Private companies spend a huge amount of money on the maintenance of their fleets. After all this is what keeps their businesses function. Fleets don’t just make businesses function but they also help the flow of commerce for entire nations. Maintenance of these vehicular fleets is a must if this flow is to continue. These fleets mainly comprise of trucks, trailers and off-road vehicles.
Maintenance of these vehicles can get very expensive and most private companies try to compromise in fleet maintenance. This compromise in maintenance eventually ends up costing more to the companies in the long run. Some fleet owners understand this and try to optimize their fleet maintenance procedures while some fleet owners fail to optimize the fleet management process and instead incur more losses. So in order to understand that, it is important to learn what fleet maintenance is.
What is Fleet Maintenance ?
In order to understand how to optimize fleet maintenance we need to first understand what fleet maintenance is. To ensure that a business flow is maintained properly, we need to ensure that the fleet is taken care of. Fleet owners need to schedule routine checks to observe the condition of different parts of all the vehicles in the fleet. The performance of each vehicle in the fleet needs to be monitored and timely repairs must be done.
Private businesses also need to make sure that all their vehicles are washed on a regular basis to prevent the accumulation of dirt. All vehicle accessories and maintenance tools need to be checked to see if they are working as intended. This entire process together can be called proper fleet maintenance.
Top Tips for Fleet Maintenance
So here are the top tips for optimized fleet maintenance that will help fleet owners to avoid unnecessary maintenance costs:
- Automate your fleet maintenance
- Adaptive utilisation
- Create a control list
- Divide the task
- Plan according to company needs
Here is how these tips can help you:
1. Automate your Fleet Maintenance
The single best way to optimize fleet management would be to use a fleet telematics system. It is very difficult to perfectly maintain vehicle fleets manually. Human errors like overlooking can cause vehicles to get damaged. A fleet telematics system helps us to monitor the performance of each vehicle with the help of computer or mobile applications. The application alerts the user when a vehicle is underperforming or is being misused in any way. This also helps to keep the vehicle much more secure.
The fleet telematics application also informs the users when to schedule a maintenance so that they can be used in and maintained in an optimized manner to increase the productivity in business. With the help of the application, fleet owners can check how much the maintenance cost must be to avoid maintenance scams. A fleet telematics system can automate the functioning of the entire business and help private companies to increase the overall profits and avoid incurring losses
2. Adaptive Utilization
The need for maintenance can be minimized by planning the utilization and load of each vehicle according to the route they are to travel through and the place that they are going to be utilized. Considering factors like the terrain and topology and the need for each accessory that is to be loaded into the vehicles can help to reduce the wearing out of these vehicles.
If more load is added to these vehicles than there needs to be the vehicles will wear out quicker and maintenance will have to be done more often which in turn will result in more losses for the business.
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3. Create a Control List
In order to reduce the downtime of vehicles, fleet owners must keep a control list or a check list of different maintenance operations that needs to done on each of their vehicles. This way no details will go overlooked and tasks will be done systematically.
This is also helpful in discovery of different flaws in the vehicles and help to speed up the maintenance process. Fleet owners much create this list according to the specification of each vehicle in their fleet as different vehicles have different requirements and may develop different kinds of wearing.
Also read: What’s Holding Back the Fleet Management Industry?
4. Divide the Task
Dividing the different maintenance operations into different groups of maintenance staff can help to improve the uptime of different vehicles that are in the fleet. This will help to streamline the flow of maintenance operations and asset utilization. The division of the tasks into different specialized maintenance groups will ensure that no flaws have gone overlooked and this will also ensure that the control list is well maintained and is checked out in less time.
5. Plan According to Company Needs
It is crucial to plan fleet maintenance according to the company needs. Most private companies lose money because the downtime different vehicles in their fleet makes them incapable of carrying out important business tasks in time. This effects the company’s client base hugely and makes them unfit for the market competition. To avoid this maintenance must be scheduled by first observing the trend in their demand. Fleet owners must look into factors such as seasonal demands, workforce availability and customer preferences to schedule fleet maintenance to be more systematic and organized and so that the downtime does not have an adverse effect on the business tasks.
LocoNav offers you services for all your business needs, from Vehicle Tracking Solutions, Fleet Management System and Fleet Telematics, along with FASTag. LocoNav helps you in optimising your operations and business while you focus on the growth of your enterprise!
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