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Dive into the dynamic world of Toyota Connected India, where innovation meets urgency to tackle the automotive industry's most pivotal challenges head-on. Our team is on a mission to craft transformative solutions that resonate globally, shaping the daily lives of millions. In our blog series, "From Idea To Impact," we unpack the steps that bring some of these nascent concepts to fruition. Discover what it truly means to ignite change, revolutionize our roads, enhance vehicle experiences, and ultimately, champion sustainable mobility in a world in perpetual motion.
In this month’s deep dive, Maalaiappan Subramanian shares how his team is leveraging cutting-edge software solutions to help Fleet Operators—both in logistics and car rentals—streamline their operations. From real-time fleet tracking to predictive maintenance and driver behavior analytics, they are working on solutions that empower fleet operators with smarter decision-making, enhanced operational efficiency, and a connected fleet ecosystem accessible across web and mobile platforms.
Maalai and the Fleet Solutions team are at the forefront of building intelligent, data-driven solutions that transform fleet management. With expertise in Web, Mobile, and IoT technologies, they are building intelligent tools that make the fleet management experience, seamless.
What is a problem you’re currently solving within your team?
A major challenge fleet operators face today is the fragmentation of their operational tools. They often rely on multiple platforms—one for day-to-day operations like trip allocation, fleet and driver onboarding, trip sheets, and invoice management; another for basic GPS-based asset tracking; and sometimes a third for advanced analytics, particularly in large-scale fleets. Managing data across these disconnected systems is inefficient and limits their ability to gain actionable insights.
At TC India, we’re solving for this by building a unified platform that seamlessly integrates all these functionalities into a single ecosystem.
Beyond just GPS tracking, we collect and process rich vehicle telemetry data, enabling advanced metrics such as driver behavior monitoring, predictive maintenance, and driver scoring. This holistic approach empowers fleet operators with deeper visibility, improved efficiency, and smarter decision-making—all within one comprehensive platform.
Let’s dive a little deeper into the ‘How’ of the process.
To build a unified and intelligent fleet management platform, we follow a data-driven and technology-first approach. Our system integrates data from multiple sources, including IoT-enabled vehicle telemetry devices.
To collect reliable telemetry data, we use OBD devices directly from the CAN of the vehicle, allowing us to gather deeper insights into fleet performance, vehicle health, and driver behavior. This enables us to go beyond basic GPS tracking and offer advanced features like predictive maintenance, driver scoring, and fuel efficiency optimization.
To handle the large volume of data that is collected, we built a robust IoT data ingestion pipeline that efficiently collects, processes, and analyses vehicle data in real time. The pipeline is designed to be scalable and extendable, allowing seamless integration of additional devices in the future.
Our predictive analytics capabilities are built on AI/ML models that analyze historical patterns and vehicle health metrics to forecast maintenance needs and optimize fleet operations.
On the backend, we leverage microservices and event-driven architectures, enabling independent evolution of features and seamless rollouts of new functionalities. Our event-driven approach, powered by Kafka, ensures real-time data processing and responsiveness, empowering fleet operators with a single source of truth for all operational insights.
By combining IoT, data analytics, and modern software architectures, we provide fleet operators with a powerful, end-to-end solution that simplifies operations, enhances efficiency, and drives smarter decision-making.
What are some challenges that you faced during this project? And how did you overcome it?
When it comes to building a platform that caters to both small-scale fleet operators (with just a few vehicles) and large enterprises (managing hundreds of fleets), the challenges that come up are quite unique.
For example, when we were looking at the feature, it was immediately evident that different fleet operators have varying needs and a one-size-fits-all approach didn’t seem like the right fit. So, we structured our platform to offer modular features, ensuring customers can select what fits their needs without unnecessary complexity. We were also proactive in anticipating that the need for customizations would inevitably arise. Customers would need tailored workflows and reports. By adopting a modular, microservices-driven architecture, we enabled quick adjustments while ensuring core functionalities remained intact.
We were also really cognizant of the fact that operational costs needed to be optimized well, to make pricing competitive for small operators. Our data ingestion and processing pipelines were optimized, leveraging efficient data storage, event-driven architectures, and cloud optimizations to balance cost and performance.
What is the real-world impact of the project you’re working on?
By unifying fleet management in a single platform that enables asset tracking, and analytics, our fleet solution helps fleet operators improve operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and optimize costs.
As Toyota Connected India works towards its vision to empower sustainable mobility and deliver elevated customer experiences, the hope is that through the real-time insights on driver behavior and fuel consumption we actively contribute towards safer driving practices and improved fuel efficiency, making fleet operations more sustainable and cost-effective.
