How Fleets are Automating Workflows with Fleetio

What is workflow automation in Fleetio?

An automation is an instruction you can give Fleetio to automatically update your records when a specified event happens. If you're familiar with if-then statements, then you've already got the gist of how workflow automations behave.

Automations consist of three elements—triggers, conditions and actions:

• Triggers are events that initiate automations. They can be anything from a work order being created to an issue getting reported.
• Conditions allow you to get granular by stipulating details that need to be met in order for an automation to run. For example, if you want something to happen when a work order is created by a specific employee, you can set up a condition to enable that process.
• Actions are tasks that Fleetio automatically carries out when a trigger occurs and all associated conditions are met. Updating vehicle and work order statuses are two of the most-common automations fleets are using.

Put simply, if an automation's trigger occurs (and all its conditions are met), then its action will automatically be performed.

What kinds of tasks can you automate?

To help organizations streamline as much of their operations as possible, automations cover several key aspects of fleet management:

• Work orders: When an issue is resolved, when labor gets added or when parts you've been waiting on arrive, you can have Fleetio automatically update relevant work orders.
• Vehicle statuses: To maximize visibility over your vehicles, automations can automatically update vehicle statuses when work orders are created/completed or when an issue is reported.
• Vehicle/equipment issues: Based on rules you specify, you can configure Fleetio to automatically update the statuses of open issues and even create issues for specific locations.
• Shop and labor management: To keep your maintenance and repair records accurate and up-to-date, automations can auto-assign work orders to specific users and streamline offsite repairs.

How real fleets use automation

While automations just officially debuted in Fleetio, several fleets have already been testing this feature in our beta program. In the six weeks since its beta release, we've already seen more than 73,000 successful automations, with each fleet saving 12.5 hours a month on average.

Intra City Dispatch: Improving asset visibility

Intra City Dispatch is a Michigan-based trucking and brokerage company. Its technicians do an admirable job of keeping the company's tractor-trailers, straight trucks and cargo vans in working order, but they aren't perfect when it comes to updating the statuses of those vehicles. Sometimes, they'll create a work order but forget to mark its associated vehicle as being in the shop. And, in the past, that would lead to confusing discrepancies between what was being displayed in Fleetio and reality.

But ever since they set up an automation that automatically updates the status of a vehicle when a work order for it gets created, Intra City Dispatch has been able to dramatically improve their data accuracy.

As soon as a work order has started, boom, [the vehicle is] listed as being in the shop. I don't have to worry about somebody going "Is that truck in the shop today?"

Like when a truck stops just to get windshield wipers. Those kinds of mini maintenance things get missed as "in the shop"/"out of the shop" things.

This being automated, we don't have to worry about it. We can see every time a truck stops to get something done on it. Jennifer Lamkin, Maintenance Controller

Now, Intra City Dispatch's fleet manager spends far less time identifying and correcting vehicle status errors. Plus, greater data accuracy enables ICD's maintenance controller to leverage vehicle histories more effectively when she sleuths for missing parts.

City of Farmers Branch: Proving value with better data

From dump trucks to fire engines, the city of Farmers Branch, Texas relies on a typical lineup of public works and emergency vehicles to provide services to its 42,000 residents. Because these services are indispensable to the well-being of its inhabitants, maximizing vehicle uptime has always been a top priority of Fleet Operations Manager Kevin Reinartz.

Unfortunately, for a long time, tracking uptime of municipal vehicles was far from easy for Kevin.

Before this workflow automation, I had been harping on my [technicians] about updating the statuses of the vehicles as they came in and out of the shop. We were doing it on the work order side, but we weren't doing it on the asset side.

So I was missing that piece of an easy way to track vehicle uptime, which is one of my critical KPIs. Kevin Reinartz, Fleet Operations Manager

Now though, thanks to automations, Fleetio ensures that vehicle statuses are kept up-to-date. This improvement in data accuracy not only gives Kevin greater visibility over the health of his fleet and the productivity of his technicians, but it also helps him advocate more effectively for his fleet’s needs.

As a municipal fleet manager, the budget Kevin gets to work with is determined by Farmers Branch's city council. Fleetio provides Kevin with statistics he presents to the city council that prove his competency as a fleet manager and illustrate what his operations require to continue to function effectively. And the more insights about his operations Fleetio can provide (enabled by features like automations), the more angles Kevin has to make his case.

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