Commercial trucks carrying high value items are preferred targets for thieves and dacoits. Sterlite Copper, a business unit of Vedanta, was facing this challenge as its trucks used to transport copper were under huge risk of being attacked by criminals. With copper being an expensive commodity, the company had copper with a value of approximately Rs 1.2 crore, at any point in time, on the road. This carried a huge fleet management risk for the company. Besides the loss of revenue, there is also the risk of business interruptions and costly litigation challenges.
To address this issue, Sterlite has tied up with Novire Technologies, a firm with huge expertise in the 
logistics and transportation space. Sterlite Copper deployed a solution that consists of an asset tracker and an immobilizer device. “If a vehicle is stolen, we can immediately and automatically disable it with the immobilization service. Further, we can identify all the proven safe routes, and feed it into the device. This ensures that the vehicle sticks to the route assigned,” states N Hariharan, GM-Logistics, Sterlite Copper. As a result of this tracking, the company has been able to identify high risk routes, which in turn, has helped in significantly reducing the number of thefts. Novire’s solution also ensures immediate identification of any fuel pilferage, load balance, and velocity to make sure that all vehicles are driven safely to ensure safety and longevity.
Performance review
With in-built analytics, Sterlite Copper can analyze the route that drivers take, allowing the firm to use route optimization and gauge truck and driver performance for review. “With detailed insights, we can now analyze both driver performance and routes. For example, we can now evaluate where we can minimize vehicle downtime, and where we can improve in areas where the vehicle is being underutilized,” says Hariharan.
The in-built tracking feature gives an accurate and real-time estimate of shipping times and can provide instant alerts to customers and warehouses of arrival times or delays. Novire’s solution has also helped Sterlite in identifying route deviations, non-standard stoppages and over speeding.
