Fleet Connect

The problem

A fleet is really three problems that refuse to stay separate.

There is the shop: what is broken, what is being worked on, and what it cost. There is the parts room: whether the part is on the shelf, which shelf, and whether it is still under warranty. And there is the roster: who is available to drive tomorrow, who is off, and whose licence expires next month.

Run those in three systems — or in one system and two spreadsheets — and they drift apart within a week. The vehicle is scheduled for a driver who is not available, or a work order waits on a part that was in the building the whole time. Everyone can see the mistake afterwards. Nobody could see it in advance.

What Fleet Connect does

In the shop, work orders carry their parts, labour, and cost, and sit on a schedule showing what is in the bay and what is queued behind it. Preventative maintenance is driven by mileage and interval rather than by whoever remembers, and defects are raised with photos — including defects that arrive by email, so a report from a driver does not depend on someone re-typing it.

In the parts room, stock is tracked to the aisle, shelf, and bin, so “we have one somewhere” becomes a location. Parts are checked out against the job that consumed them, barcodes save the typing, and warranty and price history are attached to the part rather than remembered.

On the roster, driver availability and coverage feed day and week schedules, so an absence is visible while there is still time to cover it. Certificates and driver abstracts are tracked against their expiry dates, which turns a compliance problem into a date in a list.

Across all of it, vehicle telemetry reports position and use, and a monitor flags units that have gone quiet — because a vehicle that stops reporting is usually telling you something.

How it is built

Laravel 13, Livewire, and MySQL, with an interface built for people who use it all day. Vehicle telemetry comes from Geotab; supplier invoices and documents that arrive by email are read with Google Gemini rather than re-keyed; parts are handled with barcode scanning, and reports export to PDF and Excel.

It has been in production and under active development for years, which is why it covers the unglamorous parts — tire positions, part bins, abstract expiry — that fleets actually run on.