NEXT #16 - Better visibility into your fleet, less hassle in your day-to-day operations

This issue is all about transparency, connectivity, and streamlining day-to-day fleet management. We’ll show how an unexpected lease return at Julius Gaiser GmbH sparked the shift to digital fleet management, introduce the new Partner Area, which now makes the AZOWO network directly visible within the platform, and take a look at the AI-powered driver’s license check, which takes over one of the most time-consuming tasks in fleet management. We also provide the cost data you’ll need for your 2027 budget planning. Enjoy the read!

Julius Gaiser GmbH is a medium-sized building services engineering company headquartered in the Ostalb region of Baden-Württemberg. Across its five locations—Heidenheim, Böhmenkirch, Aulendorf, Ulm, and Amstetten—284 users have access to a fleet of 210 vehicles, including 32 shared vehicles, 20 Ford Transit vans, and 11 electric vehicles.

For a long time, the fleet was managed using an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs, maintained by two people. Deadlines for vehicle inspections (TÜV), occupational safety inspections (UVV), and lease expirations, as well as damage claims and vehicle data, were all tracked manually. As the number of vehicles grew, this system reached its limits. The problem became apparent during a lease return: One vehicle had significantly exceeded its mileage limit; no one had noticed the overage, and the additional payment was correspondingly high.

With the AZOWO Mobility Cloud, Julius Gaiser now monitors mileage automatically, and a traffic-light system shows the status of each vehicle at a glance. The system directly maps the holding company structure with its five independent locations, and pool vehicles are booked centrally through the front desk. The Ford Transit buses are equipped with Geotab dongles and automatically log the trip log; driver’s license checks are conducted twice a year via the AZOWO driver app, and fuel and charging data are imported monthly via the UTA interface.

“AZOWO supports us in our day-to-day operations by providing significantly more transparency, especially when it comes to monitoring mileage. Thanks to the traffic-light system, we can see at a glance the status of each vehicle and have all relevant data right in front of us,” say Jessica and Nadine from Julius Gaiser GmbH.

In the full case study, you can read how the AI-powered document management system automatically assigns service reports to the appropriate vehicle file and what role the fuel data import plays in cost analysis at the vehicle level

Read the case study here!

AZOWO positions itself as an all-in-one platform for fleet management. Over the past few releases, the partner network behind it has grown steadily, but until now this has been visible primarily on the AZOWO website, separate from the actual work context within the platform.

The new Partner Area changes that. All partners and interfaces of the AZOWO Mobility Cloud are now listed directly within the platform, complete with descriptions, status, and respective functions. Fleet managers can see at a glance which partners are already integrated and which ones would be suitable additions to their own fleet—all without leaving the platform.

New partners are continuously being added to the Partner Area.

The AI driver’s license check handles one of the most time-consuming routines in the fleet 🪪

As the vehicle owner, the company must prove when a driver’s license was last verified—not just that it was verified at some point. The effort involved rarely consists of the verification itself: informing employees, sending out appointments, following up with those who don’t respond, conducting visual inspections, and preparing documentation for proof.

All told, each check easily takes 20 minutes. With two checks per driver per year and 220 drivers, this represents a fixed block of time in the fleet’s daily operations that recurs every six months.

With the AI driver’s license check in the AZOWO Mobility Cloud, this manual effort is almost completely eliminated. The check takes place in two stages.

📱 Step 1 checks the photo. The driver starts the check in the driver app or via a QR code in the browser—so an app isn’t strictly necessary. Images can only be captured using the phone’s camera; uploading pre-saved images is not possible. Additionally, the specified hand position changes with each check. This ensures that the image is current.

🤖 Stage 2 verifies the driver’s license. After submission, the security features are checked, the images are cross-referenced with each other, and compared with previously verified images from earlier checks. If everything matches, the check is completed and documented without further manual review.

There is one requirement: The first check must be manually confirmed once. It serves as a reference for all subsequent automatic checks.

For many companies, fall is the time when budgets for the coming year need to be finalized. This is often more difficult for the fleet than for other cost centers because the actual total costs per vehicle frequently cannot be clearly quantified. Leasing payments, fuel, maintenance, and insurance are tracked in different systems and Excel spreadsheets, resulting in a lack of a comprehensive overview. A TCO overview that consolidates all costs associated with a vehicle—from acquisition to depreciation—in one place closes this very gap and makes it possible to compare vehicles, manufacturers, or cost centers over their entire useful life.

Particularly tricky are the costs that aren’t immediately obvious. A vehicle that is hardly ever driven still incurs the full fixed costs, yet appears in the current overview as an item just like any other. Missed maintenance quickly becomes more expensive than regular maintenance because a minor defect can turn into major damage. And the time spent manually coordinating bookkeeping or compiling reports does not appear in any cost calculation but ties up staff capacity that is then lacking elsewhere.

According to AZOWO’s experience, companies that switch to an automated cost overview achieve savings of up to 30 percent in the first year, depending on fleet size and the current level of digitization. You can roughly estimate your own potential using the ROI calculator with just a few details about your fleet—even before the budget figures for 2027 need to be finalized.

How to Reduce Your Fleet Costs with the AZOWO Mobility Cloud