Machinery & fleet

Why the real cost of your fleet matters today

At peak harvest, a stopped tractor or sprayer costs window days that don't come back. For Chilean fruit operations moving hundreds of hectares in peak weeks, fleet maintenance is no longer a workshop matter: it's machine availability when it's needed most, and real cost when every trip is charged to a cost center.

The other cost is silent: nobody knows the real cost of operating each tractor or sprayer. Fuel and kilometers driven dissolve into the monthly total instead of being charged to a cost center, so machinery stays out of the cost per kilo and can't be compared against a standard.

The real problem (no marketing)

Fleet management in many Chilean farms lives in a workshop notebook and in the mechanic's head. The breaking points repeat:

The underlying cost is that machinery is an expensive asset managed as a blurry expense: neither availability nor cost per kilometer enters the cost-center profitability conversation.

How this module solves it

The module shows the fleet on a live map and turns maintenance into a plan that fires on its own, not a notebook to remember. Each machine goes from a blurry expense to an asset with a measurable cost per kilometer and a known location:

1. 01

   Fleet on the map, live

   Live GPS for the whole fleet, with playback of every trip and raw engine data, not just a moving dot.

2. 02

   Preventive maintenance with alerts

   The plan fires by hour-meter or odometer and warns before maintenance slips, with no dependence on someone checking a notebook.

3. 03

   Cost charged per trip

   Every trip computes its fuel cost per kilometer and splits toward one or two cost centers using rules that suggest the split — confirmation is always yours.

Every trip a machine makes computes its fuel cost, and the allocation rules assign it to the corresponding cost center, so machinery cost flows into cost per block instead of sitting in the monthly total.

Integration with your current stack

The module doesn't replace your accounting: it charges the cost of every trip to a cost center, and that spend flows into the same costing the rest of the modules use.

Confirming the cost center for each trip is still yours: the system suggests by rule, but never assigns silently.

From workshop notebook to a managed fleet

For a Chilean fruit operation that concentrates machine work into a few peak weeks, the fleet is an expensive asset almost always managed as a blurry expense. Moving from the workshop notebook to a managed fleet isn't about buying new machines: it's knowing, for each tractor or sprayer, where it is right now, what it costs to operate per kilometer, and when it's due for maintenance before it fails.

The starting point is the hour-meter. While it lives in a notebook, preventive maintenance slips because it depends on someone checking it; when the hour-meter or odometer feeds a plan that fires alerts, maintenance becomes a calendar that keeps itself. Anticipating a maintenance pass costs a fraction of a tractor stopped mid-harvest, when the fruit window won't wait.

The second leap is allocation. Every trip a machine makes computes its fuel cost and splits toward one or two cost centers using rules that suggest the split —you confirm, the system never assigns on its own— so machinery cost flows into per-block costing instead of dissolving into the monthly total. Machinery stops being a blind budget line and becomes a cost you can attribute, compare and discuss.

The third leap is asset security. Each vehicle can have authorized time windows documented as usage policy, remote power cutoff by manual command when you confirm theft or misuse, and an alert if the fuel pattern suggests a refill that doesn't match any logged trip. That matters as much for insurance as for sleeping easy when the machine is parked in the field overnight.

At the scale of several farms, a comparable cost per kilometer across assets also enables fleet decisions once made blind: where an in-house machine beats a contractor, and when an old asset costs more in corrective maintenance than its use justifies. The fleet stops being a pile of iron and becomes a portfolio of assets with measurable cost, location and availability on the same map.

Metrics you'll move

The module moves metrics that make the fleet manageable: cost per kilometer of each asset, kilometers driven per cost center, and the share of preventive maintenance on time versus overdue.

Each indicator enables a decision: