ETZI Group, home to the brands ETZI-HAUS und AUSTROHAUS, is Austria's market leader for turnkey and fully finished homes in solid brick construction. From site search to key handover, the family business based in Ried im Traunkreis handles everything as a general contractor. More than 3,500 completed projects, a network of regional partners, and locations across Ried im Traunkreis, Rauchenwarth, St. Pölten, and Graz.

Their fleet is central to daily operations: excavators, trucks, vans, company cars, and a pool of vehicles available for short-notice jobs. When the previous fleet manager left the company, he left behind an Excel file. Everything else, how handovers actually worked, what had happened to a specific vehicle, what had been agreed with a specific employee, existed only in his head. It is a pattern that shows up in most mid-sized businesses at some point. It only becomes visible the day that person walks out the door.

Thomas F., a construction coordinator at ETZI, stepped into the fleet role on top of his existing job. What he inherited was not one organized file but several Excel lists, maintained in parallel, each capturing whatever whoever had last opened it had thought to record. Insurance policy numbers missing. Fuel card numbers absent. Cost centers wrong.

"Two jobs. One person. Multiple Excel files that nobody had a complete picture of anymore."

Standard fleet software is built for large fleets. It is extensive, expensive, and designed for use cases that have little to do with a construction business. It was not the right fit for ETZI. Contact with kwapso came through a referral. After an initial conversation and a demo, the fit was clear quickly. The brief was focused: a simple vehicle overview, defined user roles with appropriate permissions, all documents stored in one place, and a full history of who had what vehicle and when. But the real work went deeper than the feature list.

The goal was to look at how fleet management actually ran, to question each step, to document it, and then to rethink what genuinely needed rethinking. The handover protocol was a clear example. What had previously required several people and multiple steps became a single step: the employee signs off on everything at once.

Over the course of the project, more emerged from the conversations than a data structure. Working through it together with Thomas F., kwapso built a real process map. Every existing step was questioned, documented, and put through the ESA sequence: eliminate what is not needed, simplify what remains, then automate. That order matters.

Most businesses reach for automation first. kwapso starts by removing the steps that should not exist at all. From that work, several concrete changes followed. Email automations that had not existed before: reminders for leasing end dates, mileage readings, and service appointments. Communication with department heads shifted from individual follow-up calls to automatic emails with a direct input link. And the vehicle issue process itself was rethought, not digitally reconstructed the way it had always worked, but redesigned from how it should work.

For kwapso, a clean data structure is the foundation everything else is built on. Before an app can exist, a spreadsheet has to become something that shows relationships, can be queried, and can be read visually. ETZI's single Excel file became several linked databases: vehicles, license plates, employees, usages, damages. Each its own table. All cleanly connected.

During the data import, a familiar pattern surfaced. The list looked organized at first glance. Closer inspection found duplicates, entries with no date recorded, entries with no driver assigned. Three pages of vehicle usage records that could not be matched to any known employee. Four more pages of what appeared to be active usages with no start date attached. This is not unusual. In fact, it is standard. These errors are not the result of careless work. They accumulate naturally over years of manual entry in spreadsheets, where small inconsistencies build up invisibly because no one has reason to look until something breaks.

Data cleaning always takes longer than anyone expects at the outset. Your own data looks cleaner from the inside than it actually is. That is not an ETZI problem. That is nearly every client we work with. It is also why this work requires an external partner who takes the time to look closely, because that time almost never exists in the middle of running a business day-to-day. Operational chaos does not hold steady over time. It grows. Introducing structure designed to grow with the business is what separates systems that hold from systems that need to be rebuilt again in three years

Thomas F. had a clear picture of what he wanted from day one: enter a license plate and see everything attached to it. Leasing contract, insurance policy, billing data. In one place. That is what the system is built around, in ETZI's own branding and using their existing document templates. Every vehicle has its own detail page: master data, insurance, leasing, fuel cards. License plates are managed with a full history. A vehicle can carry multiple plates over the years. A plate can move between vehicles. Both remain traceable.

Damage claims run through a clear workflow, with or without insurance involvement, including edge cases where individual pieces of construction equipment are covered under policies separate from the main company insurer Uniqa. Accounting sees only what it needs: taxable vehicle benefits and fuel card numbers, with no ability to change other vehicle data. Every change in the system is logged. In the Excel world, anyone could delete anything without leaving a trace. That is no longer the case.

Today, a license plate is enough. Leasing, insurance, and billing data in one place, not pulled together from three parallel files that may or may not agree with each other. [MISSING: no quantified results in source — add metrics once available, e.g. vehicles managed, time saved, errors eliminated.

Is your fleet still running on Excel and memory? Book a structured intro call.

- Vehicle and license plate management: replaces parallel Excel files and manual searching for the right record.

- Driver management: replaces informal knowledge about who had which vehicle and when.

- Usages, fixed and pool vehicles: replaces memory-based vehicle assignment.

- Handover and return protocol (current sprint): replaces paper forms and physical signatures.

- Damage management: replaces WhatsApp messages and manual emails to the insurer.

- Document management: replaces PDF folders organized by employee name.

- Automated reminders (mandatory vehicle safety inspection, service, leasing end dates, mileage): replaces manual deadline tracking.