Fleet Maintenance Pro

"Experience has been good overall. Software has most of the features we need (would like some added)."

Overall: Prior to having this software, we relied on our shop staff to maintain equipment when needed. As you can imagine, we operated mostly in a reactive state. Having Fleet Maintenance has helped us to move into a proactive state and gives us the tools to really see what is happening with each piece of equipment. We can start to analyze when to deactivate a piece of equipment, we can look at trends as to what repairs/issues seem to be common to equipment and better prepare for those repairs by having parts on hand. We anticipate having equipment that runs longer because we are consistently performing preventative maintenance on the equipment based on the schedules set up in the system...we anticipate this will yield savings in less repairs and not having to replace the equipment as often. This software has helped us to better maintain our equipment, provide better efficiency and effectiveness for our shop employees, and provides us data that we can use to make better decisions for future purchases. It also gives us the ability to track inventory and our entire fleet of vehicles and equipment. Overall, we are very pleased with the benefits of the software and the experience with the Fleet Maintenance sales and customer service/technical support teams have been excellent!

Pros: Ease of use, not hard to navigate or learn. Value for the money. No monthly contract. Setup is easy. Software has a lot of flexibility for data entry. If you forget something, you can add it in at a later date and if you need to take something out or delete it, it can be done with ease. Customer service has been excellent, very responsive and pleasant to work with. Overall the experience from estimate, trial period, purchase, and back-end support has been a pleasure (seems like a great company).

Cons: Would be nice to have an inactive or out of season option/button for an entire category instead of having to do it on each piece of equipment (e.g. snow plows, mowers, etc.). Would also be nice to have GPS capable software to automatically track vehicles, mileage, etc. A bar code scanning option would be nice for inventory/parts. Reports are a bit difficult to learn especially if you want to customize them and sometimes have a hard time pulling data because the option for what we are looking for is not available (no specific example...we have ran into this a couple times over the last year...probably not a big deal, but if there was more flexibility in what data can be pulled for each report, it would make customizing and analyzing the information more robust). Most of the preset reports are great as a starting point...without the robust customization, it limits your ability to explore the trends deeper.

"Fleet Maintenance Pro is very powerful"

Overall: We are learning what we have been spending every year to keep our fleet on the road. Now we are able to spot vehicles that are costing more on average to keep running and we can make business decisions based on real data.

Pros: Seeing our costs for each truck is very valuable. Being able to run a report on vehicle costs for a given time period is valuable. Issuing POs and tracking invoices helps us streamline our business. Having a great technical support staff is critical and I have found the Fleet Maintenance support staff to be very helpful to get me back on track. FM is very flexible in allowing me to attach documents and photos to my equipment.

Cons: I think the area that is hard to adapt to is the vehicle scheduled maintenance. I'm probably not setting my scheduled maintenance parameters correctly. I will make sure all the other facets of the program are fully understood by me and fully implemented, then I'll concentrate on how to make the scheduled maintenance part of the program useful for me.