Case Study: Fleet Services at Indiana University Saves Time Using Custom Crystal Reports

About Fleet Services at Indiana University

Fleet Services at Indiana University is located on the Bloomington campus. The organization offers safe, reliable and cost-effective vehicles for university transportation needs. In addition to offering rentals, leases and vehicles for sale, Fleet Services at Indiana University has a full-service maintenance facility with a fuel station and touchless car wash.

Struggled to Give Staff Fast Access to Reports

For a time, only the fleet manager at Fleet Services at Indiana University, Amanda Wilson, had access to Crystal Reports in the RTA Fleet Management Software system. This meant that her staff was reliant on her to share the information.

“There were some reports that our staff only got on a monthly basis when I had time to run them,” Wilson said.

The team also created reports as exports in Excel, which created different problems. These exported more data than needed and caused the team to have to sort through the information to find the data they wanted.

One example is an inventory report the team did for their insurance group. Wilson exported it from the fleet management software, and then spent time cleaning up the data to get the information she needed.

“(I) would spend time in Excel removing sold vehicles, sorting vehicles and equipment into separate categories, moving columns around, deleting columns, and splitting data to multiple worksheets. This process took hours each time I ran it,” Wilson said.

Because of the time and effort to create the report, the team only ran the report once every six months.

Needed a Solution for Faster, Quicker Reports

Fleet Services at Indiana University needed a quicker solution. Their current state of creating and sharing reports was too restricted with only the fleet manager having access, and the workflow was too time-consuming.

Utilized Custom Crystal Reports

To enhance their reporting capabilities, Fleet Services at Indiana University added Custom Crystal Reports to their RTA solution. This allowed multiple users to access the reports, and let the team create custom reports to pull the exact information they needed.

Using Custom Crystal Reports, the team was able to create a custom solution to easily pull the insurance report. The process took just seconds instead of hours.

“Now anyone can run a list of vehicles for the insurance report in seconds, and as frequently as they want,” Wilson said.

The team also rolled out the Custom Crystal Reports to its garage staff. This helps the technicians determine in real-time what parts are in stock and identify any errors in the inventory.

“They run this report daily to correct any errors quickly. This has saved hours of time in tracking down those errors in parts entry,” Wilson said.