Commercial vehicle maker Ashok Leyland is preparing to provide its telematics solutions as part

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of OEM (original equipment manufacture) offering soon. While the company expects to equip over 3,000 buses of state transport fleet in Tamil Nadu, it will also offer the solutions to buses of some of the other state transport undertakings under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Management (JNNURM) programme.

The company, at present, is offering its telematics solution ‘Alert’ through distribution partners as well as directly to state transport undertakings and fleet owners. “The solution will be part of the OEM offering soon,” Jayaram Krishnan, president – telematics business unit, Ashok Leyland told Financial Chronicle.

“Alert is an advanced controller with inbuilt GPS/GPRS. It enables various devices/sensors to be integrated with the back office in real time mode through the GPRS system, apart from the fleet management track and trace solution. It offers a wide range of solutions compared with simple GPS units available in the market today,” Krishnan said.

The company has so far installed its solution Alert, a fleet management solution including passenger information system (PIS), on about 800 buses of Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) of Tamil Nadu. By the end of the year, it expects to take the number of installations to 1,600 buses of MTC.

Over the next two years, the company expects to gradually extend GPS system installations to MTC’s entire fleet of over 3,000 buses, which would then be the largest PIS system in Asia. “With this order itself, 1,600 buses will be fitted with Alert systems, and this is expected to be extended to the remaining fleet,” said Krishnan.

Besides this, the company has installed its devices on 2,000 trucks so far for vehicle tracking and management of goods transportation. Thus, it has made a total installation of over 3,000 GPS units to over 100 customers.

On installations of GPS systems on buses to be supplied under JNNURM programme, he said GPS solutions would be offered as per the requirement of each STU or for their existing fleet. It also plans to offer a host of new features such as providing ETA (expected time of arrival) information via SMS and web in future.