This growing area, however, is not free from criticism: a profitable business comes from the understanding that Maintenance Service means to operate within a wider and deeply different area, compared to the traditional Technical Assistance in the warranty period. It is important to constantly consider and implement some paradigms.

1. The Service involves directly sale, design, construction and post sale processes. Manufacturer and then maintenance companies have direct interest (sometimes this makes the difference between a profitable and an unprofitable order) that the maintainability parameters are as high as possible, the scheduled, preventive maintenance is efficient, the technical documentation is as exhaustive as possible, and the logistic of the spare parts is optimized.
2. Thanks to the Maintenance Service, the manufacturer/maintenance supplier not only grants assistance during the warranty period but becomes a real protecting the life span of the good, being capable of intervening on the asset with targeted revisions and repairs which allow the carriageable material to maintain its efficiency and improve its performances. All of this is possible thanks to the specific design knowledge of the manufacturer/maintenance supplier.
3. The Service contract often includes some bonus maluses, regarding the attainment of objectives linked to the means' availability, the disservice timings, and the problems solving timings.

The last few years of the evolution process in Europe and in Italy have implied different transitions; each one setting a step in changing the traditional warranty assistance to a high level Service. Availability of the right tools means following a more direct, fast and profitable action path.

A Management Model is the answer to the needs of the market. It allows to govern all processes, both the traditional assistance ones and the more complex and evolved ones of the Maintenance Service. Such model has been developed on the basis of the knowledge and the experience, generated by the application of its typical methods which correspond to rigorous, scientific guidelines. The scientific papers of today confirm this approach and describes in detail its use in the management of the fleets of vehicles.

The following complementary and synergic elements form IB's proposal:

• the InfoPMS® platform, for the full management of fleet of vehicles, facilities, garage equipments and real-estate assets. The InfoPMS® solution is modular and scalable in several applicative modules. Continuous research and innovation have prompted IB to enrich the high added value functionality platform, and to satisfy the most demanding clients through the progressive growth of the application. InfoPMS® can cover the authorised workshops and the warehouse processes, the contract management, the possible incidents, the administration control of the fleet, etc...;
• design and optimization of the organizational models for the fleets' management (authorised workshops, warehouse, sales, etc...), centred on the efficacy and efficiency of the processes, and the best experiences in the field, in cooperation with important partners.

InfoPMS®, the IB's software solution for the fleet management, particularly supports the Service workshops by:

• sharing the data of interest: creation of a portal, with access from both inside and outside of the structure; its target is to issue the management performance (state of the art), in an analytical, clear manner, and in real time; this guarantees the maximum transparency at any given time
• to monitor the performances according to the set goals: set some goals, analyze the performance in real time, verify the achievement of the objectives and calculate any possible deflection from the set targets; all this versus the efficacy and efficiency indexes of the transport field (see UNI EN 1534:2007), and following the drafting of the service level agreement (SLA);
• forward the information to the clients: realization of an interface allowing the clients to monitor both the conditions of the promised Service Level Agreement and the performance of the activity, always in real time.
• to improve thanks to the continuous feedbacks to the planning: capitalization of the experience, for improving the RAM parameters during the planning phase.