BOO!

Happy Halloween everyone! The Fleet 4 Fire team has been making consistent progress through October and is excited to share an update with you.

For those that aren’t familiar, Fleet 4 Fire is the first enterprise resource planning tool to be tailored for the fire-service industry. Our features include CRM, Service Scheduling, Inventory Management, Sales Management, and much more. We also integrate with QuickBooks Online, EasyPost, Twilio, and more to cover every aspect of your business! Find out more at fleet4.net!

Updates

• Asset Upgrades
• Inventory Warranty Changes
• Sale Price Approvals
• Pick Tickets / Fulfillment Changes
• Search Improvements
• Resource Migration

Asset Upgrades

One thing we've recognized is the importance of each company being able to customize their instance of Fleet 4 Fire. We've made changes to Apparatus / Assets such that now many of their respective fields are user defined! Technical fields used to be predefined such as Manufacturer Build Number, Pump Information, Transmission information, etc, and now these fields are all defined by users to show what truly matters.

As the screenshots show, we've organized asset data points into tabs for quick reference. The General tab holds general information about the given asset and does not take in user defined fields. We sorted out technical information into the Technical tab and made all of the fields user defined. As a part of this change, any existing data was aggregated and placed in the technical tab for a smooth transition.

Not only are technical fields user defined, but also warranty information and other non-technical custom pieces of data. This is planned to be extended further to allow users to create global custom data points that prepopulate on every apparatus / asset as they're defined!

User definition is a trend that we're moving towards across the application so look for more instances of this change in future blog posts!

Inventory Warranty Changes

One of the main goals of the inventory system in Fleet 4 Fire is to keep your counts accurate in real-time. The other side of keeping your count accurate, is keeping your asset value accurate. No longer will you pay tax on items you didn't pay for, or that do not contribute as assets. With our extension, Fleet 4 Fire now differentiates warranty items from general stock ensuring that your business is making money where it should, and not spending where it shouldn't.

As you can see, when looking at the total stock for an item there is another number in parentheses next to it. This number shows how many items you have that are warranty and have zero cost. This view also makes intuitive sense when counting your shelf as you expect to find 45 items that were purchased and 16 items that are warranty for a total of 61 items across all locations. It is important to note that warranty is tracked by location just like your traditional stock, and is represented in the same way by being shown in parentheses.

Sale Price Approvals

Every company we've worked with has given countless stories of salesmen shorting themselves, or even the business with special pricing or deals meant to further customer relationships. In Fleet 4 Fire, we prevent this from being your business's normal by requiring salesmen to get approval on sales prices that pass below a threshold.

Line items on sales orders and proposals that drop below 90% of the price given by the selected sell function, or prices that drop below the highest cost you have for an item (across all vendors) will be flagged for approval. Line items needing approval can be seen in yellow, and sales managers or administrators can view pending prices in the Admin Dashboard.

Pick Tickets / Fulfillment Changes

Fleet 4 Fire has always been designed to help not only run your business, but to grow it as well! One of our features that is specifically built for business growth is our pick ticket system. We modified our inventory fulfillment process to facilitate an off-site warehouse or fulfillment center.

Now whenever parts are attached to a work order, a "pick ticket" is generated which pushes to our mobile app for users with Parts or Warehouse roles to physically fulfill and ship where needed. These shipping costs are also directly associated with the Sales Order / Work Order that the fulfillment was for.

These pick tickets can still be fulfilled from the website similar to our previous system if you wish to keep the old process!

Search Improvements

After getting some feedback from some parts users, we decided to improve our searching algorithms. Previously when a user searched the inventory, a number of columns where searched against without any weight on a specific column. We've made changes such that now when a user searches, the columns are weighted towards the item id and vendor part number, and then searches the description with the least weight. This results in closer matches to your specific search appearing at the top, and more distantly related results appearing near the bottom.

Resource Migration

The final major change we've made in October is our app's home in the cloud! The team noticed some resource limitations affecting our current user group and decided now was the time to look at expanding our resource pool. Late this month we successfully migrated away from Heroku (our old hosting platform) and purely into Amazon Web Services. This change will let us scale our resource pool much more dynamically, and ensure that your experience is perfect at every turn!

Thanks for reading through our second developer update. If you have any questions or feedback on what we’re working on don’t hesitate to let us know at fleet4.net

Jake Kowa
President & Founder
Fleet 4, LLC
jakekowa@fleet4.net
https://fleet4.net
(314) 937-5253, ext. 01