What does fleet management software hold, beyond the vehicles?
The known part of fleet management software is about the vehicle (position, mileage, deadlines), and for that part people buy ready-made products. The question that reached us was another one: what is on board the vehicle, across fifteen vans that carry hundreds of spare parts and pass them to one another.
Fleet management software usually starts from the vehicle: where it is, how many kilometres it has done, when its roadworthiness test is due. On that ground there are mature products, and when that is the question, the answer we give is to buy one.
The job that came to us was a different one: knowing what is on board the vehicle.
The problem as they told it to us
A telecommunications operator with fifteen vans in service and hundreds of spare parts spread across them. At head office, nobody knew which parts were on which vehicle.
A spreadsheet holds up as long as the parts stay still. These move by themselves. One technician takes a part from a van and fits it, another moves parts between two vehicles, a third leaves one at the customer’s. Every movement is legitimate and nobody has time to record it.
The choice that decided the project
Any solution that asks a technician to tick off a list works as long as somebody checks it. We wanted the data to arrive without anyone entering it.
From there came the two technical decisions: an RFID tag on every component tracked, and a UHF reader fixed to every vehicle. The van reads what it has on board by itself, and the reading reaches a cloud web platform that keeps the inventory of every vehicle. On top of that we put the notification logic: when an expected part is not detected, an alert goes out.
The project in full, with what came out of it, is in fleet management for a telecoms operator.
Why we file it under management software and not under apps
Because the hard part was neither the hardware nor the screen: it was getting the on-board inventory back into the systems the company already had. An inventory that lives on its own becomes a second place to look, and the two truths never match.
It is the same reason why something like this ends up within the scope of custom management software. The rules on which parts are on which vehicle, who can take them and what happens when they stay at the customer’s belong to that company, and a product learns them only after getting to know it.
What we take away with us
Two things hold beyond this project.
Data that depends on goodwill does not arrive. If recording costs time for someone whose hands are full, sooner or later it gets skipped, and incomplete data is worse than no data, because it looks true.
It has to work without a network all the same. In a warehouse or in an area with no coverage the vehicle keeps reading, holds on to what it has collected, and syncs when the signal comes back.