How do we involve customers in product roadmap

When developing or improving existing products, it is always a challenge to select the features and functionalities that deliver both what the customer wants AND what is technologically and economically feasible. To do that, when deciding on the features, you can:

1. just follow your instinct.
2. “borrow” from your competition
3. or you can ask your customers or your consultants.

Well, we do all of that. But how do we prioritize features for the best price-performance ratio? In Fleetman, we use two powerful tools and a finely tuned process.

First, we are continually collecting all potential ideas. From everyone. Nothing gets left behind. Our customers, our product team, marketing…basically anyone can access our Ideas portal that we incorporated in our product website. We are using a well-known Czech product development tool called #Productboard. And while still learning to use all its capabilities, it already helps greatly in organizing the process. With Productboard portal we collect inputs from the market trends, from the development community and, perhaps most importantly, from the daily practice of our customers.

Then, we evaluate and prioritize the list of features during regular meetings of all stakeholders. Development, marketing, sales, management…it is often long and lively meeting, you can imagine. But in the end, we have a prioritized Roadmap where we roughly know the value and cost of these features.

In the third phase, we use another mighty tool: #AzureDevOps where we take the approved Roadmap feature through development, testing and deployment, while taking into consideration the inputs from the previous two phases.

So that is how we choose new functionalities for Fleetman development. With the help of #productboard and Azure #devops and striving to balance customer needs and satisfaction on one side with technological and financial feasibility of the product on the other. 

Tomáš Pavlíček, Product Director

Konica Minolta IT Solutions Czech

Spring news in Fleetman product

A cleaner and more comprehensive display of the most important information, even more practical and colorful reporting in Power BI, or the most requested extension – the mobile journey log. These are the main new features in our spring release of Fleetman updates. We are constantly listening to our customers’ feedback. As the number of users grows, we also get a better insight into how they really use the app. These are the main sources of insights for continuous improvement. And we’ve got more to come. Let’s take a closer look.

Vehicle 360° – comprehensive and beautiful screen with vehicle data

This is a typical example of adjustments based on feedback. We evaluated the most frequently used vehicle data, previously spread across multiple screens, tabs, etc. And we compiled them into a clearer, more practical view of the first screen a user sees about the vehicle. And we’ve named this new view Vehicle 360°. 

In order to organize this information in a really clear way, we used a new component called “Information Tiles”. These concentrate and display data from different areas such as service, vehicle financial balance sheet, consumption, etc. And also, a current picture of the vehicle. This is useful for quick identification.

Of course, other data about the vehicle can also be useful. These too are easily accessible; we have moved them to the Details tab.

See for yourself:

Vehicle 360° screen – all relevant data in one place

Driver Hub – a journey log in mobile

We have also seen strong demand from our customers for a simple application for drivers to record and report their journeys. Fleetman operates technologically on the Power Platform, which meant that building a new mobile app was technically relatively easy. Of course, selecting and integrating the right functionality is another matter. We wanted the app to be easy to use and function as a useful source of data that can be further worked with within Fleetman application, then fully administered by fleet manager.

Driver Hub can also be deployed in your organization as a standalone application, without Fleetman. Further development is to be expected, based on practical experience and it already provides the following functionalities:  

• Keeping a record of the journey made (business / private) in the scope of
• Database of frequently used locations for faster and easier entry of trips
• Overview of basic vehicle technical information
• Integration with Fleetman

The Driver Hub application is licensed and installed separately. If you are interested in this application, please contact us via the support portal.  

Fleetman reporting in Power BI

He who does not measure, cannot manage. Certainly not the efficiency of the fleet. Fleetman works with a lot of measurable data on fleet operations. It can also clearly display and evaluate the data for better management. In addition to its own basic graphical dashboards, Fleetman can also integrate with the reporting and analytics tool Microsoft Power BI. In the spring release, we took this capability even further and prepared a customized set of reports to meet the exact needs of fleet managers, as well as their managers and CFOs.

The reports visualize data on, among others:

• Drivers and vehicles – costs and profits by type, economic balance sheet, lease termination prediction
• Service events – types, costs, inspection date prediction
• Insurance claims over time and by type
• Refueling – geographical distribution, costs
• Overall fleet performance – failure rates by model, cost prediction and planning, year-on-year comparisons, etc.

Power Bi dashboard in Fleetman

No additional license is required to run the report. Basic work with the report can be done in the freely available version of Power BI. More information about Power BI licensing can be found here. 

If you are interested in extending your licenses to work in PowerBI online, please contact our support. 

…and many more smaller improvements

Apart from these three major improvements, we have finalized several smaller functionalities in the spring release, mostly focused on the practicality and ease of use of the app. These include:

• Fully configurable vehicle equipment records (applicable to anything)
• Multi-currency support for financial indicators
• Predictive calculation of the next service date or lease end date
• Records of profits generated (for example, if you lease your vehicles)
• Clearer tracking of availability statuses (when the vehicle is ready for use, in service etc.)
• More convenient editing of notes on the vehicle card
• Faster and easier work with some records (closing a service, creating a tire record)

…and other seemingly small things. Of course, our customers who already use the system will be notified about all the new features in detail. And we can all look forward to further improvements that we are already working on at full speed.

How much does Fleetman cost?

From the discussions with our customers, we learned that the licensing and pricing of the product could feel a bit confusing on the first glance. Do not despair though, we are happy to help! You can either contact us directly with your questions regarding licensing via our contact form. Or you can read further for a pricing example of a typical mid-sized customer.

When we designed the product, we focused on ease of use, flexibility, compatibility with existing technology at our customers’ stack and scalability of the solution. The Microsoft Power Platform technology was a natural choice. However, it comes with its own license structure, which takes into account your currently purchased licenses (savings for you!), while allowing us to license the tech we built on top of the platform.

So, let’s say you are a company with a higher tens to low hundreds of vehicles. You have several branches or locations where those vehicles are distributed and managed. From Fleetman point of view, you:

• have one main fleet manager with four aides in company branches (assistants, back-office, technicians…)
• use Office 365, purchased under Microsoft 365 Business Basic license (or higher)
• do not have any Microsoft Power Apps licenses
• decide to implement quickly and efficiently with the support of vendor implementation services

In this case, you will end up paying 128,5 euro monthly

and one-off implementation investment of 3 753 euro. See the detail in the table below:

On top of that, add-ons can be purchased, like Ecofleet integration module. That would be worth considering if you required advanced telemetry like actual mileage to be monitored directly in the Fleetman app. This particular add-on would cost you 60 EUR monthly per one tenant (implementation). 

In case of any questions or if you need any license consultation, do not hesitate to contact us through our contact form. 

Test the Fleetman demo! It is waiting for you in AppSource.

Those new tools you need at home you just want to touch before you buy them. You know the feeling – when you shop for something, even something simple, like a hammer. Standing in front of the shelf with various pieces, it is not enough to choose with your eyes only. You want to pick them up, assess the heft and balance, the texture and shape of the handle…maybe a couple of test swings… And of course, it is much harder to assess the suitability of an application for your organization’s needs. Real life processes that it is supposed to simplify, main functionalities and of course the touch and feel of the controls, all that you just want to test. Fleetman allows you to do just that in the new demo that we created.

Of course, no demo can truly show the daily operation with real data and those real-life situations no one could have had even imagined before. But it can tell you a lot about your future cohabitation. Now, you can try the Fleetman as well. As the good application it is, it features in its app store. Since it is built on Microsoft Power Platform, you can find it in Microsoft AppSource. And you can test it via its “Test Drive” in a 2-hour demo environment created specifically for you.

So go ahead and take it for a spin right now.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Fleetman is now in the Microsoft AppSource

Fleetman application was recently published in AppSource – the Microsoft application marketplace.

A Forrester Consulting study from April 2019 shows that 73% of business buyers find the web more convenient for purchasing. The same study finds that by 2023, 17% of all business-to-business transactions will happen through eCommerce. For Software as a Service applications, the online environment is a natural distribution channel. And, same as many other phenomena crossing from consumer space to B2B, app-stores for businesses came along.  

Microsoft AppSource is essentially an app store for business applications. It is designed to help organizations customize their user experience and improve overall functionality of their system. Combining both applications and services, it expands the Microsoft platform with partner solutions.

Find Fleetman in the Appsource here