Old soldiers never die — they simply fade away, as the old song goes. That, precisely, is the sorry story of Indian logistics. Growing numbers of officers in the Indian Army are moving on to lucrative careers as managers in the industry, but none of them gives a fig for the fauji drivers in the non-commissioned ranks he’s served with.
It’s an observation Lt. Gen. Vishnu Kant Chaturvedi corroborates. A retired officer takes a “good while” to find his feet in the world of private corporations, but when he does it’s all about his own personal advancement from then on, the gunner-for-life from the 99 Forward Regiment (Sylhet) concedes.
That the vast reserve of veterans from the finest fighting force in the world should go untapped while their ex-superiors devote all their energies to climbing the corporate ladder is a tragedy of national proportions. The indifference to ESMs certainly isn’t the fault of fleetowners alone. Gagan Chaturvedi says he’s encountered it on more than one occasion, and it makes him marvel.
In 2017, as managing director of G-Trans Logistics (India), he faced an inexplicable resistance from a former Army major, operations manager at an e-commerce giant, to the deployment of a fleet of 100 light trucks he’d just bought to service the bulk of that company’s express delivery requirements in the NCR, that he planned to man with teams of fauji drivers.
Instead of the 100 agreed on, the contract he was given was for 30 trucks only. The perfidious ex-major quit in short order and set up his own transport business to corner the balance. Not only did he not employ a single fauji himself; he left Gagan no choice but to cap his own fauji driver hires at 25 — and to seek the patronage of a leading e-comm competitor to keep those expensive CNG trucks running.
To make matters worse, the civilians who made up the bulk of his driver pool, all from trucktown Mewat, perversely went AWOL en masse the entire month of Ramadan in May and June – with the vehicles, – bankrupting the ₹45 crore business, which had grown at 300 percent year-over-year till that point.
It was an epiphanic experience, and sowed the seeds of what would, two years later, become Signodrive Logistics Pvt Ltd (Signo).
Only months earlier, Gagan’s fleet manager had introduced him to another ex-major, a people person after his own heart who headed placements for Maxplus Logistics. G-Trans needed drivers for the prospective e-comm contract and Sulekha Sharma was scouting around for new business. They agreed to a trial, and Gagan’s first close encounter with the ESMs left a deep impression.
It took him till April 2019 to emerge from insolvency and rescale the business to a “limited operation” with Flipkart, but all that time he had his eye out for what he could do next, for a plan that wouldn’t need “much capital” to put into effect. He’d been observing Maxplus’s faujis at work for SpiceJet, and the more he watched, the more he was convinced that there in front of him was THE answer to the “pain points” of the (now) ₹1.5 lakh crore logistics industry.
Several conversations with advisor, friend, and confidant Shailesh Kaul later, the Signo concept had begun to crystallise. Shailesh, now chief commercial officer at the startup, says Gagan was in awe of the ESMs, floored by their dramatically different “attitude and professionalism”, the savings on fuel and maintenance that accrued from the vehicles they drove for him, and the complete stoppage of pilferage during the three months they were in his employ.
Men and the art of missile-launcher maintenance
According to Lt. Gen. Chaturvedi, who retired in 2011 as Director-General Manpower Planning & Personnel Services, as many as 5,000 of the 70,000-odd men that retire from all three services each year are drivers.
Because they’ve been posted to all parts of the country – each moves at least four times in his career, often five, alternating between peace and field locations, – fauji drivers aren’t topographically challenged. Open roads, steep mountain trails, crowded city streets — an ESM is equally at home on all.
For your friendly neighbourhood fauji, defensive driving isn’t a skill; it’s second nature. Problems with brake wear and clutch life? The fauji’s your man, far better-trained and practised in the science and art of vehicle maintenance as he is, than the best-trained civilian driver (can be).
Pre-departure checks? A fauji won’t turn the key in the ignition without them. Secure your load? Consider it done. Rotate tyre positions? Save the time and expense of a visit to the service centre — he’ll do it himself. Breakdown maintenance? Should it even come to that, he’s more than up to the task.
Unlike his typically untrained civilian counterparts, a fauji is extremely resourceful when it comes to emergency repairs and keeping his vehicle going in tough conditions. “An ESM can be depended on to guard his vehicle with his life,” says Maj. Sulekha, who joined Signo as chief sourcing officer (effectively, CHRO) in March.
Paraphrasing English military historian John Keegan, she points out that a fauji, when committed to a task, cannot compromise; his is an unrelenting devotion to the standards of duty and courage … and to “not letting the task go until it’s been done”. All in all, a bulletproof kernel to build a sustainable outsourced fleet management enterprise around, considering that “90 percent of a fleetowner’s job is managing drivers”.
At its core, Signo is a social enterprise conceived to connect faujis to fleets at planetary scale, leveraging the latest advances in artificial intelligence to make the most beneficial matchups according to the particularised needs and preferences of both sides. “We take great pride in the opportunities we give our drivers and the close attention we give our clients,” the CEO proclaims on its website.
Like no other logtech startup in the land, Signo’s team actually possesses hardcore supply- and distribution chain expertise, covering the entire breadth of logistics functions to depths of both know-how and know-why that are unequalled in the industry — a reflection of more than 150 years of executive experience combined.
Of FASTags and faujis
The company has deployed more than 300 faujis since January to fleets signing on for its driver-as-a-service, including such big names as DHL SmarTrucking (50+) S.M. Auto Group (45), Harsh Logistics (40), AVG Logistics (25), and BLR Logistiks (25). The number, Gagan reckons, could have been as high as 1,000 were it not for the disruptions due to the state governments’ overblown COVID response.
The minimum commitment Signo asks is for a year, though it’s offering contracts of a maximum of three years only at the moment. The fleetowner must provide up to 25 items of information upfront, such as the age, composition, and fuel consumption of individual vehicles in, his fleet; the route(s) and route expenses including tolls and payoffs to RTOs and at border checkposts; and what his problem areas are (driver retention/fuel theft/unionisation, etc). Signo tailors its proposal accordingly.
Every client is guaranteed a driver and transit-time performance, plus a minimum 5 percent fuel-efficiency gain, going up to 15 and potentially even 20 percent, according to the service level agreed in the contract. Signo bills him every month for the equivalent of the driver’s salary plus a management fee proportional to the SLA.
At the most basic level, route expenses and tracking are the client’s responsibility. Level 2 entails Signo additionally shouldering the responsibility for delivering the client’s vehicle from A to B, including paying all route expenses at actuals, while Level 3 layers on maintenance, tyre performance (in partnership with Fleeca.in), and consumables.
Not every fleet operator can expect a driver from Signo — only those that treat its faujis with the deference they are due. The company is very particular that, among other things, they are provided suitable rest and clean sanitation facilities onsite; that their feedback regarding the state of repair of the vehicles assigned to them is appreciated and actioned; and that their hours-of-work protections under the law are strictly honoured.
In the interests of the safety of drivers and cargo, a truck that’s required to cover more than 400 km in one work day will necessarily be manned by a team of two – this is non-negotiable – and the client billed accordingly. Signo monitors its drivers’ duty performance individually and in real time by means of a smartphone app with a SIM tracking function, and provides the client with daily MIS reports.
The company was an early tenderer for a requirement by the state road transport undertaking of Uttar Pradesh for 1,000 drivers, but Gagan says there’s been no movement on that contract because … COVID. More recently, Signo’s snagged a contract with Bisleri for 1,000-odd drivers to operate the packaged drinking water giant’s entire fleet of Tata 407/709 delivery trucks pan-India. It placed the first five of an initial commitment of 17 drivers with Bisleri’s operations in Chennai last month.
For long hauls, it has begun to offer a premium-priced pay-per-kilometre plan as a flexible alternative to fixed-term contracts. On 1 September Parkkot Maritima Agencies, a Goa-based operator of 120 trucks that typically cover up to 10,000 km a month apiece, replaced 50 of its existing drivers with ESMs, whom it will pay the standard salary plus an incentive for every kilometre driven over and above a 7,500 km floor commitment.
At the next level is its end-to-end fleet management proposition for “key accounts” that covers the full spectrum of their truck-in-transit needs – driver, tyres, on-demand fuelling en route by means of smart bowsers, tolls and highway expenses, insurance, maintenance, you name it – or any subset thereof for a single all-in price per km.
For pioneer client Inland World Logistics, Signo has assumed pretty much complete operational control on the Delhi–Mumbai and Delhi–Kolkata lanes, for a per-km charge that factors in the drivers’ salaries, diesel, and route expenses.
As its fleet management relationships mature, Signo expects eventually to be entrusted with the authority to specify and configure client vehicles and equipment, sensors, and telematics devices; to independently monitor and process their outputs; and to derive strategic insights from vehicle and driver data that it can leverage to maximise fleet performance.
Co-founder and chief business officer Jitesh Pandey sees solid prospects for services such as the above with rapidly expanding new-generation fleets DHL Supply Chain/SmarTrucking, Delhivery, et al, but says the biggest potential beneficiaries of Signo’s most powerful value proposition will be the three-million-odd owner-drivers and small fleets of up to 10 trucks.
Managing a multiplicity of operating expenses is a “huge struggle” for most every player in this segment, which accounts for an estimated 60 percent of the total fleet pool. A new PAYG (prepaid) offer from Signo gives them access to all the same fleet management services as the large fleets, the upfront pricing varying inversely in proportion to their kilometrage commitment.
Another powerful service it soft-launched in June, that it doesn’t want reported in more detail yet, could potentially do away with the 1.5 lakh brokers and other rent-seekers that hold sway over the sector once for all, and tear down the structural inefficiencies they’ve built into the system that the existing freight matching startups have left largely untouched.
The ultimate ambition is to evolve into a driver-on-demand platform à la Uber, which will enable Signo to better satisfy the diversity of route and working-hours preferences of its driver pool. That, however, is going to require a minimum of 1,000 “active backup” drivers on its rolls at each demand location to guarantee supply, according to chief technology officer Mukesh Deogune, a 2020 graduate from IIT-BHU.
Provided the right types of trucks are available on lanes for which the relevant demand is, Jitesh believes fleetowner acceptance of “driver by the hour” will finally fuel the growth of relay trucking — the single assetholder model having signally failed. The task, he explains, is to match both, truck type to load type and driver to truck per route segment, to be able to deliver the best value.
All aboard!
The company has a completely automated registration and screening process, which sorts drivers according to their preferences and whether – and how well – they meet the functional requirements.
A conversational AI bot, presently available in eight vernacular languages, elicits essential details of a registrant’s location, specific vehicle skills, and length of experience. Within 45 seconds he receives by text message a shortlist of open jobs available within a reporting radius of 100 km.
Clicking on any one of them as an expression of interest connects him via the bot to a “supervisor” (a JCO) for that region, who informs him personally of the specifics of the job description and asks him how soon he can join. The close of that conversation triggers another message with details of the date and time he has to report at and the address he has to report to, plus the name and number of the supervisor.
It also initiates the second level of engagement, in which he has to upload proofs of identity and credentials (driver’s licence, Army number, PAN, and Aadhaar if available) via – and take a selfie image from within – the Signo driver app.
The system runs cutting-edge optical character recognition (OCR) and facial matchmaking algorithms developed by Mukesh and his geek squad to verify the authenticity of the documents submitted, and accepts the driver’s profile as genuine only if the result is a positive match with a high degree of probability. At the same time, it also returns criminal background checks via APIs to the relevant government databases.
The whole process takes less than five minutes.
The driver reports to the supervisor at the job location on the date and at the time appointed, and is signed into the system via the supervisor’s app, which records the start of his employment and pushes a welcome message to his own app with details of his job, salary, etc. On entry of his bank information his salary is credited into his account.
Technology may help filter Signo’s 10,000-strong driver pool for functional fit, but ensuring that its faujis fit behaviourally into a shared emerging corporate culture very different from the one they’ve been used to for up to 20 years of their lives, is going to take robust (physical) recruitment procedures.
Assisted by senior leadership development consultant Anand Chaturvedi, the company is working on a streamlined onboarding process that will help it maintain coherence of purpose during its present rapid scale-up. Together, they’re also thinking through policies to manage an ESM’s entire lifecycle within the company with a view to delivering an exceptionally rewarding career experience.
Chaturvedi, who retired from confectionery megacorp Mars last year after 10 years as leadership facilitator for APAC, the Middle East, and South Africa, believes Signo has what it takes to exemplify the Economics of Mutuality in action. EoM is a groundbreaking business reengineering methodology developed within $37 billion family-owned Mars, Inc, that seeks to focus enterprises on the service of society and the environment (away from their obsession with shareholder primacy) for sustainable growth and profitability amid the emergent challenges of the 21st century.
If Signo’s value-sell jells, not only will old soldiers never die; they simply won’t fade away.