Case Study: Fleet Management System
Customer: TCM Transportation
Challenge
TCM had over 80 trucks with trailers and some company cars. The trucks were managed using a combination of hand-written reports and a very large excel spreadsheet that only one person could manage. Others were not able to understand or use the spreadsheet, it was very hard to extract reports, there was a high risk of mistakes and the ongoing possibility of losing everything.
Solution
We implemented a complete back-end fleet management system with the following features:
Maintenance Interface
- Input maintenance plans of all vehicles and trailers
- Reminders when maintenance due
- Track maintenance jobs
- Interface for mechanics
- Track all work done on the trucks and whether there is anything outstanding
- Developed a scheduling interface to plan when vehicles came into the shop and what needed to be done when they were there
- Inventory management module for truck parts – track parts, know when to reorder, alerts when levels are low (reduced theft)
Driver interface
- Touch screen interface for drivers to fill in trip details immediately after each trip (expenses, kms driven, fuel purchased)
- Built-in messaging so that when a driver logs in, messages are highlighted and he/she can respond.
- Tracks all drivers, kilometres driven, routes, speeding fines, etc.
- Driver expenses were reimbursed through the system
Insurance and licensing tracking
- Tracks the insurance for each vehicle with expiry dates and reminders
- Tracks all driver licenses with expiry dates
- Tracks company credit cards and gas cards - who they are allocated to, when they expire.
Reporting
- Dashboard shows managers what they need to make decisions – for example individual costs or aggregate costs over time, cost by vehicle, total kms driven, gas used by driver and by vehicle, cost of maintenance overall and by vehicle, driver records, etc.
- Dashboard also shows alerts in colour, for example when a vehicle license is about to expire or maintenance is overdue.
- Developed an insurance app to keep track of all issues sent to the insurance company, follow progress and remind managers at key milestones.
Summary
This complex system was custom developed in less than 6 months. The customer saved more than 10% of his costs in the first year of use because of better control and reporting, reduced mistakes from manual processes and reduced theft.
The elimination of paper-based trip reports saved time on re-entry of data and increased the data reliability. The customer was extremely please with the results.