Case Study · Logistics & Compliance
Fleet Management & Compliance Platform for Chema Steel
Digitising fleet operations, compliance and vehicle maintenance for a growing hardware and steel business in Kenya.
Client
Chema Steel & Hardware Ltd
Sector
Hardware retail & distribution
Scope
Custom platform, PWA, VPS deployment
Status
Live, under active support
The problem
Chema Steel ran a growing fleet of vehicles and drivers on paper registers and spreadsheets. Fuel entries were written at the pump and typed up later. Service history lived in a garage file. Insurance, NTSA inspection, speed governor and dangerous goods permit dates sat in different documents held by different people.
The practical result was that nobody could answer basic questions quickly: which vehicle is due for service, whose licence expires this month, what a truck actually costs to run. Deadlines were missed because nothing surfaced them in advance, and every audit or renewal turned into a document hunt.
Compliance dates tracked manually across several files
No running view of fuel or maintenance cost per vehicle
Records only reachable from the office, not from the yard
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What we built
We designed and developed a Fleet Management & Compliance System around the way the yard already worked. Administrators manage vehicles, drivers and documents from a dashboard; drivers log fuel and odometer readings from their phones as a progressive web app, so no install or app store is involved. Every compliance date the business is accountable for is stored once, with the system doing the reminding.
Vehicles & drivers
One record per vehicle and per driver, with assignment history, documents and status at a glance.
Fuel & odometer logging
Entries captured at the pump with odometer readings, giving consumption trends per vehicle rather than a monthly total.
Service scheduling
Services raised automatically on mileage or date intervals, with garage visit history kept against the vehicle.
Compliance alerts
Licence, insurance, NTSA inspection, speed governor and dangerous goods permit expiries surface before they lapse.
Document store
Logbooks, permits and certificates attached to the vehicle they belong to, retrievable during an inspection.
Reporting
Cost and compliance reporting for management, exportable for audits and insurer requests.
How we delivered it
Sat with the fleet team
We worked through the existing registers and asked what each column was really for. Several fields turned out to be workarounds for a report nobody could produce.
Prototyped the daily screens first
Fuel entry and the compliance dashboard were designed and reviewed before anything else, because those are the screens used every day.
Migrated the existing records
Vehicles, drivers and open compliance dates were loaded and checked against the paper files before go-live, so the system started out trustworthy.
Deployed and maintained on VPS
Provisioned and hardened the server, set up TLS, automated backups and monitoring, and continue to handle patching and enhancements.
Outcome
40+
Fleet vehicles managed in one system
100%
Compliance dates tracked centrally
Real-time
Maintenance and service alerts
Paperless
Fleet records and documents
“We used to find out a certificate had expired when someone was stopped. Now the system tells us weeks before, and the record is on my phone.”
Charles Mwangi
Fleet Manager, Chema Steel & Hardware
Capabilities delivered
Running your fleet on paper?
We can walk through your current registers and show you what the same operation looks like in one system.