Cognecto focuses on products which deliver productivity and cost competitiveness for our customers.

 – Rohet Sareen

Head Of Product and Business Development, Cognecto

Why monitoring for heavy equipment is important and where does Cognecto fit in this?

Heavy equipment has low utilization due to lack of transparency on operation data and major breakdown due to minor negligence. Cognecto is focused on bringing easy to deploy and custom build fleet management platform for heavy industry.

Traditionally this segment has been served by complex software that requires significant implementation effort and upfront investment. In recent days there has been attempted to use off the shelf telematics solutions for heavy equipment but in long run it faces challenges to the meet feature, function and accuracy level needed for these industries.

Cognecto is filling the gaps by providing fleet management platform that integrates equipment of multiple brands with its own custom build sensors. The data is utilized by our analytics to analyze and report applied time, fuel management, maintenance service reminders and for overall optimization of freight cost.

Cognecto connects assets to be utilized across multiple asset types irrespective of brands. We also leverage IoT data to generate insights into productivity, safety, usage patterns, alerts, fuel utilization, maintenance etc. We generate analytics and insights on daily basis as well as millions of data points across equipment and multiple locations. In addition, we have an experienced set of experts who monitor the assets for our customers and proactively advise them in case of any breakdown as well as potential issues.

In essence we are one stop shop for all kinds of heavy equipment monitoring and optimization for both owned as well as rented assets. We are SaaS based which means the upfront cost to implement Cognecto Fleet Management solution is minimal and we follow “Pay as you Go” model.

What is the market size (in market value terms) for your technology/product in the industrial digital transformation space within the heavy equipment segment including global energy & resources sector?

At high level the segment is broadly divided in to two parts — heavy construction equipment and commercial vehicle trucks.

Heavy Construction Equipment: Global sales of construction equipment are expected to reach approximately 1.1 million units by 2023. Number of serviceable units is 11 million assuming average life of these asset to be 10 years.

Commercial Vehicle Trucks: In 2021,1.9 million heavy-duty trucks will be sold globally, Number of serviceable units is 20 million assuming average life of these asset to be 10 years.

The top-down number also suggest the same market size, global fleet management market is pegged at USD 55 billion. This market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.7 percent between 2019 and 2027, of which around 20% is for commercial and construction assets.

India is a significant market and the commercial vehicle sales is likely to increase from 261,000 (2020) vehicles to 324,000 vehicles (2024). In addition to India, Cognecto is focussed on Africa, Middle East and Australia markets which are growing rapidly. One of the interesting trends is that market is moving towards electric commercial vehicles in addition to digitization of heavy equipment which would open the space for IoT / Telematics space as well.

What do you think are the major challenges when it comes to adopting the digital platforms in terms of design of machines, availability of vendors for connectivity solutions, and acceptance level of end-user segments?

Adoption: Industry has been behind the technology curve especially for SME segment. Lot of usage patterns and data pass through multiple layers such as operators, supervisors, HQ manager, CXO level which lead to distortion of data gathered as well as delay in quick decision making.

Generating ROI: The cost of implementing an IoT infrastructure can be expensive, hence Cognecto has embarked on SaaS model to democratize the IoT ecosystem across Heavy equipment users and especially medium enterprises.

Connectivity: It is the part of networking challenges, as the Internet is still not available everywhere at the same speed. We work closely with cellular operators and network providers to work in inhospitable and remote locations.

Creating IoT Standards: Unfortunately, lot of IoT devices are not plug and play. At Cognecto we have re-designed the hardware and protocols in make the devices relevant for our customer so that information captured is reliable and relevant for our customers.

Can you brief us about ‘Cognecto Virtual Machine’ system and how is it becoming a game changer in the construction equipment industry?

In general, there are two types of models that are currently deployed in the heavy equipment market, one that requires upfront investment by customer and second the same investment is converted capex to opex or more commonly known as SaaS model.

Cognecto is introducing a concept of SaaS model where asset owner with even 10+ assets are getting to be part of the IoT based application and burden of the cost is spread much lower. Cognecto solution is applicable across all sets of User types from large scale fleet operator to an SME and from Homogenous asset base to Heterogeneous asset types. ROI in months and not years, in addition to seamless transfer to our platform. Some of the features for Cognecto product are:

• Hassle-free Onboarding– The implementation time for both installation and application go live is in hours and not weeks. To incentivise users to join the platform Cognecto provides multiple Analytics and Real time visibility around six areas such as production, fuel management, fleet monitoring, maintenance, operator management and safety. These modules are available at a nominal cost to ensure fast enrolment of supplier with no limit on assets base.
• Technology for Users on the field – Cognecto is pioneering a platform that uses “WhatsApp” as a mode of communication to deliver real time data to complete eco system that includes operator, workshop, third party service provider, supervisor, maintenance crew which enables last mile optimization of repair work. Minimum or no digital readiness is needed because communication flows in local language including voice and video chat.
• Technology with Human touch – We have a monitoring centre where experienced set of experts monitor the assets for our customers. This is to ensure that all users from Operators to Management are aware of real time issues with human analysis with regards to Usage, Alerts, breakdown, Repairs etc.
• Shared Economy Commercial Model – mining and construction industry is prone to interruption and one of the biggest impacts of this is low utilization of capacity. Cognecto is attempting to bringing these assets on a common platform and has developed models to identify demand and supply gap. To effectively execute the transaction Cognecto has dedicated team of expert who can analyse the technical requirements.

Tell us about Customer journey for Cognecto including the business transformation.

Customer: Major Infrastructure Company

No. of Heavy Equipment’s owned: 200 +

Asset Mix: Hot Mix Plants, Batching Plants, Crushers, Pavers, Concrete Mixtures, Excavators, Shovels, Road Rollers, Dump Trucks.

Issue: Operating fleet of over 100+ heavy equipment is a major cost contributor in their overall operations. Customer has been faced with cost pressures resulting from aggressive market bids and increased competition. Customer relied on its traditional method of supervisors to oversee its operations but faced major challenges:

• Instances of fuel theft, unauthorized use, engine idling, driver behaviour resulting in safety issues.
• Data such as Km run and Hour run was difficult to collate across multiple operation sites. The reliability of data depended on the site operators.
• Each site and unit were acting as standalone with no vision of current / future capacity.

While customer has felt the need to leverage digital interventions to assist in their daily operations related to the heavy equipment fleet; being an organization with extremely limited digital capacities. It was imperative that the product / solution customer adopts does not result in any increase in the outlay in terms of people or time spent on deploying or managing the solution.

Cognecto Solution: Cognecto platform was able to effectively bridge this gap by bringing a solution that resulted in next to zero overhead in the deployment and day-to-day usage of the solution.

Today, with Cognecto:

• Customer does not waste time on collecting data for operations and has greater confidence on its decision-making capability. Customer has 100% visibility and control in real-time over their assets at the project sites.
• Customer has much better informed and are better equipped to deal with anomalies and deviations in day-to-day operations such as safety, productivity, fuel pilferages.
• The combination matrix of performance visibility and installed capacity gives customer a better way to leverage their existing assets rather than getting new rentals.
• The insights are not only for daily basis but also historical trends which makes it easier for customer to decide which Assets to leverage and which ones to retire.

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