Fleet Maintenance

Are your vehicles prone to expensive breakdowns and costly fuel consumption? Proper vehicle maintenance can be one of the reasons.
Vehicle life span depends on scheduled preventative maintenance as it is paramount for the safety of the driver on road.

Types of fleet maintenance:

Scheduled Preventative Maintenance: Everyday battle to keep vehicles on the road without a hassle is a daunting challenge for fleet managers. To ensure an overall smooth delivery process, be a proactive player in creating maintenance schedules. A good profit margin is based on a vehicle’s health, so schedule maintenance on the basis of odometer reading and time interval. This is the best way to determine faults prior hitting the road.

Unscheduled Breakdown Maintenance: This is a type of maintenance performed when the vehicle gets already broken. It occurs due to a lack of regular preventative maintenance activity and is usually expensive than scheduled maintenance.

So how a fleet manager avoid these unscheduled breakdowns on the road?? Have a look at a simple “Fleet Preventative Maintenance” strategy:

Essentials for “Fleet preventative maintenance plan”:

• Generate checklist defining all activities to be carried out while scheduling maintenance
• Frequency or service period details after which maintenance is to be conducted is to be tracked.
• Analyze DVIRs (Daily Vehicle Inspection Report) conducted by the driver and check the current vehicle status. Review the maintenance history for chosen vehicle i.e. parts replaced, mileage and other written complaints submitted by the driver. 

Main benefits of building smart preventative maintenance strategy:

• Increased lifetime of vehicles: An effective maintenance plan in place is the principal benefit of prolonged life of an asset. The longer is the life of your asset, more is the profit retrieved from it.
• Cost-effective: A planned long term maintenance activity saves the company resources as unplanned downtime will halt the product line and leads to idling time for their employees. Hence, catch it on a small scale before they become a large repair headache.
• Enhanced safety: Unsafe vehicles lead to destructive failures like the death of a vehicle operator. A condition-based predictive maintenance plan helps to improve equipment safety and also warns against expensive outages.