Fleet maintenance is one of those areas of business that’s constantly evolving. Last year’s best practices might not necessarily be this year’s best practices. As a fleet manager, this means you have to stay on top of the latest trends at all times.
Here are some helpful tips for excelling in 2022 and beyond:
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1. Properly Spec Your Vehicles
Make sure you’re being meticulous about spec’ing out your vehicles. A failure to do so could lead to increased costs and excessive maintenance. An under-spec’d vehicle, for example, will get more usage and/or load than it can reasonably handle.
This means it’ll end up in the shop more frequently. An over-spec’d vehicle will cost more to operate than it should. In true Goldilocks fashion, this is something you want to get just right.
2. Schedule for Success
Rigorous scheduling is a must. It might seem like a waste of time and resources at the time, but this is a long-term investment in the cost-efficiency of your fleet. The key is to schedule maintenance during unscheduled vehicle downtime. This helps you make the most out of your uptime.
3. Keep Parts on Hand
There are certain parts and materials that you rarely need. In these situations, there’s nothing wrong with ordering the parts from your supplier. But what about those parts and materials that you need on a regular basis?
This includes tires, oil, oil filters, brakes, rotors, hoses, batteries, etc. It pays to have these parts on hand at all times. In fact, you should probably set up regular shipments so that you always have them on hand.
4. Use Fleet Maintenance Software
Fleet maintenance software has come a long way over the past couple of years. If you haven’t reevaluated your software recently, now would be a great time. The technology and features have improved a tremendous amount. Cetaris fleet maintenance, for example, now offers robust features like warranty capture and seamless third-party integration with more than 150 other tools and applications. This makes it easier to fit the software into an existing tech stack and get results right away.
5. Optimize PM Checklists
Get serious about optimizing your preventive maintenance checklists. It’s better to be too thorough than to not be thorough enough. If you’re using a fleet maintenance software like Cetaris, all of this can be digitized so that your technicians can quickly and efficiently address the needs of each specific vehicle without wasting valuable time.
6. Reduce Excessive Idling
For the most part, we’ve discussed big-picture strategies that you can use to enhance your overall approach to fleet management. However, for the last tip, we’re going to give you a very specific tip for hopefully slowing down wear and tear on vehicles (which relieves pressure on your maintenance team). The tip is quite simple: reduce excessive idling time.
Drivers idle for any number of reasons – though it’s usually tied back to comfort. Whether it’s to keep a vehicle warm in the winter or cool in the summer, drivers idle their vehicles all the time. (And it’s costly, both in terms of fuel consumption and engine wear and tear.)
To illustrate the fuel cost of idling, let’s use some round numbers. Idling is said to use approximately ⅕ of a gallon of fuel per hour. While that’s not much, you have to extrapolate it across your entire fleet. If you have 500 vehicles that accumulate a total of 5,000 hours of idle time per year, that’s 1,000 gallons of fuel burned. At $3.50 per gallon, you’re talking about $3,500 per year. But that’s just the immediate cost! You also have to think about how this collective idle time puts wear on the engine, which accelerates maintenance scheduling and accelerates the need for replacing.
The Art of Fleet Maintenance
In many ways, fleet maintenance is very technical. But in another sense, it’s an art form that requires finesse and planning. This is an aspect of fleet management that requires an intentional approach. You can’t just manage everything with spreadsheets and dashboards. You have to invest in relationships and be a good communicator.
Things are constantly changing in our industry. It’s the fleet managers who take maintenance seriously and adapt to the latest technologies and best practices that walk away successful at the end of the day.
Here’s to making 2022 your most successful year yet!