Trimble has announced that Holcim Services (South Asia) Limited, a unit of Holcim Group, one of the largest global cement manufacturers, will deploy the Trimble trako Fleet Management and Visual Cargo solutions in their outbound logistics fleet that transports cement to various destinations across India.

The Trimble solution will provide Holcim better visibility into its transport logistics operations to help increase fleet productivity, improve operational efficiencies, enhance fleet and driver safety, and meet tight delivery timelines.

As part of the implementation, Trimble will provide the Visual Cargo solution to Holcim’s ACC Limited and Ambuja Cements Limited plant operations and the GPS/GPRS based Fleet Management solution for use by their contracted transport vendors.

Visual Cargo provides advanced dashboard and reporting features that allow logistics managers to easily monitor, track and manage delivery exceptions. The Fleet Management solution will provide online tools for transport vendors to manage their fleet utilization and driver safety.

“One of the major challenges for the Indian cement industry is to effectively manage logistics and distribution in a highly competitive, high-volume market over a large geography. Across our extensive network of cement plants, we engage a large, dedicated fleet to transport cement products to our customers across India. The effective use of GPS and related technologies to provide efficiencies in the logistics operations can have a direct positive impact on distribution costs and customer satisfaction. We chose Trimble’s cutting-edge solutions to rapidly achieve our goals and further advance ACC and Holcim’s leadership position in the cement industry,” Kuldip Kaura, CEO and managing director, ACC Limited said.

Onne Van Der Weijde, managing director of Ambuja Cements Limited said, “The Indian cement industry is a high-growth market and customer satisfaction is a high priority for cement manufacturers. At times, logistics costs may exceed manufacturing costs. All our cement plants deploy state-of-the-art solutions such as those offered by Trimble to create the highest efficiencies across our entire supply-chain. These mission-critical applications can enable Ambuja and Holcim to enhance our leadership positions,”
Sunil Tewari, CEO, Holcim Services, (South Asia) Limited commented, “Being a pioneer in the cement industry globally, our goal is to leverage and integrate innovative technologies such as GPS, RFID and Cloud computing to obtain a higher level of visibility into our enterprise supply chain. These technologies will allow us to create an enterprise framework to build a network operating center that seamlessly integrates logistics and business operations to deliver sustained productivity, visibility and safety improvements. We chose Trimble because of its proven expertise in successfully deploying large-scale Transportation & Logistics solutions and its ability to collaborate as a long-term partner.”

“Transportation and logistics in India is a fast-growing, complex market with fragmented ownership of vehicles. Shippers are dependent on multiple transporters to deliver goods. This complexity triggered us to tailor an enterprise-class Fleet Management solution for transporters combined with the Visual Cargo solution to shippers. Its innovative access control mechanism offers trip-based visibility, alerting and reporting to relevant stakeholders across the supply chain,” said Rajan Aiyer, Trimble’s managing director for India. “We are excited to be working with Holcim, ACC and Ambuja on such a challenging project and look forward to a long-term relationship. We are confident that Trimble’s solution can bring Holcim increased visibility and improved fleet management in the dynamic cement distribution market.”