Fleet Maintenance Software Development

What fleet maintenance software has to manage

A fleet maintenance program has three jobs: catch problems early, fix them before they strand a vehicle, and prove the work was done. A regional delivery fleet with 150 step vans, a utility with bucket trucks and a trucking company with tractors and trailers share those jobs, but each measures wear differently. Vans wear by miles and stop counts, bucket trucks by engine and PTO hours, trailers by days and inspections. Tepia starts by mapping your asset classes and the meters that matter for each one.

The daily flow starts with drivers. Under FMCSA rules, drivers inspect their vehicles and report defects, and a carrier must repair or certify that a repair is unnecessary for any defect affecting safe operation before the vehicle runs again. In practice that means a pretrip checklist on a phone, photos of the defect, a supervisor deciding whether the truck is safe to drive, and a technician closing the repair with a signature. If any step lives on paper, the chain breaks.

Behind that sits the shop: preventive maintenance intervals, parts on the shelf, warranty claims with OEMs, outside vendors for body work or tires, and technician labor on each job. Tepia designs the software so a fleet manager can answer three questions for any unit in seconds: what is due, what is open, and what it has needed over its life.

Features of a custom fleet maintenance system

Tepia fits the feature set to your shops and asset classes. Most fleets end up with a version of this core:

Out of service flags are where maintenance meets dispatch. When a supervisor marks a truck out of service, Tepia pushes that status to your dispatch and routing systems so no one assigns it a route, and the driver app offers a replacement unit instead. That single connection prevents a surprising number of roadside violations.

Telematics, fault codes and fuel data

Most fleets already have telematics, and the engine data it collects is valuable for maintenance if someone reads it. Tepia integrates with Samsara, Geotab, Motive and OEM portals to pull odometer, engine hours and diagnostic trouble codes into the maintenance system. Odometer readings drive preventive maintenance automatically, and fault codes are ranked so a supervisor sees aftertreatment and coolant warnings ahead of informational codes. The details of those connections are on our telematics integration page.

Other feeds are worth connecting too:

• Fuel card transactions to spot a unit whose fuel economy has dropped, often an early sign of a mechanical issue.
• Tire pressure monitoring where installed, to catch slow leaks before a blowout.
• Parts suppliers for catalog lookups and order status on back ordered components.
• QuickBooks or your ERP to post parts and outside vendor repairs to the right unit and department.

Tepia keeps the maintenance system as the owner of asset and repair records, and treats telematics as a source of readings rather than a second system of record.

How Tepia approaches fleet maintenance software

Tepia’s six phase process runs with a US based project manager, adapted to shops that cannot stop working while software changes around them.

1. Discovery: time in your shop and yard at shift change, a review of current PM spreadsheets or software, telematics accounts and parts records, and interviews with drivers, technicians and the safety manager. Deliverables include an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories like a technician closing a brake repair and clearing the out of service flag.
2. Design: design questionnaire, moodboards, a style guide and wireframes for the DVIR flow, the shop board and the unit file, checked on rugged phones and shop tablets.
3. Development and Testing: an Alpha with one asset class, then a Beta across the fleet, with test plans for PM trigger accuracy against real odometer histories, offline DVIRs in dead zones and user acceptance with technicians.
4. Training: in person sessions at each shop and yard, plus short driver videos for the pretrip flow.
5. Launch: migration of units, PM history, open work orders and parts counts, then a cutover by location with support reps on hand.
6. Support: issue resolution, bug tracking and feature requests such as adding trailers or new equipment types.

Typical timing is 1 to 3 months for Discovery, 2 to 6 months for development and QA, and roughly a month to launch. Read our process.

Packaged maintenance software or a custom build

Packaged fleet maintenance products cover standard preventive schedules and DVIRs well, and for a fleet with one shop and common vehicles they are often the fastest answer. Tepia says so in Discovery when it is true. Custom software earns its place when:

• You maintain mixed equipment, such as trucks, trailers, generators and attachments, that packaged tools model only as vehicles.
• Maintenance has to talk to your own dispatch, routing or ERP in ways the product’s integrations do not support.
• You run in house shops across several sites with parts transfers between them.
• You maintain vehicles for other companies as a contract maintenance provider and need customer facing reporting.
• Your technicians need offline work orders in yards and remote sites where coverage is poor.

For broader fleet tooling see custom fleet management app development and how to build a fleet management app, or talk to Tepia about your shops.

Frequently asked questions