Geotab’s sustainability agenda

KEEPING TABS ON SUSTAINABILITY

Deepak Kadambi, General Manager APAC for Geotab, recently visited Australia to speak at the Sustainability Leaders Summit. MHD caught up with Deepak to learn about Geotab’s sustainability and social responsibility approach.

Geotab, a global leader in IoT and connected transportation, helps its customers improve productivity, optimise fleets through the reduction of fuel consumption, enhance driver safety, achieve strong regulatory compliance to regulatory changes, and focus on sustainability. Geotab is one of the few companies with the ability to help organisations reduce their environmental footprint by leveraging green technology and helping companies transition their fleets from internal combustion engine (ICE) fleets to electric vehicle (EV) fleets.

Established in 2000, Geotab is now one of the largest telematics companies in the world and is a leader in providing fleet management and vehicle monitoring solutions. In 2020, it was the first to exceed two million connected vehicles on a single, open platform.

With a driving aim to connect vehicles to the cloud and make roads safer for everyone, Geotab’s open platform and Marketplace guide businesses in automating their operations by integrating vehicle data with other data assets. This helps to improve productivity and driver safety, helps ensure regulatory compliance, and reduces fuel consumption.

Geotab has worked for over twenty years

Geotab has doubled down on its commitments to environmental sustainability and social responsibility.

We are intensely focused on research and innovation. Because we’ve mostly sold through distributors and resellers, that has allowed us to expand as well as focus on customers’ pain points and build our products to be more potent. ”

with its partners to develop an ecosystem and to provide an extensive product portfolio that can help businesses achieve their goals, no matter the size or function of their fleet.

“Over the last four to five years, Geotab has seen customer growth and a significant expansion of its product portfolio,” Geotab General Manager APAC, Deepak Kadambi says. “More than 130 countries and seven continents have Geotab connected vehicles, including Antarctica. Geotab leverages its ecosystem to sell its hardware, enabling it to allocate more resources to research and innovation. This focus on innovation allows Geotab to develop and deliver the highest quality product.”

Geotab’s GO device is agnostic to the size of the vehicle, size of the fleet, the industry it serves and the type of vehicle. While Geotab’s primary business model began centred on hardware, it has become more about the services and solutions it delivers to its customers.

CLEAN COMMITMENT

Deepak has over 20 years of strategy, operations and engineering experience in transportation, technology and telecommunications. Following his role

as head of Strategy at Omnitracs in North America, Deepak joined Geotab and was recently appointed General Manager of the Asia-Pacific region.

“The appeal and the advantage of being a part of a founder-led company is that it’s switched on when it comes to sustainability; it’s always been a part of the company,” Deepak says. “That’s why Geotab started working with electric vehicles over ten years ago when they were not cool yet – sustainability is in the inherent DNA of the company.

“If you look at company baselines from a couple of years ago, there was a drop in the greenhouse gas contribution from 42,928tn of CO2 to 29,269tn. So, there was already an internal formalisation around Geotab’s sustainability practices that started before Geotab put out its inaugural Sustainability Report in November 2021. It has always been the kind of company that has considered the right thing to do – but by making the report public, Geotab wanted to ensure it is holding true to its aspirations.”

FOUR PILLARS OF SUSTAINABILITY

In Geotab’s Sustainability Report, four pillars are outlined: safeguard the environment, source responsibly, provide innovation to help organisations improve and create a positive impact in communities.

Guided by the first pillar, Geotab is focused on achieving the goals set out in the Paris Agreement and researching science-based technology initiatives. Regarding the second pillar, sourcing responsibly, the company implements a code of conduct for its partners to abide by.

“When it comes down to how Geotab operates and its social responsibilities, it’s not enough just for Geotab to be socially responsible – Geotab encourages its ecosystem of partners to follow in Geotab’s footsteps and commit to their own social responsibilities, including environmental awareness and climate action,” Deepak says. “That’s why Geotab has a partner code of conduct. It has requirements of its partners on things like how they get their energy. Is it clean energy? What are the waste management practices? How are they disposing of waste? Are they recycling? So, that’s not just how Geotab operates, but also how Geotab’s ecosystem of suppliers and partners operate.”

To share its innovations and identify new goals for customers, Geotab launched the Green Fleet Dashboard to show how a fleet is performing over time. It supplies data on: • How the average fleet fuel economy improves over time; • How much time vehicles are idle; • What the carbon footprint of petrol or diesel vehicles is; • How to improve driving behaviours; • How one fleet compares with other, similar fleets; • How to increase EV utilisation; and • How much EVs are helping to lower costs and emissions.

The advantage of being a founderled company is we’re switched on when it comes to sustainability; it’s always been a part of the company. That’s why we started working with electric vehicles almost 10 years ago, when they were not cool yet – it’s in the inherent DNA of the company. ”

SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS SUMMIT

Deepak spoke at the annual Sustainability Leaders Summit, held in Melbourne on 1-2 March this year. At the summit, Deepak met with representatives from companies including Nestlé, Australia Post, and Woolworths to unpack how each organisation’s sustainable practices could apply to the transport sector.

“The diversity of the industry segments at the event was high quality,” Deepak says. “Transportation is a significant chunk of the GDP in most countries. Regardless of the speaker’s industry expertise, it was evident that transportation is essential for many businesses across various industries. Geotab is uniquely positioned to champion measures aimed at improving sustainability practices in the transport sector by providing a solution that enables companies to be more socially conscious and environmentally responsible.”

Deepak also used the opportunity to share what Geotab has done as a technology solutions provider in the transportation space, including its wider support of electric vehicles.

“If there’s a fleet that is transitioning to electric, Geotab has the ability to make that happen,” he says. “I would say Geotab is among one of the only companies that can help businesses fully transition from a purely internal combustion engine vehicle fleet to an electric vehicle fleet, as it has done so already with a rental car company in the US.”

Ensuring that the transition to electric vehicles is seamless for its customers is what Geotab prides itself on as a business. Deepak invites others to consider making the change from ICE to EV fleets to help positively impact the environment.

“If a company has sustainability goals and there is a portion of the business that is extremely dependent on transportation, Geotab can have a conversation with them, understand their pain points, and determine the next steps towards the transition.” ■