A bus has a problem. The book has one answer. Your fleet has another. The senior on the floor has a third. The unit itself has a history. Yardwise pulls from all four and returns a single answer with each piece labeled by where it came from. Here's exactly how the loop works.
Most fleet tools treat knowledge as one big bucket. Yardwise doesn't. Every note attaches at one of four levels, carries that label everywhere it appears, and stays scoped to the people and equipment it actually applies to.
What the OEM publishes. Travels with the make, model, and year regardless of who owns the asset. Service manuals, technical bulletins, recall notices, factory specs. Same answer whether the bus is in Springfield or Sacramento.
Your organization's standing practice. Decisions you've made about how things get done here. Applies across all relevant equipment you operate. Different from another district's practice on the same vehicle, because your routes and conditions differ.
Knowledge tied to a specific senior person. Their workarounds, their reads, the things they figured out over decades and never wrote down. Carries their name everywhere it appears. When they retire, the knowledge stays in the shop.
Knowledge attached to a specific category, model variant, or individual unit. The quirks of one chassis. The recurring issue on one bus. Stays with the asset for as long as you operate it, and shows up whenever that unit is in the conversation.
"When's the next oil change due on Truck 312?"
How those four knowledge levels get into the system, and how they come back as something a tech standing in the bay can use without putting down his wrench.
PDFs, DOCX, scans of binder pages, photos taken on a phone of pages from the file cabinet. Anything that isn't already text gets OCR'd. Each chunk is tagged with the make, model, and year it came from. Status bar while it runs. Once it says Ready, every page is searchable.
Senior tech talks into his phone. Picks the level the note belongs to. Picks the kind: tip, override, procedure, warning. Tags the conditions it covers: climate, region, terrain, usage. Supervisor sees it in a queue. Nothing reaches a junior tech's chat answer until that signoff happens.
Hold the button. Ask in shop talk. The response streams back as text on screen and audio in the ear. Hands stay on the wrench. Works on a noisy floor. Round-trip under five seconds when the network's behaving. The answer cites the page number and the senior's name, every time.
Sometimes a fleet override runs counter to the OEM spec. Sometimes a senior's note contradicts the fleet-level policy. Both surface in the answer. The disagreement is flagged for the tech, and again for the supervisor in the dashboard. Yardwise doesn't pick a winner. People do.
A conversation can be scoped to a unit or a category. The chat then only pulls answers relevant to that asset's make, model, and year, plus its own equipment-level history. Useful when you're standing in front of one vehicle and the question is only about that vehicle.
Four tabs: overview, usage, gaps, quality. The gaps tab is the one that earns its keep. Every question the system couldn't answer with confidence, sitting in a list. You can also just type the question you have, like which tech asked the most that went nowhere last month, and read the number. Quality scores stay with the admins. The tech never sees his.
Upload a doc and you say where it lands. One unit. A whole model. A single model year. A category, a maker, or the entire fleet. The library shows whether each file came through clean or failed on the way in, and whether anyone's checked it yet. Filter by status when you're hunting for one.
Equipment used to be a tag on a chunk of text. Now it's a list of what you actually own. Every make and model, down to the single unit by its number, with its manuals and its notes already sitting on it.
Buses, trucks, sedans, cranes, the hydraulic stuff, and whatever else rolls through your gate. Add your own categories when the defaults don't fit. Drop in a CSV of the whole roster, or punch in one unit at a time. Then search by make, model, unit number, or VIN.
A model holds its years. A year holds the actual units. Each one has its own number and VIN. Open Unit A01 and you see the make, model, year, the day it was added, and an Ask button right there for questions about that one truck.
A document or a tip clips onto the unit, not some general pile. The screwdriver trick for the audio on that sedan. The air filter you run in desert heat. It shows up when that unit is on the screen, and stays quiet when it isn't.
One shop used to be the whole account. Now you can run a string of them. Each yard stands on its own, its own trucks, its own books, its own crew. Switch yards up top and everything on the screen comes with you.
Spin up a yard, load its trucks and its manuals, and it works on its own. What the east depot knows stays at the east depot. It won't leak into an answer across town. And a director over four shops doesn't carry four logins. It's one.
Everyone gets one of four roles. Admin, director, manager, tech. The admin opens a grid and flips what each role can touch. Ask the chat. Upload a doc, or delete one. Approve a note. Write knowledge. The admin sees everything. The other three are yours to dial in.
A tech using Yardwise still uses your work order system, your telematics, your fuel cards. We connect where the manuals and the questions live, and leave the rest to the tools that already handle it.
The pieces every fleet needs and every fleet already has. Turned on the day you sign up.
The major fleet systems all expose APIs. We've read the docs. We don't list logos we haven't shipped against. Each one goes live with the first customer who needs it, and stays live for everyone after.
Yardwise has one job: get the right knowledge to the right tech in the bay, fast. The list below is what it leaves to other tools on purpose.
No scheduling, no ticket assignment, no closing out jobs. Fleetio, RTA, AssetWorks, FASTER, Dossier all keep doing what they do. Yardwise sits alongside them and answers the questions they can't: what torque, what procedure, what did Mike find on this chassis last winter.
No fault code reading, no GPS, no driver behavior scoring. Samsara, Geotab, Zonar handle that. When a telematics system is connected, we can pull current mileage and recent fault codes into a question. The telematics platform stays theirs.
For torque, pressure, fluid capacities, and electrical specs, every answer carries a verify-against-the-source note. The model is fast, not infallible. We flag it and leave the call to the technician. That's not a limitation. That's the right design for a shop floor.
Not a quarter-long implementation. Two weeks, a handful of manuals, fifteen minutes with one senior person.
What's in the product now, what's next, and what comes later when it earns its place.
Bring two or three manuals and a question your best mechanic always gets asked. We'll show you the answer in under a minute.
We'll set up a workspace with your manuals in it. Spend fifteen minutes with one of your senior people getting voice notes down. Let your bay floor use it for an afternoon. No commitment. Founders take every call.