5 tips for fleet equipment maintenance management

Fleet maintenance is the process of keeping your vehicles operating in a good enough condition so that they are safe, reliable, and can stay on the road longer. Developing a preventative maintenance program is an important part of managing a fleet and helps businesses reduce operating costs and improve vehicle inspection outcomes, among other benefits.

Without a proactive approach to fleet maintenance, you risk compromising your employees’ safety and paying for costly emergency repairs and unplanned downtime. That’s why the health of your vehicles is a good overall indicator of the health of your business.

1 – Preventive maintenance

There are three types of fleet maintenance:

Corrective maintenance: Made when the defect has worsened and needs repairs, and aims to restore the vehicle’s normal use condition;

Predictive maintenance: The purpose of predictive maintenance, as the name suggests, is to predict when a failure may occur, based on wear, vibration, noise, heating, or other indicators, depending on the type of equipment, machine or vehicle in question, this avoids unnecessary downtime and breaks that would harm productivity;

Preventive maintenance: This type of maintenance aims to reduce excessive expenses with the fleet, as it is based on scheduling stops in advance for adjustments, lubrication, and replacement of components. Its cost is usually between 30% to 40% lower than the other modalities, in addition to increasing the time between maintenance, increasing safety, and reducing the probability of problems on the road.

To use these benefits, it is necessary to draw up a maintenance plan: in an agenda, or a fleet management software, point out which vehicles and components will be overhauled and the respective dates. Do it in a way that meets the need for maintenance of each type of vehicle, in addition to not leaving the fleet without enough units to operate and meet the demand of the company and its customers.

2 – Know the vehicles of your fleet

Know all the specifications of each vehicle in the fleet, this will help to structure the fleet maintenance plan mentioned above, as you will know the ideal parts, the exact moment, and how to maintain each one. Some of the most important information about each vehicle is:

• maintenance recommended by the manufacturer;
• frequency of filter and lubricant changes;
• performance characteristics and load capacity;
• wear ratio per load weight;
• characteristics of your travel routes, such as roads in poor condition.

3 – Get qualified labor for fleet maintenance

As important for companies as investing in good quality vehicles, tires, parts, and components, the investment made must be preserved through the use of qualified labor for its driving and maintenance. 

The more specialized and competent the mechanic, the higher the quality of the maintenance provided, which will result in savings in maintenance, longer life of the truck, fewer stops due to breakages, and consequently, profitability on the fleet will be higher.

Besides, hire conscientious and responsible professionals who know how to take proper care when driving the vehicle, this helps to reduce wear and prevent possible accidents.

4 – Invest in fleet management and maintenance software

The use of fleet control spreadsheets, parts stock control spreadsheets, and maintenance control spreadsheets, in general, is often quite complicated and unreliable, in addition to the fact that preparing and feeding these documents is time-consuming for employees. Also, an ineffective control causes unnecessary parts to be purchased, maintenance periods go out of control, mathematical failures occur, data may be lost, among other problems.

These complications can be overcome with the simple implementation of fleet management and maintenance software, the program automates the entire bureaucratic process, issues maintenance alerts according to the launched fleet maintenance plans, issues more detailed and comprehensive reports, help to eliminate human error, reduces the need for typing and rework and allows employees to spend more time on their core activities.

With Link2Pump you can take control over everything related to fueling, improving delivery planning and fuel distribution, and also with a lifetime warranty. We offer a hassle-free parts replacement policy, where servicing is simple and easy and can be done quickly by the customer, reducing downtime to a minimum. 

5 – Track equipment maintenance expenses

A good fleet manager knows how to work together with the financial sector and the company management to create a budget plan that will allow you to define the limits of each type of spending on your fleet, so that on a day-to-day basis you can identify possible deviations and excesses, and work to heal them, preventing them from compromising the company’s profitability.