Fleet Management System - Movect
What inspried us to revamp FMS
Story of FMS
The vision of FMS can be best described with a story here. It is called “Two Tales Four Perspectives”. I have an idea of what an FMS should be. I would like to share this idea or a vision of Addverb’s FMS, with a story. It is called, two tales, four perspectives. I am going to tell you two stories. The first one is of two mobile robotics engineers. The second story is of two customers. All of them are fictional characters btw.
The first story is called **Leap of faith**
Praveen is a newly appointed manager at a company called ShipFast, an online third party logistics company.
He strongly believes in the power of automation and he is determined to prove to his company of his worth. Meanwhile his boss is assigned with a new task of setting a new warehouse. Praveen pitches the idea of having robots for sortation.
He is convinced that it is the best way to solve the problem statement. His boss has mixed feelings about the idea. He had tried a similar solution before at his previous company and the project failed massively.
The maintenance was a hassle, the projects took too long to install and get up and running, and even for the tiniest issue, they had to depend on the robotics vendor to fix the issues causing further delays.
Praveen however was more confident and convinced his manager that addverb will be a reliable partner. They finalized on the solution with addverb and the delpoyment initiated. The projects team had very well comunicated to them the possible risks associated with deploying the robots, like the floor condition, the network requirement, the power requirements etc and Praveen was able to figure that out with Addverb.
A young engineer arrived from Addverb. Praveen wondered if he would be able to get the job done within time, and if he had sufficient experience. The young engineer was however fully equipped.
He got the robots up and running, integrated the system with their current software stack, trained the resources on how to use the product, how to troubleshoot the product and it all was to be done just via the user interface, nothing else. The system was up and praveen was appreciated for getting the company to a new milestone.
Now Let us start with the second story, the story of Ram Prasad. 21 year old straight out of college. Top of his class.
Secured a placement at Addverb, India’s leading robotics company. On his first day in, he is excited, he has his future ahead of him, one day he could be a renowned engineer, with multiple patents under the belt.
On his first day he saw a farewell party in the common area. Got to meet Laxman Prasad. It was laxman’s last day at addverb. Ram prasad was curious, he asked - laxman, why are you leaving the company? How was your experience working here? I want to know because I am joining the same role. Laxman Prasad, was hesitant at first but tried to explain, he said, I wanted to be a robotics engineer since I was a young kid. I studied and I joined addverb. I was given training, and I was very excited. I thought I knew how to handle robots.
One day after a few months of training, I was sent to site with another GET to deploy 20 robots. At first it was exciting, but then a few weeks passed and all the robots were still not functioning.
Troubleshooting robots took a majority of time. There was too much ambiguity. People would often ask for reports but I did not really know what exactly was required in that report? It was my first experience.
We handled a lot of developments on site itself, some fixes on the UI, some robot parameter tuning. But even the process of getting the robots up and running, involved a lot of manual repetitive processes. I was too much under pressure, the sites would often have ongoing construction, would be too hot or too loud. I have heard tha thee is ongoing development to solve these issues.
Hopefully your experience will be different. Ram prasad thanks laxman prasad for sharing and proceeds to his training class. In his training he is told about the new Fleet management software that has been launched. This software guided the engineers on the steps of deployment. He is told that everyday he can generate a report with just a few clicks and settings.
Each step has sufficient documentation to support him and if not then the seniors can easily go through the logs to help him troubleshoot the situation. He is told that the UI’s principal is to follow the Red. and whenever he does, it is able to go to the root cause of the issue immediately. After carefully understanding the material given to him Ram is more determined than ever.
He is able to understand that his experience will not be the same as Laxman. He comes to realize that tech development sometimes takes time, but he is at a company which is constantly becoming better. So that was the tale of two mobile robotics engineer at addverb and their perspective.
The aim of the new FMS is to achieve a level of software that is easy to deploy, troubleshoot and train on.