Fleet maintenance has spent decades relying on telephones, emails and manual approval processes, even as almost every other area of business has moved online.
FleetGuru.ai CEO and Co-Founder Eden Shirley believes that is finally changing.
FleetGuru.ai has built a platform designed to connect workshops, service providers, fleet management companies and fleet managers in one digital maintenance ecosystem.
The objective is to streamline the processes that occur when a fleet vehicle requires servicing or repairs — from the initial quote through to approval and payment.
“What’s unique about a fleet vehicle versus, say, a private vehicle is when the vehicle goes in for a service or a repair, the driver’s not paying for it,” Shirley said.
“There’s a whole bunch of compliance and reporting and things that you just need to do to ensure that that vehicle is appropriately safe as a workplace.”
According to Shirley, more than 10,000 service providers in Australia use the FleetGuru.ai platform, with approximately 12,800 across Australia and New Zealand.
Service providers can log in and create digital work orders that are submitted to fleet management companies for authorisation.
The fleet management company can then review the proposed work, scrutinise the quote and approve the required repairs. FleetGuru.ai also manages the payment process between the fleet management company and the service provider.
Shirley said 11 significant fleet operations are using the platform, including a number of well-known fleet management companies.
The next stage has been extending more of that capability to the fleet managers whose vehicles sit behind those fleet management arrangements.
“We’ve certainly streamlined the relationship between the service provider and the FMO, and now we’re enabling the FMO to bring their customers into that platform,” Shirley said.
That expansion means fleet managers can gain greater visibility over service history, approvals and vehicle bookings.
Shirley said more than 75,000 vehicles are now connected in a way that allows fleet managers to interact with these processes.
One of the simplest examples of the opportunity is booking a vehicle service.
Fleet managers can organise almost every other part of their working lives online, yet vehicle servicing can still involve multiple phone calls between the fleet team, driver, fleet management company and workshop.
“You can book a dentist and a physio and everything like that, but booking a car service is almost impossible,” Shirley said.
FleetGuru.ai is aiming to reduce those manual steps.
Once the platform knows that a vehicle is approaching a scheduled service interval, it can help identify who is responsible for organising the booking and prompt them to take action.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to support that process.
Shirley said FleetGuru.ai’s technology can potentially communicate directly with drivers, confirm where they would like the vehicle serviced and progress the booking without the fleet manager becoming involved in every interaction.
“It shouldn’t require a phone call,” he said.
The move towards FleetGuru.ai has also opened opportunities to make more use of the large volumes of data generated through the maintenance process.
Shirley said machine learning and AI are being applied to areas including quote analysis, approval automation, benchmarking and workflow improvements.
“With the growth of AI and the expansion of machine learning and all the data that we’re sitting on, we’re really starting to be able to use technology to do some really clever things,” he said.
That includes “deep analysis and automation in and around approvals”, as well as insights based on peer medians and benchmarks.
However, Shirley is careful not to position technology as the only source of innovation.
One of the reasons FleetGuru.ai has become a Foundation Sponsor of the Fleet News Group Awards is its desire to recognise improvements across all parts of the fleet management process.
“Innovation is everywhere, but even process innovation — how things are done — is critically important,” Shirley said. “It’s not just about technology. It’s really process innovation where it’s at.”
That distinction is important for fleet managers.
Digitalisation does not create value simply because a manual process has been moved onto a screen. The real benefit comes when technology removes unnecessary steps, provides better information and enables fleet teams to manage vehicles more efficiently.
For FleetGuru.ai, the opportunity is to connect the people already involved in fleet maintenance and make the flow of information between them much simpler.
“All of the key users in the value chain are connected to this ecosystem,” Shirley said. “So we can streamline a lot of those processes.”
