Hertz has over 10,300 locations worldwide, offering a wide range of rental vehicles, from luxury sedans to trucks.
Services & Technology
The Challenge
Eliminating workflow bottlenecks and expensive fees by bringing maintenance management in house
Vehicle maintenance is a crucial aspect of any rental car company’s operations. To ensure a successful customer experience and minimize vehicle downtime, Hertz requires an advanced system for requesting and tracking routine and off-cycle maintenance—such as tune-ups, oil changes, tire rotations, brake pad replacements, and so on.
Hertz local edition (HLE) locations—or off-airport, neighborhood sites—outsource their vehicle maintenance to various third-party service providers, such as Firestone. These vendors use a software called Auto Integrate, which allows maintenance managers to receive, approve, and assign repair orders from vehicle suppliers like Hertz.
For years, Hertz used a third-party solution called Snapsheet to facilitate all US-based HLE maintenance projects. But this software was never designed for Hertz or fleet maintenance in general. Rather, Snapsheet is a solution for managing and tracking insurance claims.
Therefore, relying on this platform resulted in expensive licensing fees and inefficient workflows. Also, any platform customization requests from Hertz to the Snapsheet software development team were either unfeasible or delivered too slowly.
Hertz partnered with Codal to replace Snapsheet with a faster, smarter, and more cost effective internal solution—custom-designed to meet the business’ unique goals and requirements. This would soon become known as the Hertz Maintenance Portal.
Discovery
Diagnosing the problems of the legacy maintenance system
Codal and Hertz kicked off the project with a two-day session at Codal’s headquarters in Chicago.
We started by diving deep into the Snapsheet platform, walking through current business processes, user pain points, and considerations for the new solution—based on Hertz’s goals for the fiscal year. We also performed stakeholder interviews, data analysis, and general market research to help guide our strategy.
Development
Building the Hertz Maintenance Portal from scratch
After the initial Discovery, we put together a list of objectives that the new solution needed to accomplish, then divided those into phases—with the highest-priority objectives to be tackled first. These included:
Migrating data off of Snapsheet without disrupting any live business activities.
Taking advantage of quick-win opportunities to simplify tasks via new technologies and UX redesign.
Improving conformance of Delivery Service Providers (DSPs) to preventative maintenance requirements and best practices.
Enhancing management visibility into micro- and macro-level maintenance information.
Streamlining and centralizing vendor communication.
Building reports to provide visibility into field staff performance and fleet statistics.
Next, we documented requirements for the entire product roadmap into a detailed feature list, assigned features to phases based on the identified objectives, and performed a MoSCoW analysis to determine which features should be prioritized for the initial launch.
The platform had to give both desktop and mobile users the ability to:
Create a Vehicle Maintenance Request (VMR) ticket by selecting a specific ticket type, vehicle, and location—as well as scan the vehicle barcode, upload a photo of the odometer, and enter the mileage.
Access vehicle profiles to view details, history, photos, last known location, and repair status.
Search for vehicles via advanced filtering options, such as license plate, VIN, rental agreement number, last known mileage, and the year, make, model, and color.
Access maintenance tickets to view and download VMR status, vehicle information, ticket details, comments, and invoices.
Establish roles and permissions for both internal and external platform users—and search for those users via advanced filter options, such as badge ID number, employee name, email address, role, and status.
Work through a ticket by updating its status, assigning users, adding comments, editing details, uploading invoices, adding a PO number, and canceling or reopening the ticket.
The Result
Simplified maintenance and reduced vehicle downtime
After many team meetings, design sprints, demo sessions, and tests, we successfully launched the Hertz Maintenance Portal.
This cloud-based application can be accessed through a desktop or Hertz-managed phone, so employees can quickly and easily request, track, and manage vehicle maintenance from home, at the office, or out in the field. Integrated with Auto Integrate and other third-party solutions, the platform allows users to smoothly communicate with vendors and centralize important information.
Built with cutting-edge, data-driven technology, this internal tool is helping Hertz increase burn-down rate on maintenance work, reduce vehicle downtime, streamline employee workflows, save money, and improve the customer experience.
Codal continues to work with Hertz on making updates and adding new features to the platform to ensure long-term success and scalability. We’re proud to partner with industry leaders like Hertz, and are excited to see what the future holds!
