Unplanned fleet vehicle downtime is one of the most dreaded events for anyone responsible for running a fleet, since it significantly impacts on costs and profitability. By enhancing your fleet maintenance system and schedule you are already more than half-way to getting your vehicles as roadworthy as possible. If you have fleet management system data at your disposal, you will undoubtedly optimise your operations and minimise fleet downtime.
What does fleet management system data do to enhance your fleet maintenance?
Here are just a few ways in which technology can help you manage fleet maintenance:
• If you use an automated service for recording maintenance you will speed up communications and bring some much needed clarity to what can easily be a muddled aspect of your business.
• You can use fleet real-time data for accountability and proactive decision-making.
• With a fleet management system, you can track, manage and measure internal and external service events as well as ensuring compliance.
How to reduce fleet downtime with the support of data?
With the data collected from maintenance, you can build up a real database of useful information. Here we give you four suggestions on how to identify useful information from your maintenance recording system in order to take important decisions.
1. Get the right metrics for your assets—by gathering data on your assets such as age, mileage, frequency of servicing or breakdown, actual downtime and so on, you can predict recurring issues and take action where needed (change/replace vehicles or investigate possible reasons for wear and tear—driver behaviour, for example).
2. Detect chronic failures—if specific vehicles are subject to the same type of servicing or constantly out because of a particular issue, you can consider the existence of these failures when purchasing new vehicles or identify measures for reducing such events occurring (also connected to driver behaviour).
3. Evaluate how much is spent on servicing or assess whether a vehicle has come to the end of its useful life—if you have all your vehicle’s performance data to hand, it will help you make this kind of decision
4. Compare servicing costs—it’s a simple matter to compare all your maintenance providers once you have all the data (price, type of service, date etc.) and establish which one is most suitable to continue caring for some or all of your vehicles.
