Fleet maintenance is a term used to describe the process involved in keeping all vehicles within your organisation well maintained and in good operational order.
Having effective fleet maintenance processes ensures the vehicles in your fleet are safe, ready to use, keeps operating costs down, and provides some other benefits.
It’s been proven to be more beneficial both from a cost and a safety perspective to invest time and money into maintaining a fleet as opposed to dealing with issues when they arise.
Here are some of the key reasons why you should implement strategic fleet maintenance processes within your business:
You’ll Improve the Safety of Your Drivers and Other Road Users
Safety comes first. Maintaining a fleet of vehicles to a high standard improves the road safety of a fleet, and that can’t be ignored.
You’ll be aware of why drivers carry out daily walkaround checks on their vehicles.
It’s an essential part of a driver’s role and helps to identify potentially dangerous issues or defects before using their vehicle.
There’s only so much a driver can spot with a daily check, however. Plus, a lot of the common defects that drivers spot, such as worn tyres, warning lights, fluid leaks, etc can be avoided with maintenance.
In a nutshell; a well-maintained vehicle is less likely to break down, faults will be spotted sooner, and the risk of a fault-related accident is reduced.
You’ll Reduce Your Fleet Repair Costs
Vehicles and most of the parts on them last longer when they’re well maintained. If you work in the fleet industry you’ll be very familiar with how expensive even the most routine part replacements can be.
So, while it might be more expensive in the short-term to invest more into maintaining your vehicles, it will almost certainly save you money in the long-term.
Combined with the fact that you’ll spot potential issues sooner as discussed above, that’s less time in the workshop and more time on the road too.
For some businesses, a vehicle being off the road can cost hundreds a day is lost hours or the need to hire a replacement. Being proactive with maintenance is more cost-effective than being reactive.
You’ll Reduce Your Operational Costs
It’s not just on the obvious vehicle parts that need replacing where you’ll save money. Depending on your business, there are a number of areas where you might see operational cost savings.
Some of the possible savings include; improved fuel economy due to vehicles running optimally, and less time with vehicles off the road due to breakdowns.
Just think of routine parts that are changed during vehicle servicing. Oil filters, oil, air filters, etc. All of these can increase fuel consumption when they’re not clean or running optimally. The same applies to tyres that are worn or not running with the correct pressure.
All you have to do is start to multiply these factors across a large fleet of hundreds, even thousands of vehicles and you’ll start to get a picture of how much it could be costing you.
How Does Fleet Management Software Help With Fleet Maintenance?
There are a number of features built into our Fleetcheck fleet management software that will help you better maintain your fleet.
Most importantly, you can set any number of reminders or flags against vehicles for when they need to be checked or serviced so you never miss an appointment.
It already has a proactive defect and tyre management and servicing and vehicle advisory repair alerts built-in among other features.
We also have a smartphone app for driver walkaround checks, which integrates with our software in real-time so you can catch defects early and get them resolved.
As a fleet grows in numbers, it becomes almost impossible, or at least not economically viable to maintain everything on paper records or spreadsheets.
Fleet software enables you to grow your fleet at scale, without adding any more man hours into the maintenance. Plus, you’ll never miss a service, MOT, or any other vehicle maintenance appointment.
