Whether your business runs one vehicle which is the lifeblood of the operations, or has a fleet of over 100 vehicles, you need an effective maintenance programme for your fleet. And this is the same whether your vehicles are a means of transporting people and materials from job-to-job, whether they are delivering products all day, every day, or if they are simply an executive perk. Many businesses have a mixture of all these vehicle types, but regardless of that, the basic principles of a fleet maintenance system are the same.
Maintenance is an essential element of a fleet management programme, from the point of view of both costs and compliance, so let’s look at the basic principles of a fleet maintenance programme:
- Planning
- Selecting the right vehicle
- Partnerships
If you have a large fleet of vehicles then this becomes a much bigger challenge, but anyone who has ever owned and run a vehicle knows that you need to have it periodically serviced and maintained. This is a legal requirement in terms of MOTs, but is a recommendation based on safety and also running an efficient vehicle. Given your fleet is doing possibly hundreds of miles a week for the business, that is a lot of fuel and a lot of cost. So the vehicle needs to be properly maintained in order to run efficiently and give you the best, most reliable performance. You need to schedule maintenance so that a vehicle is off-the-road at an appropriate time and when there are others available to cover it, and this involves possible remedial work. So the fleet manager needs to log all vehicles and manage a schedule for vehicle maintenance for the fleet across the 12 months of the year, ensuring minimum recommended periods between service visits and/or mileage requirements are covered.
On this basis, it is also important to understand the principal of ‘preventive maintenance’. This is essentially making sure problems don’t develop, so ensuring that things like oil is topped up, tyres are checked and other simple checks are undertaken. Asking drivers to self-check elements of the vehicle on a regular basis can pre-empt problems and reduce unforeseen breakdowns. These can be costly in terms of repair and to the business not having an available vehicle on the road. An essential element of maintenance is planning against breakdowns, so make sure preventive maintenance is a basic part of your maintenance programme.
Quite simply, if you have the right vehicle for the job you are expecting it to do, then you should see a reduction in the amount of maintenance required. So if you are asking a small vehicle to do regular long distances, or to transport heavy loads, for example, this is a strain for the engine and can damage the suspension and the brakes. The vehicle is simply not designed for this. Similarly, a larger vehicle doing stop-start, short distances is inefficient for the engine and is a waste of a presumably costly outlay on the vehicle.
Of course, occasionally a business will need some vehicles to have a multi-purpose adaptability, but selecting a vehicle specifically for deliveries, or transporting tools and people, or just for long motorway journeys to visit clients, will cut down on maintenance costs. Fundamentally, if you have the right vehicle for what you want it to do, the individual components of the vehicle will be performing how they are designed to and hence they should last longer and see less wear and tear. If you are over-working a component, it will require more maintenance.
Fleet maintenance is usually sub-contracted out to specialist service and maintenance centres. It is important that you build a relationship with these operations, not necessarily so you can enjoy cost savings, though that might be an additional benefit over time, but you need to know they are reliable. Having strong maintenance partners means you know the vehicles are going to come back in the best possible condition, you know the costs are fair and reasonable, you know the work is going to be fast and effective, you can be assured and confident about compliance issues and the maintenance partner is more likely to be flexible and reactive when you need it. You want your vehicles back and on the road ASAP, so having good maintenance partners is the best way of achieving that.
Another strong partnership you need to build is with vehicle leasing providers. This ties in with maintenance because you need to have good options available to replace vehicles when lease deals are coming up to expiry. Obviously the older a vehicle is the more maintenance costs you can expect, so a good leasing partner will agree to the most suitable lease terms for a vehicle in question, and ensure you can replace it before maintenance costs become excessive.
Discuss fleet maintenance with Total Motion
At Total Motion we are the experts in every aspect of fleet management, and because maintenance is a key element of all our fleet management packages, we can discuss the important principles of fleet maintenance with you. This will help you understand where costs can be saved and where your systems can be improved, so get in touch with our maintenance experts at Total Motion today.
