Natarajan is tuning several systems, like, Active Drivers Assistance System (ADAS), which is a device to avoid collisions and followed up with a lane departure warning system, which send out alerts when the drive is breaking the lane, and driver drowsiness system.

Data as a service
The IoT powered vehicles generate one data package every second per vehicle, one terabyte of data every day and 1.2 billion kilometers of data every month. These data points may contain battery voltage, longitude and, oil pressure, altitude, etc.

The group is extracting meaningful insights and focusing on helping their customers to run their business better. They provide deep insights about the driver’s behaviour and fuel management solutions and fuel pilferage solution.

“We are leveraging this data for predicting the battery failure, clutch failure, etc.; applying artificial algorithms and machine learnings. We provide a consolidated view,” adds Natarajan.

Ashok Leyland has recently launched a digital market place, which consists of four digital platforms, i.e, i-alert, E-diagnostics, LeyKart and ServicerMandi.

I-alert is the connected big data vehicle platform, where they provide their customers with insights on vehicle health, driver behaviour, and fuel economy. ServiceMandi, is a digital platform which connects customers and the mechanics. LeyKart is digital e-commerce platform, through which the automotive industry has moved from B2B to B2C. E-diagnostics is for troubleshooting the problems in the vehicles.

These platforms aim to provide more value to the customers and is aligned with the business objective. The group is adopting the DevOps methodology for rolling-out these applications.

“We function like a startup, where ideation to deploying the solution is significantly compressed,” he explains. Also, leveraging machine learning algorithms and historical data to identify prospective customers.

Industrial IoT for a consolidated view
The group has started making some early investments on building IoT platforms which will be linked to their manufacturing automation systems.

Currently, the data generated by the connected devices in the shop floor is isolated, hence they are building an industrial IoT to consolidate the data on a single platform. And gradually, identify the ways to leverage the data for driving meaningful insights into the shop floor operations.