By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
June 19, 2024
Fleets come in all shapes and sizes, and their needs and challenges are just as varied. Whereas most fleet technology companies offer a one-size-fits-all product, Ridecell works with its clients to tailor its product to their needs. Ridecell’s Fleet Transformation Cloud integrates data and churns usable insights, digital vehicle control, and an automated workflow. Whether a fleet wants to scale their use of EVs or find areas to cut spending, Ridecell helps them streamline fleet operations and maximize profit.
While fleet managers often must manage multiple systems and tools simultaneously, Ridecell combines everything into a unified oversight platform. We spoke with Mir Baqar, Senior Director in the Ridecell Product Management group*, to learn more about the company’s product and how it benefits fleets.
Tell us a bit about what Ridecell is. How do you help fleets?
Ridecell is an intelligent business orchestration platform that helps fleet leasing and management companies manage their entire asset lifecycle, from ordering and acquisition to delivering the vehicles to their end customers.
These are typically enterprise customers that come in all shapes and sizes, from commercial customers with hundreds of thousands of vehicles to small companies that need a handful of vehicles for their sales fee or service people.
It’s not only about ordering, acquiring, and delivering those vehicles on behalf of the business customers–there are many expectations regarding how those vehicles are being used throughout their lifecycle, including their performance, maintenance, and any required repairs. We want to ensure that our customers and their vehicles perform at maximum capacity.
Now, using these vehicles isn’t the core function of these companies. That’s why they rely on fleet leasing or management companies to help them manage that side of the business. Ridecell gives fleet management and leasing companies the software they need to manage their entire digital operations throughout the fleet’s lifecycle.
That way, those fleet companies can provide their clients with the best and most efficient customer experience. That’s our sweet spot: we’re not just providing specific data or digital experience but an entire orchestration of how these fleet companies manage their business operations.
When you start working with these FMCs, several systems are already in place. How does Ridecell integrate those systems and connect them to streamline processes?
Most of these FMCs have been around for decades and have grown in various aspects of the industry. As they grew and became very successful in those aspects of the business, they looked at digital tools and technology systems to solve these particular problems.
Fast-forward a few decades, organic growth created an environment where these companies were good at addressing specific customer needs, but the complexity of those needs also grew. They introduced new products, services, and capabilities but needed help evolving their applications.
With that complexity, it wasn’t about just one function solving one part of the problem. It was more about managing the entire vehicle lifecycle because they now provide services across all the various stages. The ability to orchestrate the entire operation across these systems became challenging, and that’s where we come in.
We’re not here to replace any systems or tools since most companies come to love and rely upon these systems. We function as a horizontal platform connecting and interacting with these various systems. That way, we can overlay the entire lifecycle of the process and coexist.
Our secret sauce is our ability to conveniently coexist and integrate with these systems to bring this business orchestration layer to these functional transaction systems. That’s where we’ve helped accelerate some of the transformations that depleted industries are going through.
How does Ridecell make the fleet manager’s job easier?
Through digitization and automation, we make things more efficient. We’re reducing the overall human capital investment in managing business aspects such as monitoring fuel consumption, driver behavior, etc.
Historically, that has been either very silo and vertical, or there’s been a lot of manual overhead. The intelligence we bring through our platform identifies opportunities where automation can reduce the need for human interaction. We also provide intelligence through our visibility product, where fleet managers only have to deal with things that are exceptions. This reduces the overall cost and helps fleet companies quickly react to customers’ needs, providing the ability to scale.
How does the product team work with clients?
We’re very client-centric. We call our customers our partners because we know they have unique needs and demands regarding their services. Instead of saying, “Here’s a product, here’s how it works: configure it and use it,” we ensure we have an intimate understanding of the pain points because not all are the same.
By understanding it from a business and outcome context rather than a technology context, we can work with them to configure and set up our system to address their needs and challenges while meeting their desired outcomes. Then, through the intelligence in our platform, we can help them see insights and trends that will give them the outcomes they’re looking for.
Our client-centric focus gives us a long-term relationship with our customers and a deeper and broader understanding of the industry. We can see how it’s evolving and what the needs and trends are, so we’re ready to help our customers better fight their challenges.
What’s next for Ridecell?
We’re certainly investing a lot of focus in AI. While it might be new to many people, we’ve been using a lot of technology intelligence data-driven machine learning over the last few years to continually evolve our product. I believe that the explosive growth in the innovation around generative AI will have a significant impact on two areas that we can bring to our fleet customers.
The first area is predictive intelligence. Instead of business intelligence, which looks at past events, predictive intelligence uses data to analyze trends and make recommendations as to what companies can do to avoid a challenge, improve an operational area, or optimize another set of experiences.
The second area is creating another level of interaction between the fleet and their customers, whether it’s conversational AI or predictively notifying when an event is happening and helping people find the correct answers without the need to search.
Do you have a customer success story you can share?
One way our platform has helped clients is in the transition to EV fleets. We had a client who did many retail and last-mile deliveries and wanted to transition to a more sustainable model.
They invested in acquiring EV vans for their delivery but quickly realized that operating an EV fleet differs significantly from an ICE fleet. We had worked with them in other areas, so they asked for help. Our platform is very extensible, so we could leverage the same platform to help them predict and manage the electric fleet based on their delivery needs.
We had the ability to track and manage charging at scale, assign vehicles for delivery routes based on each vehicle’s battery health and charging status, and ensure the vehicle was ready when the driver needed it, which we can do through keyless access. These three problems had to be combined to enable EV fleet utilization at scale.
They only considered managing the charging but did not consider how they would assign the vehicles for various deliveries and orchestrate vehicle readiness. We brought all the puzzle pieces together and gave them the confidence to scale the transition faster than they predicted. It’s an excellent example of how we understand our clients’ business challenges and leverage our platform to meet their needs instead of offering many features and functionality.
*Mir Baqar leads Product Strategy and Operations at Ridecell to enable the digital transformation in the Fleet industry through its Business Optimization platform. Previously, Mir led the Product portfolio at Cox Automotive Inc. for the Xtime Service CRM SaaS platform which digitized the end-to-end vehicle owner’s service lifecycle experience across 7000 franchise dealers in North America and Australia. Mir also held various leadership positions at Cisco, NEC Solutions America, and Newbridge with responsibilities for Supply Chain automation, API partner ecosystem, eBusiness platforms, and IT services.
Mir has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Business from San Jose State University, holds 5 international patents, and is an avid golfer.
