The situation
A third-party logistics operator running lanes across North and West India owned a modest core fleet — all GPS-equipped — but fulfilled the majority of loads on market-hired vehicles. Those hired trucks were invisible between pickup and delivery. The control tower's day was consumed by status calls to drivers, customers escalated when updates were slow, and route deviations were discovered only after they had cost hours.
What we implemented
We deployed consent-based SIM tracking across every hired trip. At load assignment, the driver's number was registered and a consent request sent; on approval, the vehicle streamed positions to the same dashboard as the GPS fleet. Geofences were drawn around hubs and key delivery zones, with route-deviation and long-halt alerts pushed to the control tower. FASTag crossing data was blended in to fill any network gaps on highway stretches.
What changed
Within three weeks, every vehicle carrying the company's freight — owned or hired — was on one screen. The control tower shifted from calling every driver to managing by exception, acting only on alerts. Customer-facing teams answered status queries from the dashboard instead of the phone. Over the following quarter, delivery escalations fell by 38%, and two attempted route diversions on high-value loads were caught and corrected while the vehicles were still en route.
Why it worked
Zero hardware meant zero onboarding friction: a market truck hired at noon was trackable by its first toll plaza. And because tracking was explicitly consent-based and trip-scoped, driver cooperation — the usual failure point of visibility projects — never became an issue.