What I ’ ve learned from working at DingGo
WORDS BY ADRIAN BLACKWELL
After decades in the automotive industry , often in the big-end of town , I joined DingGo -- a fast-moving Australian tech start-up . I did it for a reason .
When I saw what DingGo could do as a platform for commercial fleets , it became clear that this solution was like nothing else out there and it was sorely needed by fleet managers everywhere . Moreover , I realised it would never be a ‘ legacy ’ product , settling into a comfortable but ineffective place after it had won over its first customers .
DingGo will always be cutting edge , because the team is not only committed to research and development but sharing those learnings with the industry at large -- something attendees of the 2021 Australian Fleet Conference & Exhibition saw in DingGo co-founder Shaun Janks ’ presentation .
The future of fleet management
Now it ’ s my turn to share . In the months since I ’ ve joined the DingGo team , here ’ s what I ’ ve learned about tech and digitisation : truly powerful technology is about connected , comprehensive data .
While the best fleet managers understand the importance of data , it ’ s still being delivered to them in separate buckets . We were recently invited to an internal meeting for one of our fleet clients where their insurer spoke and presented some really detailed , insightful data . But it only captured information for repairs that the insurer dealt with -- considering this company ’ s high excess , there were a significant number of repairs not represented in the data at all .
The risk of working with siloed data is that you end up making lopsided decisions based on only one part of the picture ( in this case , the bigger repairs ) and driving blind on everything else . One or two small jobs missed might be inconsequential , but across a nationwide fleet it ’ s a critical oversight .
Efforts to manually comb through and combine separate sets of detailed information into a uniform , usable database are expensive . In the digital age it no longer makes sense to pay someone to do a heavily administrative role , rather than using the power of technology to do the heavy lifting and leaving your people free for the strategic decision making that really makes a difference .
26 ISSUE 30 AUGUST 2021 / WWW . AFMA . ORG . AU