Every fleet has a maintenance story to tell. What do you think yours is? The answer lies in the data. Just as your biometrics—blood pressure, cholesterol levels, etc.—tell a story about your physical health, your telematics and shop data tell one about your fleet health.
Once you determine what that story is (good, bad, or ugly), you can change it just as a writer edits a piece to make it more compelling. In other words, your fleet’s maintenance story is malleable and within your control when you let data guide you to make the right changes or “edits.” For example, your data may suggest that the brakes on a particular make and model should be replaced 10,000 miles before the OEM’s recommendations, or you’ll risk more costly and time-consuming repairs. To help you craft the right narrative, here are the pieces you should consider.
The main characters
You can think of your vehicles as the main characters in your maintenance story. It all starts with “the metal.” How old are these characters, and what condition are they in? Are they mechanically behaving as they should or costing you more time and money than they ought to? If you collect and analyze it, the data will answer these questions for you.
My company, Mike Albert Fleet Solutions, has a client whose data analysis uncovered that one specific make and model comprising a quarter of their fleet incurred major repairs between 120,000 and 150,000 miles. These vehicles were written out of the fleet, just as an author may excise a protagonist who fails to move the plot along.
This aggressive edit, along with other data-driven decisions, saved this company more than $1.5 million in yearly maintenance costs, leading to a much happier ending for the annual financial books.
The supporting characters
Despite not being the main driver of the plot, supporting characters often significantly impact a story. (Think Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings.”) In your fleet, the supporting characters would be the drivers behind the wheel. How they operate your commercial vehicles shapes your maintenance story, and the only way to know how they’re driving is to gather data from both standard and video telematics.
The data will alert you if your supporting characters are “misbehaving” by speeding, braking harshly, or not wearing their seatbelts. You can then take the necessary corrective actions.
While drivers sometimes oppose telematics (with the “Big Brother” argument), the data clearly shows that monitoring behavior leads to safer driving and better mechanical health for the vehicle.
A client of ours recently faced considerable pushback from its drivers when implementing telematics. So, it developed an incentive program to motivate drivers to improve their safety scores. Then, an interesting thing happened—as they must in good stories. These drivers embraced telematics, and now there’s a friendly competition among them as to who can achieve the best safety scores.
Other supporting characters in your story are the technicians caring for your vehicles. Are they ASE-certified and not inclined to recommend unnecessary repairs? Are their labor rates and parts fees aligned with industry and market standards? Software, such as ALLDATA, can shed light on these matters.
Through cost avoidance and negotiated savings with certified, in-network shops, we helped another client reduce their maintenance spend by a million dollars.
Read more: History buff: Using past data to improve repairs
The setting
Just as every story happens in a particular setting, your fleet also operates within the confines of a specific time and place. As for timing, what maintenance schedules does the OEM recommend for your vehicles? Have you adhered to these schedules?
Might there be reasons to deviate from the OEM’s timing recommendations because your data tells you to? For example, does unavoidable excessive idling suggest that your oil changes should happen more frequently? Might rough terrain dictate more frequent maintenance? After all, the environment in which your vehicles perform impacts their performance and maintenance needs.
Another client of ours, a security company that patrols apartment complexes, doesn’t rack up the miles, but their vehicles are in near continuous use. After looking at the data, we developed a maintenance schedule based on days of use versus the OEM’s miles-driven schedule.
Foreshadowing
Many books foreshadow what’s to come by revealing something about a character’s past early in the story that later has a big impact. When it comes to fleets, that foreshadowing is predictive maintenance data.
If you allow it to, data will tell you—based on usage histories, part life cycles, and other methods—when specific components are at risk of failure. This allows you to address those matters proactively before they wreak havoc and lead to expensive repairs, more downtime, and possibly a vehicle stranded on the side of the road. Unplanned maintenance can cost as much as three to nine times more than scheduled maintenance. That’s why at Mike Albert, we’re fond of saying, “When it’s not broke, that’s when you fix it.”
Following what the maintenance data tells you enables you to shape your fleet’s behavior in the days, weeks, and months ahead, ultimately saving you time, money, and hassles. We have clients for whom the data suggests certain parts be replaced more often than recommended, and clients whose data indicates that some parts need not be replaced as frequently as the OEM’s schedule recommends.
Conflict
Every story has conflict and tension that must be resolved before its end. Data will help you identify the conflict in your maintenance story so you can address and alleviate it. Here are a few of countless examples:
- Might your drivers be ignoring trouble codes or check engine lights?
- Are OEM recalls being appropriately addressed in your fleet?
- Are repairs happening at approved, in-network shops?
- Is on-board equipment, such as generators or compressors, being properly maintained?
- Are you cycling out vehicles too soon or not soon enough?
Conclusion
Once you have a handle on your fleet’s maintenance story, what is its general “feel” or “mood”? Is it happy or sad? Simple or complex? Satisfying or frustrating? Whatever the current state of your story, data can help you determine what changes to make to turn it into one that’s a joy to read and share because it hums along like, well, a finely tuned engine.
