Where's the crane truck? Live fleet tasking and fuel variance for multi-site contractors

Ask a project manager on a multi-site electrification job where their crane truck is right now and you will often get one of three answers: a guess, a phone call, or a WhatsApp message to a foreman who is in a meeting. None of those answers are good when a crew is sitting idle waiting for the truck to arrive.

The fleet on an electrification project is not large by industrial standards. A handful of pickups, a crane truck or two, a low-loader for transformer movements, a digger if you do your own civil work. But the operational cost of those vehicles being mistasked, off-the-air, or quietly burning more fuel than they should — that adds up faster than most contractors expect.

This article is about what live fleet management looks like when it is part of the same operational system that runs the rest of the project.

The four questions a fleet system has to answer

1. Where is each vehicle right now, and what is it tasked with?

Not "where was it yesterday morning when the foreman last saw it." Where is it now — and what job is it doing today. If the answer requires three phone calls, the system is not working.

2. What is the fuel consumption per vehicle, and is anyone running an unusual variance?

Fuel is the operational expense most contractors discover quarterly, in arrears, in a card statement. By the time the variance is visible, the conversation has cooled and the driver is on a different vehicle.

3. When is the next service or statutory inspection due — and is it scheduled?

Insurance, MOT/road-worthiness, statutory inspections. Every vehicle on the road in Kenya has multiple expiring documents. A vehicle pulled off the road by a traffic stop because of an expired sticker is a day lost on whatever site it was meant to support.

4. Which vehicle is returning to which site, and is it carrying anything material?

Linkage between vehicle movements and material movements. The truck that goes to Site B should not return empty if Site C needs the off-cuts.

How InfraPro answers each one

The four primitives that handle this in InfraPro:

• Vehicle. Registration, VIN, make, model, year, fuel type, status, assigned driver. Plus document fields with expiry dates: insurance, road-worthiness, inspection certificates.
• VehicleTrip. Movement from a location to a location with planned and actual dates, mileage at start and end, status. Trips can be scheduled in advance and confirmed when they happen.
• VehicleFuelLog. Refill date, quantity, cost, mileage, fuel station. The system auto-calculates efficiency (distance / quantity since last fill). When efficiency drifts on a specific vehicle, that is a flag worth investigating.
• VehicleServiceSchedule and VehicleMaintenanceLog. Scheduled service dates, maintenance history with costs, downtime tracking. Combined with the document expiry fields, the system can surface "what is due in the next 14 days" without anyone having to remember.

None of this is exotic. It is the same four kinds of records that a thorough fleet manager keeps on a spreadsheet. The difference is that they live in the same place as the project itself, so a project manager looking at the schedule can see which vehicles are tasked to support it — and a fuel anomaly on a vehicle assigned to one site shows up against that site's expense pattern.

The unglamorous wins

The operational gains from getting this right are not heroic. They are a series of small ones:

• The crane truck is not "missing" anymore — it is logged on a trip to Site B
• The fuel variance on Vehicle KAL-XXX-A across the last six refills is visible without a card audit
• The insurance expiry on the low-loader is flagged ten days before the renewal date, not the day it lapses
• The driver assignment on each vehicle is current, not historical

None of those is a headline. All of them save days across a project lifecycle.

Further reading

For the broader picture of how operational records, scheduling, materials, safety, and fleet sit together, see our electrification project management buyer's guide. For the platform — see InfraPro.