The technology is intended for those fleet managers who either outright-purchase their vehicles or lease them but carry out maintenance management themselves and was originally developed for a Midlands-based civil engineering group that operates a fleet of around 300 vehicles that it purchases and manages itself.

Following its successful application at this company, the new functionality, which is part of Mycompanyfleet's FleetAcumen fleet management system, is being made available to all FleetAcumen users.

The new module allows a maintenance history and cost profile to be built up for each vehicle part or a specific piece of servicing or maintenance work on every vehicle on the fleet.

The system then signals any deviations away from previously incurred or standard costs so they can be flagged up and investigated.

At the same time, pre-negotiated discount structures for each part or item of work can be built into the system to ensure they are applied correctly to the job task in hand, with any deviation from these again can being easily flagged up and identified.

The system also look at the time intervals involved in replacing parts and automatically flags up where they fall within existing manufacturer warranty periods, so that additional costs are not needlessly incurred.

And it can identify where replacements parts other than manufacturer-recommended OEM parts are entirely suitable for purpose and can be legally used without infringing manufacturer warranties.

Full management reports of all costs incurred, and cost savings achieved, can then be produced to show management where under or over spends are being achieved and whether overall budgets are being met.

Jon Tandy, business development manager at Mycompanyfleet, said the system is ideally suited for outright-purchase fleets or those who believe they can take care of maintenance more efficiently than their leasing firm, explaining that ‘its smart functionality allows maintenance history to be built up right across the fleet and for cost trends to be easily identified. In this way, maintenance costs can be challenged and managed more effectively, resulting in reduction of up to 25% in maintenance spend across even a relatively small fleet.’

He added: ‘The potential for large fleets which manage the maintenance of several thousand cars and vans is enormous.’