Assets and duty cycles
Alongside vehicles, a fleet includes non-vehicle assets — trailers, containers, forklifts, generators, compressors and tools. The same module that records them also defines the duty-cycle profiles used to plan maintenance, and provides the fleet utilization view, which catches vehicles sitting idle.
Who it's for
The fleet manager and organization administrator register and update assets and create duty-cycle profiles. The maintenance manager co-owns profiles and uses them when planning service; the safety manager, alongside maintenance and fleet managers, can also manually ground or restore a vehicle. The finance controller records the cost entries that build a vehicle's TCO.
Key concepts
A duty cycle is how you measure an asset's usage — by mileage, by engine-hour count, or both. A duty-cycle profile ties that measure to a threshold (e.g. every so many kilometres or engine-hours), which feeds maintenance schedules and expected wear.
Asset register
You register an asset with a serial number, a name and a category (trailer, container, forklift, generator, compressor, tool or other), assigning it to a site and optionally to a fleet group. The asset's status — in service, out of service, in storage, disposed — controls its operational availability, the same way a vehicle's status does.
The same backend module also keeps TCO entries for vehicles — individual cost line items (acquisition, maintenance, fuel/energy, insurance) with an amount and a date, recorded by hand by the finance controller or fleet manager; they add up on the vehicle's detail page (see Vehicles).
Duty-cycle profiles
A duty-cycle profile defines a name, a measurement basis (mileage, engine-hours, or both) and thresholds (kilometres and/or engine-hours) past which an asset or vehicle qualifies for service. A profile assigned to a vehicle feeds both preventive maintenance schedules and the expected wear rate shown on the vehicle detail page.
Fleet utilization
The utilization view is an on-demand snapshot: for a given no-activity threshold in days (default 30), the system flags vehicles with no recent data as "ghosts" — potentially idle or abandoned assets running up cost without doing work. The view shows the total vehicle count, the number of ghosts caught, and, per vehicle, its status, current odometer reading and last-activity date.
In the background
A vehicle's roadworthiness is automatically withdrawn when an inspection reports an open safety-affecting defect — the grounded vehicle is excluded from dispatch assignments until the defect is repaired and certified, or roadworthiness is restored manually by a maintenance or safety role.