By FMW Staff
July 12, 2023
Roadz launched in 2018 to become the central source for best-of-breed fleet management solutions. The platform helps commercial fleet operators find, procure, integrate, and implement the right solutions to address a full spectrum of fleet management needs, from ways to control operating costs to optimizing productivity to addressing safety and regulatory compliance.
With many years of fleet industry experience under their belts, the founders of Roadz realized that busy fleet managers need help discovering the exact right fleet management products for their needs within a rapidly growing and continuously changing industry. Multiple OEM challenges, broken supply chains, vendor mergers and acquisitions, fueling and charging confusion, shifting fleet performance metrics, and increasing regulations are just some of the issues that have made the procurement of digital fleet solutions a time-intensive, high-risk undertaking.
A Single, Intelligent Resource for a Multitude of Fleet Solutions
The Roadz team set out to develop an online SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution that connects a fleet not only with products from leading vendors but with pertinent technical and integration data to connect these applications together for greater operational visibility and decision support. Through the service, fleets can finally address their software needs faster and with unsurpassed technical and price assuredness.
Roadz’s newest SaaS marketplace is called Fleetstore, a Bosch Initiative. The sole aim of the branded marketplace is to bring together curated solutions from a range of top vendors in over 13 critical fleet management categories. The digital platform includes solutions to assist commercial fleets of all sizes in monitoring operational expenditures, workforce productivity, safety and regulatory compliance. The one-stop shop helps fleet operators save time and money by utilizing an intuitive marketplace user interface that enables fleet managers to discover, compare, and purchase solutions in a central location.
“We’re interconnecting the data from these solutions as well as offering the solutions to fleets at channel pricing,” said Amit Jain, Chief Operating Officer at Roadz. “We’re uniquely qualified to pass on the savings through our business model and have already received a tremendous response from smaller fleets that do not have the luxury of negotiating such pricing. The solutions in Fleetstore run the gamut from distracted driver prevention and driver training to roadside assistance, telematics, and much more.”
‘Smart Recommender’ Drives Fleets to the Exact Right Solution
Fleetstore is designed with an easy-to-use, consumer-like user interface that simplifies fleet managers’ purchases of the best solutions for their needs. In particular, the platform’s Smart Recommender function asks a few simple questions to efficiently drive fleet managers to the best solution for their size and vertical. Previously, fleet managers had to conduct general searches online to find the right fit among a multitude of choices and confusing claims. Complicating the situation was a lack of integration information and a dearth of pertinent use cases.
“A solution for an operator in the long-haul trucking industry won’t necessarily meet the needs of a business in the construction industry, for example,” noted Jain. “Likewise, a solution for a 1,000-vehicle fleet isn’t likely to help a company with just 10 vehicles. The Smart Recommender alleviates these problems, and a fleet manager gets the right solution to fit their precise needs.”
Additional Fleetstore Benefits
Fleetstore helps smaller fleets to leverage otherwise unavailable negotiated and channel pricing. What’s more, the savings are passed along through a single bill for all of the solutions purchased.
“A unified bill resolves potential complexities when putting together an end-to-end solution. Especially in smaller fleets, the same person is wearing multiple hats, and one unified bill is a lifesaver,” said Jain, who in the past has also worked in fleet-related positions for GE and Verizon and has talked with over 800 fleet operators about their needs. “I’ve seen fleets try many solutions over the years, and frankly, there’s a big churn problem. Why? Because after trying novel solutions, sometimes, the solution is just not a good fit.
“By picking the right solution from the get-go, Fleetstore customers save a lot of time and money in the long run by adopting the best solution for their needs from the start. They don’t need to waste time trying different solutions or pulling information from different sources, which may or may not work. In fact, the data integration enabled through Fleetstore not only saves on the cost of trying to integrate the solutions yourself, it also delivers greater visibility across a fleet’s entire operations. With the Fleetstore marketplace, you get holistic-based decisions in a fraction of the time and at a reduced cost.”
Success Stories
An example of one company that successfully used Fleetstore is a fleet already using a telematics solution. They purchased a predictive maintenance solution. Because a predictive maintenance solution cannot operate in a vacuum, a code was needed from the vehicle fleet to be sent to the application to provide the wealth of data that Fleetstore maintains.
Another success story of a user of the Fleetstore marketplace is a fleet company that purchased driver training solutions. While other providers give out LMS (Learning Management Systems) of general driver training modules that may not be best for them, Fleetstore provides training specific to drivers based on driving behavior. This is possible because of the integration of telematics solutions, which gives insight into individual drivers.
Since Fleetstore’s launch, many operators have changed from trying to search for solutions and integrate them on their own to using the simple, centralized marketplace that provides data integration along with competitive pricing and assistance in finding the best solution fit from a range of curated, best-in-class vendors.
According to Jain, in addition to Fleetstore, Roadz is powering digital marketplaces for leading telematics service providers and commercial auto insurers and is also in the process of launching digital ecosystems for leading energy companies, automotive OEMs, automotive suppliers, and other fleet-management companies.
