Anuradha Parakala, Co-founder, Chief Strategy and Product Officer, Fleetronix Systems, explains how GPS, geofencing and analytics are reshaping cement logistics operations.

Digital fleet management systems are now transforming this landscape through real-time tracking, geofencing and data analytics. These technologies are helping cement companies improve turnaround time, reduce pilferage and optimise fleet utilisation. In this interview, Anuradha Parakala, Co-founder, Chief Strategy and Product Officer, Fleetronix Systems, discusses how smart fleet technology is building the foundation for modern cement logistics.

How is digital fleet management changing logistics efficiency for cement manufacturers in India?
Cement moves on trucks. That sounds obvious, but for years, the moment a truck left the plant gate, it basically disappeared. You’d send it off and just wait and hope it reached on time. Hope nothing went wrong on the way.
What tracking has actually done is close that gap. Now I know where my truck is right now. I know if it stopped somewhere it wasn’t supposed to. I know how long it sat at the customer’s site. When you’re running hundreds of trips a day across multiple plants, that’s not a small thing — it changes how you plan, how you price, what you can promise a customer.
But I’ll say this honestly — the technology isn’t the real change. The real change is what happens to the people using it. Most logistics teams in this industry have been running on phone calls and gut feel for 20-odd years. Getting them to trust data over habit that’s the actual transformation. The systems just make it possible.

What are the biggest challenges in cement logistics visibility, and how does real-time tracking help?
Three things I keep seeing come up.
Firstly, what happens after the truck leaves. I call it the post-gate black hole. Once it’s out, you have no idea what’s actually happening on the road. Did it stop somewhere it shouldn’t have? Was the load tampered with? Was the driver asleep somewhere for three hours? Without tracking, that uncertainty just becomes a cost you absorb and don’t question.
Second is turnaround time. Trucks sitting idle is probably the biggest silent drain in this business — at the weighbridge, at loading, at the customer’s gate. The problem is nobody measures it properly, so nobody fixes it. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
Third is route adherence. Drivers have their own rhythms built up over years. Their own stops, their own shortcuts. Most of it is harmless. Some of it isn’t. The trouble is, without visibility, you can’t tell which is which.
Real-time tracking directly fixes all three. But the bigger effect — and I’ve seen this in practice — is what happens to behaviour once people know the system is watching. Before you have done any deep analysis, before you have changed any process, the behaviour improves. That alone makes it worth it.

How do GPS, geofencing and IoT sensors prevent pilferage in cement transport?
I’ll say something the industry doesn’t like saying out loud. A lot of pilferage isn’t random theft. It happens through small, quiet arrangements — a route deviation that someone chose to look away from, a stop that nobody asked about. The moment you have a clean digital record of every trip, much of that stops on its own. Nobody wants to be the one trip that looks different from everything else in the data.
Geofencing is particularly powerful. You draw a corridor, which is the acceptable path from Point A to Point B. The second the truck steps outside that corridor, an alert fires. No one needs to be watching a screen. The system catches it automatically. Add IoT sensors, such as door open/close events, weight sensors, tamper alerts, and you are not just tracking location, you are also tracking what’s happening with the cargo. GPS tells you where the truck is. Sensors tell you what’s going on inside it. Together, that’s very hard to argue with after the fact.
And I want to be clear — this isn’t about treating people as criminals. When the system makes doing the right thing the easiest thing, most people just do the right thing. That’s really all it comes down to.

How does data analytics improve route planning, turnaround time and fleet utilisation?
Honestly, most companies are still at the very beginning here. They have got tracking and they know where their trucks are. But that historical data is mostly sitting there unused. Nobody’s really digging into it.
Take route planning, for instance. If you have six months of trip data, you can tell exactly which routes run slow on which days, at what times and why. You can build that into your routing instead of just leaving it to whatever the driver decides. The fuel and time savings from even small improvements, at scale, add up fast.
Turnaround time is the same story. The data shows you where the delay is actually happening. We had one situation where a customer found out that 40 per cent of their delay was happening in the last 500 metres — at the point of unloading. They had absolutely no idea. Once you see it, you can do something about it.
Fleet utilisation is really a planning problem that data solves well. Which vehicles are sitting idle, which routes can be consolidated, when to use which truck. The data stops telling you just what happened — it starts telling you what you should do next.

How critical is fuel management, and what can technology do about pilferage and costs?
Fuel is almost always one of the top two or three costs in any heavy fleet. In cement, with large vehicles, long distances, every single day, it is enormous. And fuel theft has been one of the oldest, quietest leakages in this industry, mostly because it’s so hard to catch without the right setup.
The thing about fuel theft is it doesn’t announce itself. A driver fills up, the receipt looks fine, but what actually went into the tank was different. Or fuel gets siphoned out during a long, unscheduled stop. Without sensors cross-referenced against trip data, you’re completely blind.
What technology enables is correlation. You know the fuel level at the start, the distance covered, the speed, the terrain. From that you calculate expected consumption. If actual consumption is way off, you investigate. That logic has helped surface leakages our customers genuinely didn’t know were happening.
Beyond pilferage, and this is the part people underestimate, driving behaviour alone affects fuel consumption by 15 to 20 per cent. A driver who over-revs, brakes hard, idles too much, is burning money on every kilometre. Catching that and coaching drivers — not punishing them, actually coaching them — is probably the fastest return on investment I’ve seen in this space.

What role does driver behaviour monitoring play in safety and efficiency?
I want to be careful about how I frame this, because it gets misread a lot. This is not surveillance. Done properly, it is a feedback system. It is something that helps drivers do their job better and gives managers information to support people, not just catch them out.
The reality is most drivers genuinely want to do a good job. They just don’t have real-time feedback on how they are performing. When you give someone regular data on their driving — speed, braking, how they handle the vehicle — and you pair that with actual recognition when things improve, you get real change. Not because they feel watched, but because they now have information they didn’t have before.
For cement specifically, the stakes are real. Heavy vehicles, difficult terrain, long hours. A serious accident is first a human tragedy, and then a legal and reputational one. Taking safety seriously isn’t optional — it is just part of running the business responsibly.
And the efficiency payoff is real too. Better driving means lower fuel costs, fewer breakdowns, lower insurance and less downtime. It compounds a lot across a large fleet over a year.
But there’s a bigger picture here that I think is worth saying plainly. When drivers and transporters operate within a monitored ecosystem — GPS-tagged, sealed, auditable — something shifts. Not because anyone is being forced to behave differently. It just happens. Idle time comes down. Unscheduled stoppages decline. Route discipline improves. When something does go wrong, when someone flags it before it becomes a crisis, escalations become proactive.
That’s what a well-built monitoring system actually is. It is not surveillance but operational signalling. The system is telling everyone — drivers, managers, customers — what’s really happening, in real time. And when people have that signal, most of them respond to it well.
This is the backbone of modern logistics. Not the trucks. Not even the routes. The ecosystem that keeps everything honest and moving.

How do integrated logistics platforms help cement companies achieve true end-to-end visibility?
The word ‘integrated’ matters a lot here. What most cement companies have today is pieces — a tracking system, an ERP, manual customer communication, a separate compliance tool. None of this talk to each other. The gaps between them are where information gets lost, delays compound and costs pile up.
Integration connects those dots. When the truck leaves the plant, despatch updates automatically. Thirty minutes from delivery, the customer gets an alert and no phone call is needed. When the truck arrives, a digital confirmation feeds back into invoicing. If any deviation happens, the right person knows instantly. The information flows on its own. Nobody has to chase it.
From what I have seen working with large operations. The biggest gain from integration isn’t any single feature. It’s how much coordination overhead disappears. In a large cement company, there are dozens of people whose main job is basically calling other people to find out what’s happening. A properly integrated system makes a lot of that redundant, and frees those people up for work that actually needs human judgment.
There’s also a customer side to this. Cement buyers are getting more demanding. They want estimated time of arrival (ETAs) that they can rely on, proof of delivery and alerts when something goes wrong. That’s a competitive differentiator now, not a bonus feature.

How will smart fleet technology reshape cement logistics over the next five years?
Three shifts, each bigger than the last.
Firstly, moving from reactive to predictive. Right now, operations react to problems. A vehicle breaks down, everyone scrambles. In five years, predictive maintenance will flag that breakdown two weeks before it happens, based on what the sensors are seeing. That shift alone changes a lot.
Secondly, intelligent despatch and planning. AI-driven systems will allocate trucks, optimise routes in real time with live traffic, predict arrival windows more accurately than any human team can manage at scale. That doesn’t mean people become irrelevant. It means people get elevated to the decisions that actually need judgment — things a machine still can’t handle.
Thirdly, compliance just happens in the background. E-way bills, FASTag, vehicle fitness records — the government’s push on digitisation isn’t slowing down. In five years, compliance won’t be a manual burden you manage separately. It’ll be built into the platform.
My honest take: the gap between companies that are building these capabilities now and those who are waiting is going to widen significantly. The early movers will have a structural cost and service advantage by 2029. The others will be catching up in a market that’s already moved on.

• -Kanika Mathur