CMMS for fleet maintenance

A fleet is a pool of assets with two particularities that set it apart from a fixed installation: it moves — so it’s never where the inspection was planned for — and it expires in pieces: insurance, roadworthiness inspection, tachograph, transport permit, each with its own date.

Those two things determine how the system needs to be set up.

The vehicle as an asset, with its counter

The first thing is that each vehicle needs its own record, not a line in a spreadsheet. In asset management it carries its license plate, model, serial or chassis number, registration date, acquisition cost, warranty end date, and location.

What sets a fleet apart is the counter: mileage or hours of use. It gets logged as a reading, so there’s a record of who took it and when, and it’s the basis for analyzing each unit’s real wear.

Each vehicle also supports custom fields with their own type and unit — payload, engine displacement, fuel type, tachograph number — because what describes a van doesn’t describe an aerial platform.

Two frequencies at once

This is the detail people appreciate most. A vehicle’s maintenance doesn’t follow a single calendar: some checks are due by time — the annual inspection, the seasonal filter change — and others are due by usage.

Preventive maintenance supports several simultaneous periods on the same asset, each with its own record of when it was last carried out, so the system knows which one is due first.

And both actually work. On the vehicle’s counter you define a limit — the mileage or hours that component is expected to last — and a warning percentage. When a technician logs a reading, the system adds up the accumulated total, calculates the percentage consumed, and, if the threshold is exceeded, automatically generates the preventive order, with its vehicle and the corresponding checklist.

That solves the classic fleet problem: maintenance isn’t set by the calendar, it’s set by mileage, and each unit runs on its own. It’s worth combining both frequencies, because they cover different things: time-based covers what degrades whether the vehicle is running or not, counter-based covers what wears down through use.

The documentation that expires

In a fleet this isn’t an administrative convenience: it’s what determines whether a vehicle can be on the road. Insurance, roadworthiness inspection, transport permits, cargo certificates, tachograph inspection, technical specifications.

The document manager lets you attach documents to the vehicle itself, the client, the supplier, or the order, decide who sees them — client, technician, supplier — and give them an expiration date. There’s a daily check for what’s about to expire, which triggers the corresponding alert.

The cost of finding out too late isn’t a repair: it’s an immobilized vehicle and, depending on the case, a fine. Loading those dates takes half an afternoon and is probably the fastest thing to pay off in the whole rollout.

The same applies to drivers’ personal protective equipment, with its per-person assignment and expiration alerts.

The work, in-house or outsourced

In a fleet, part of the maintenance is done by the in-house workshop and part by an outside one. Both have to be recorded the same way, or the vehicle’s history will have gaps exactly where the most expensive interventions are.

Suppliers get registered and receive the work orders that correspond to them, with their times, material, and documentation. Since licenses are unlimited across all three plans, registering every workshop you work with isn’t a budgetary decision.

If the work is done in-house, the mechanic logs it from the app: stopwatch within the order, material consumption against the warehouse, checklist, photos, and signature. It works without connectivity, which comes in handy in a workshop or in a pit.

Spare parts and consumables

In warehouses and items each item carries its cost and sale price, code, original reference number, brand, and minimum stock level. Consumables that need it — oils, fluids, batteries, filters — are tracked by batch with manufacturing and expiration dates.

The original reference number matters more in automotive than in almost any other sector: it’s what lets you find another manufacturer’s equivalent when the original part has a lead time of weeks.

And since each service van can be registered as its own warehouse, the material that travels stops being invisible. Transfers from the central warehouse record who requested them and who approved them.

The real cost per vehicle

This is the underlying reason for setting up everything above, and the conversation that can’t happen without data.

With orders closed using measured times and allocated material, reports give the accumulated cost per asset, hours per technician, downtime, MTBF and MTTR, and materials consumed.

That lets you decide what gets decided every year in a fleet, and almost always by gut feeling: which unit gets repaired again and which one gets replaced. A vehicle that’s cost three times as much as its identical siblings has an explanation, and it’s usually in how it’s used or who drives it, not in the mechanics.

It also lets you compare outside workshops by cost and by downtime, which is information that’s rarely kept organized.

If the fleet is rented out or belongs to your clients

Two common cases with the same solution.

If you rent out vehicles, the client can have their own access to open incidents with photos, track repair status, download reports, and see upcoming preventive visits for the units assigned to them. A large part of the calls a rental company receives aren’t requests at all: they’re just asking how things are going.

If you maintain other people’s fleets, the circuit is the same as any third-party maintenance: the preventive plan is what’s been sold, and the closed order with its signature is what backs the invoice.

Where to start

With two things, in this order. First, the dates that expire: insurance, inspections, and permits loaded with their expiration dates. It’s the cheapest thing to do and the one that removes the most risk. Second, periodic inspections for critical vehicles, with their checklist and frequency.

The full inventory and the old history can wait.

If you’d like to see it with your own fleet, you can request a demo or get in touch.