What We Heard
We interviewed dealer teams throughout the country. This included Fleet, Equipment, Service, and Sales managers. What came out wasn't "the interface needs better buttons" or "add more filters." It went deeper.
From Texas we heard: "Just my location here at Selma, we might have 160 machines that are throwing some kind of code. Three minutes on a machine, I'm not going to get through that list in a day... especially when you're on top of that trying to find customer contact information."
He was jumping between four different systems just to take one action.
Another said: "In the winter time there are early morning startups hydraulic filter restrictions... almost every machine's going to throw a code until it's warmed up. And when an equipment owner doesn't know what that is, they automatically start calling me."
False alarms drowning out real emergencies.
A third: "The data should be there at a point and click. For a fault code, why wouldn't there be a hyperlink to go click on the fault code?... Right now the technician's gonna have to navigate to another screen and start searching for that fault code, even though the information is in that system somewhere."
The Problem
Fleet managers were spending half their day just switching between screens. Not doing the actual work; just hunting for information across fragmented systems.
Machine owners couldn't tell if their machines were whispering maintenance suggestions or screaming that something was about to break. Service schedulers saw fault codes all day but had no way to know if yesterday's error was still relevant or if today's emergency was actually an emergency.
Only 48.7% of scheduled maintenance was getting done. The other half vanished into unchecked calendars and notifications that never got sent or got buried in email.
The machines were fine. The humans were drowning.
The Solution
The fleet side of VermeerOne brings together fleet health, fault codes, service history, and maintenance planning. No more jumping between four systems to take one action.
Fault code intelligence that understands severity, frequency patterns, and machine-specific context. Urgency-aware views that help users triage by signal not noise.
Proactive maintenance system with reminders, scheduling, and connected service history. Shifting from reactive firefighting to planned work.
Flexible views—list, map, saved machine groups—that mirror how people actually think about their territories and fleets.
Notifications timed to be helpful with enough context to act on, not just alerts that create anxiety.
The Method
We stopped asking "what pages do we need?" and started asking "what actually exists in their world?"
More than a dozen core objects emerged from the research. Here are a few we heard the most about.
MACHINE was not just a serial number, but a thing with its own history, quirks, service records. A dealer literally said machines have "attitudes" and technicians needed to document that.
FAULT CODEs have severity levels, frequency patterns, machine-specific behaviors. We heard that fault codes relate differently to different machine types and conditions. Some codes whisper. Some scream. We needed to know the difference so we could show what mattered.
SERVICE RECORD became the institutional memory they were missing—linking what was planned to what actually got done. It was also a separate system that needed to be factored into how it integrated with the telematics platform. Another product. More data. Another team.
MACHINE GROUP made mental models real. "My Idaho fleet" or "rental equipment" aren't filters, they're how people actually think about their territories. This was lacking, so we got down to brass tacks and moved on.
NOTIFICATIONs had to be more than just an alerts. They needed to arrive with enough context to act on, timed to be helpful instead of overwhelming, with controls to quiet the din.
What We Learned
When you really understand what exists and how things connect, the interfaces reveal themselves. You're not inventing screens. You're uncovering what needs to be visible based on relationships that already exist in the real world.
