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The application implements several requirements we collected from fleet companies and fleet operators. Through repeated refinements and discussions with our customers we reached at the conclusion of deploying two main functions in the application:
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For a detailed explanation of the application we suggest to read FAQ – Car Maintenance.
The application features are enumerated below:
- the application allows to manage maintenance based on mileage, time or engine hours. We personally don’t know other parameters used for maintenance, yet.
- it supports multiple currencies for expenses
- it allows to choose what type of payment was used (cash, cards, etc..) and the currency for it (yes, we thought about cross-border fleet servicing companies)
- it has a feature where the maintenance operations have a warning zone, before they are overdue. The user can be notified through a notification or when the application is started.
- it allows the expenses to be categorized
- it allows to back-date expenses
- it allows to define recurring expenses and the system will automatically roll-over at due date
- it allows the maintenance operations to be categorized
- it allows to define cyclical maintenance operations; when the operation is executed automatically a new entry is created with the same parameters as before but with a new due date / due odometer / due engine hours
- the user can link payment with maintenance operation
- creates different reports and charts (Plus version)
- the data can be saved on Google drives and restored from there (only Plus version)
The difference between our applications and others is the option to feed-up the data from a common service which has to be started and data initialized only once( PRO version) – CarListenerService. This component is at the base of several other applications and constitutes the communication layer for several applications in our development path.
The application start screen is a dashboard for maintenance operations and maintenance expenses.
For the free version of the Car Maintenance, the end-user has to update the values for odometer or engine hours by hand, for the enterprise version (PRO) the service is started once with initialized version for odometer and engine hours and then is calculating new values for them based on the activity of the truck and sensor readings for peripherals. The service is also programmable to collect and store other events:
- engine idling
- number of trips
- number of harsh acceleration, harsh braking
- GPS locations at regular intervals
- activity in Geozones
- messaging with the driver
- driver sign on
- driver/worker status based on a job dispatch
- the compliance with a dispatched route
During development we surveyed several mobile applications on both Google Play and App Store. What we detected is a light development of car/truck maintenance mobile applications with emphasis for manual entry of data. We believe in the concept that once the schedules are in place for one vehicle, the only other manual input has to be when the maintenance operation is executed (and in our app, an expense entry is filled). The app keeps track of everything related to maintenance and also allows to create detailed expense reports in multiple currencies or summarized by the method of payment (types of credit cards).
For a detailed description of each feature and step-by-step procedures please read FAQ – Car Maintenance.