Resources / Software comparisons
YardWise vs RTA Ron360: two different questions
Ron360 is a conversational assistant built into RTA Fleet360 that answers questions about a fleet's own live data, assets, work orders, costs, and compliance. YardWise is a separate knowledge layer that answers a different question entirely, how to actually fix the unit, grounded in OEM manuals and the fleet's own senior technicians. They are not really rivals. They just get lumped together because both talk back.
What Ron360 actually does
RTA announced Ron360 at Government Fleet Expo in June 2026 and shipped it to general availability on June 11 that year, built directly into Fleet360, RTA's fleet management information system. A user asks a question the way they would ask a colleague, and Ron360 answers from the fleet's own data already sitting in Fleet360: assets, work orders, parts, maintenance history, costs, downtime, compliance. The response can come back as plain text, a chart, a sortable table, or cited documentation, and every answer carries what RTA calls a reasoning trace, a record of how the answer was assembled and which sources it pulled from.
Two design choices are worth noting because they tell you what Ron360 is for. It is read only. It retrieves, reasons, and responds, and it does not create, edit, approve, or delete a record on its own. And it ships free with every Fleet360 plan, access controlled by tenant administrators rather than sold as an add on. RTA also states that Ron360 can answer procedural questions drawing on a curated knowledge base it maintains, separate from a fleet's own manuals or its technicians' local practice.
All of that makes Ron360 a genuinely useful front end on a fleet's own operational data. It is not built to search the OEM manuals a shop has on the shelf, and it has no mechanism for capturing what a specific senior mechanic knows about a specific unit. That is a different job, and it is the one YardWise was built for.
What YardWise actually does
YardWise answers a narrower and, for a tech mid repair, more urgent question: how do I actually fix this. A technician holds a button, asks out loud in shop talk, and gets a cited answer in under five seconds. The citation traces to one of two places, the OEM manual page that covers it, or a senior technician's own captured knowledge, approved by a supervisor before it becomes something the shop can rely on.
Nothing goes in without a source and a name attached. Manuals come in as PDFs, scans, or phone photos of binder pages. A senior tech's judgment, the local fix that is not in any manual, gets recorded by voice, tagged to the unit or the fault, and reviewed before it is citable. That approval gate exists for a plain reason, an uncited or unreviewed AI answer in a maintenance shop is a liability the moment it is wrong.
YardWise does not schedule a PM, open a work order, or store a cost record. It sits next to whatever system already does that, not in place of it.
Asking about your data versus asking how to fix it
Here is the distinction stated as plainly as it can be. Ron360 is a smarter way to query the records a fleet already keeps. YardWise is a way to capture and retrieve knowledge that was never a record at all, the kind that lived only in a senior mechanic's head or scattered across a manual nobody had time to read cover to cover.
| Question | Ron360 | YardWise |
|---|---|---|
| What it is grounded in | Live Fleet360 data, plus a curated RTA knowledge base for some procedural questions. | The fleet's own OEM manuals and its senior technicians' captured, approved local knowledge. |
| Primary user | Fleet managers and staff asking about operations, cost, and compliance. | Technicians in the bay, mid repair, asking how to do the work. |
| Input mode | Typed question in the Fleet360 interface. | Push to talk voice, hands stay on the wrench. |
| Where knowledge comes from | Data the fleet already logged into Fleet360. | Documents the fleet uploads, plus voice capture from senior staff, gated by supervisor approval. |
| Category | A feature of a fleet management information system. | A standalone knowledge layer, not an FMIS. |
Neither tool tries to do the other's job. That is not spin. It is the actual scope each vendor built to, and it is why a side by side feature list mostly talks past itself.
A fleet running RTA does not need to choose
A fleet that already runs Fleet360 and Ron360 has a strong answer for anything the data can settle: how much a unit cost this year, when its last PM was, whether a work order is overdue. What it still does not have is an answer for the tech standing at the bay with a fault code that is not quite matching the manual, or a new hire who has nobody free to ask.
That gap is not a knock on Ron360. It is simply outside what a fleet data assistant was ever meant to cover. YardWise sits beside Fleet360 the same way it sits beside any FMIS, pulling from the manuals and the people, not the ledger.
We already checked the AI box, why buy another one
This is the real objection, and it is fair. A fleet director who just watched a Ron360 demo has seen an AI answer come back in seconds and reasonably wonders why a separate tool is needed. The honest answer is that the demo answered a data question, something like which units are overdue for service or what a repair cost last quarter, and it answered it well. It did not answer the question a technician actually asks standing at the bay, which is closer to why does this specific unit throw this fault and what did we do about it last time.
Those are not the same category of question, even though both arrive as a typed or spoken sentence and both come back with an AI sounding answer. One draws on a ledger. The other draws on a manual and a person's memory. A fleet can own a very good answer to the first and still have nothing for the second, which is the gap this page is about.
Stated plainly
RTA's own comparison materials describe rival systems, including AssetWorks, as not having a publicly announced conversational assistant. That claim comes from RTA, a competitor to those vendors, not from a neutral source, so treat it as one company's marketing framing rather than settled fact. We also do not have visibility into how Ron360's curated knowledge base is built or maintained, so we are not making claims about its depth or currency here, only about what RTA's own product pages state it does.
YardWise and Ron360, questions answered short
What does RTA Ron360 do?
It is a conversational assistant built into RTA Fleet360 that answers plain language questions about a fleet's own live data, assets, work orders, parts, maintenance history, costs, and compliance, returning text, charts, tables, and cited documentation. It reached general availability June 11, 2026 and ships free with every Fleet360 plan. It is read only.
Does Ron360 answer from OEM manuals?
Its main grounding is the fleet's own Fleet360 data. RTA states it can also draw on a curated knowledge base for some procedural questions. It is not built to search a fleet's own uploaded manuals or a specific technician's local practice, which is what YardWise does instead.
Is YardWise a replacement for RTA Fleet360?
No. YardWise is a knowledge layer, not a fleet management information system. It does not schedule PM, track work orders, or hold cost records. Fleets running RTA can run YardWise alongside it.
Which one should a fleet buy first?
They answer different questions, so it is rarely either or. A fleet with no FMIS at all usually needs that first. A fleet that already has RTA and still watches technicians hunt for a torque spec is looking at the gap YardWise fills.
See what a cited answer looks like, from your own manuals
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