A commuter in Bangalore spends roughly 7% of his time on the road, thanks to the massive traffic woes in the city. As per a Quartz report, each employee, while travelling to work, spends at least two hours every day for commuting. That’s nearly 470 hours a year per employee. On the other hand, for an enterprise, transportation service is the third biggest cost item.
That’s just one city. This presents an extremely important need for optimisation of transportation services to improve efficiency, time and costs, not only for commuters but also for the organisation.
Recognising this problem, Deepesh Agarwal and Akash Maheshwari, founded MoveInSync where they built a technology platform to optimise enterprise employee transportation.
Deepesh says that the focus is only on one type of transportation problem – of people going to work and coming back.
“There are a lot of companies in India, especially ITeS companies that provide transportation for their employees. MoveinSync gives them a tech platform such that, say Infosys, in its Bengaluru Electronic City office has 10,000 employees who have to come to office at different timings, the company can use MoveinSync’s tech to precisely know the number of vehicles required for transportation of its employees,” he adds. This in turn reduces cost of transportation for the enterprise.
The platform lets employees schedule a pick-up and drop. The tech also has a routing engine, which combines the various employees sharing a cab to reduce travel time and cost as well.
MoveinSync has developed patented algorithms that optimise and calculate the best route for an organisation’s cabs or buses. MoveInSyc claims that it reduces travel time by an average of 10 minutes one way, out of an average one way commute time of 52 minutes.
The third important aspect of the platform, according to Deepesh, is safety of the employees, especially women. The tech platform allows to see who’s travelling, what’s the gender of the person and if she has got off at the right spot. If not, the management is alerted when the employees get off at a destination which is not identified as their home.
There is also an SOS button in the app which alerts the management when triggered. It is also mandatory for every cab driver to strictly follow the routes provided by MoveinSync’s systems. There is also a tracking mechanism, which lets employees track their cabs in real time. In fact, MoveinSync has also integrated its tech with Hyderabad Police’s women safety app Hawk Eye, where a woman employee can directly reach the police control room at the push of a button.
The company follows a SaaS model where it charges enterprises on a per employee per month basis.
It has over 50 customers in 19 cities across the country. It claims that 1.5 lakh employees use the system on a daily basis.
And in terms of saving costs, MoveinSync says that it saves companies an average of 10-15% per employee. Is it substantial? “For a lot of BPOs that work on thin margins, this adds to the bottomline and makes the company more competitive,” Deepesh says.
Having expanded to 19 cities, India remains a strong focus for MoveinSync. But the startup is also looking at exploring foreign shores, especially neighbouring countries such as Philippines and Sri Lanka.
But the larger plan for MoveinSync is to move beyond offering just a software platform. “We are looking at opportunities with our clients where we can provide their entire transportation as a service so that they don’t have to directly link up with the cab suppliers and MoveinSync can be the one platform to solve all problems regarding office commute,” Deepesh adds.