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Daily Vehicle Walkaround Inspection

Example prompt: "When a driver submits the pre-shift walkaround Google Form, classify any reported defects as minor or major. Email minor faults to the garage, and post major faults in #fleet-urgent on Slack so the vehicle can be taken off the road before the shift starts."

The Problem

Every driver leaving the depot is supposed to walk around the vehicle before turning a wheel — tyres, lights, brakes, mirrors, fluids, bodywork — and most drivers do. The question is what happens to that walkaround once it has been done. On a paper sheet on a clipboard, a minor defect that needs the garage a fortnight from now gets noticed only when the fleet manager goes looking at the end of the month, and a major defect that should have grounded the van quietly stays on the road because the right person did not see the sheet in time.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow triggered by submissions to the depot's 'Daily walkaround' Google Form. An integration step looks up the vehicle's row on the Fleet Register. A conditional step routes the case by defect severity. For minor defects an LLM step drafts a garage booking email and saves it as a Gmail draft for the fleet manager to review. For major defects the workflow flips the vehicle's status to 'Off road — awaiting inspection' on the Fleet Register, posts a same-minute Slack alert to the fleet-urgent channel tagging the fleet manager, and drafts a follow-up email with the photo. A final integration step flips the provisional Walkaround Log row's status from 'Allocating' to 'Recorded' — the row itself was written at the start of the flow (provisional-first), so the final step commits the run rather than appending a fresh record. A separate scheduled trigger at 8:30am posts the morning summary. Glass Box preview shows the garage drafts, the Slack alert, and the off-road status change before anything reaches the road or the manager.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (integration): A new submission lands on the 'Daily walkaround' Google Form.
  2. Step 1 (code, gate): Dedupe on form_response_id against the 'Walkaround Log' tab and branch on status. Final state ('Recorded') halts; provisional state ('Allocating') resumes; no row allocates a fresh walkaround_id and writes a provisional row that includes walkaround_date = today (the 8:30am summary trigger filters on this field).
  3. Step 2 (integration): Read the vehicle's row on the 'Fleet Register' tab on vehicle_reg to pull preferred_garage, garage_email, fleet_manager_email, and current vehicle_status (the current-status read feeds Step 6's no-op guard so the Major branch does not rewrite a row already off-road or one a fleet manager has manually adjusted).
  4. Step 3 (conditional): Branch on defect_severity.
  5. Step 4 (llm): For 'Minor — book in' — draft a polite garage booking email asking for a non-urgent appointment in the next five working days.
  6. Step 5 (integration): For the minor-defect branch — save as a Gmail draft for the fleet manager to review, capture the new draft_id, and immediately persist garage_email_draft_link to the provisional row.
  7. Step 6 (integration): For 'Major — off road' — update the vehicle's Fleet Register row to set vehicle_status to 'Off road — awaiting inspection' ONLY IF the current vehicle_status read in Step 2 is not already 'Off road — awaiting inspection' (the same-value no-op guard preserves resume-safety and avoids overwriting a row a fleet manager may have manually adjusted in the meantime).
  8. Step 7 (integration): For the major-defect branch — post a same-minute alert in #fleet-urgent on Slack tagging the fleet manager; persist slack_alert_ts to the provisional row.
  9. Step 8 (llm + integration): For the major-defect branch — draft a Gmail to the fleet manager with the defect detail and the photo; save as draft and persist gmail_draft_link to the provisional row.
  10. Step 9 (integration): Flip the provisional Walkaround Log row's status from 'Allocating' to 'Recorded'.
  11. Step 10 (trigger, scheduled): Every weekday at 8:30am, read every Walkaround Log row with walkaround_date = today and post a one-message #fleet summary with counts by severity plus the short list of any off-road cases (no defect detail in the summary itself — only walkaround_id and vehicle_reg).

Integrations Used

  • Google Forms — the driver's pre-shift walkaround submission
  • Google Sheets — the Walkaround Log and the Fleet Register
  • Gmail — the garage booking drafts and the fleet manager escalations
  • Slack — the same-minute fleet-urgent alerts and the morning summary

Who This Is For

Small fleet operators, last-mile delivery firms, and van-based trades with 5 to 50 vehicles where drivers already do a pre-shift walkaround on paper and the fleet manager is the one who has to chase the minor defects and notice the major ones — and where 'I thought someone else had spotted that' is the failure mode that has cost the depot a roadside stop.

Time & Cost Saved

A fleet manager handling minor and major walkaround defects across a 20-vehicle depot spends 30 to 45 minutes a day going through the clipboard, writing the garage emails, and ringing round the drivers whose major defects need the van off the road. This workflow turns that into a 10-minute review of the queue of drafts and alerts; the major-defect path no longer waits for the manager to notice the clipboard because the off-road status change and the Slack alert happen in the same minute the driver hits submit.