Streamlining vehicle maintenance through a custom, modern portal

Hertz has over 10,300 locations worldwide, offering a wide range of rental vehicles, from luxury sedans to trucks.

The challenge

Vehicle maintenance is a crucial aspect of any rental car company’s operations. To ensure a successful customer experience and minimise 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 customisation 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.

The solution

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.

Building a custom maintenance portal to streamline Hertz’s fleet operations

After the initial Discovery phase, we compiled a comprehensive list of objectives for the new solution and organized them into phased priorities, ensuring that the highest-impact goals were addressed first.

Key objectives included migrating data from Snapsheet without disrupting ongoing business activities, leveraging quick-win opportunities to streamline tasks through new technologies and UX improvements, enhancing compliance among Delivery Service Providers (DSPs) with preventative maintenance standards, improving management visibility into both micro- and macro-level maintenance data, centralising vendor communication, and creating detailed reports to track field staff performance and fleet statistics.

With these objectives defined, we documented requirements for the full product roadmap in a detailed feature list, assigned features to the appropriate phases, and conducted a MoSCoW analysis to prioritize which functionalities would be included in the initial launch.

The platform was designed to provide both desktop and mobile users with a seamless experience, enabling them to create Vehicle Maintenance Request (VMR) tickets by selecting ticket type, vehicle, and location, scanning vehicle barcodes, uploading odometer photos, and entering mileage. Users could also access detailed vehicle profiles, search using advanced filters such as license plate, VIN, rental agreement number, mileage, or vehicle specifications, and view or download maintenance ticket information, including status, comments, and invoices.

Additionally, the system allowed administrators to manage roles and permissions for internal and external users, search by criteria such as badge ID, name, email, role, and status, and work through tickets by updating statuses, assigning users, adding comments, editing details, uploading invoices, attaching PO numbers, and canceling or reopening tickets as needed.

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.