Fleet maintenance that keeps vehicles on the road

Fleet maintenance is keeping vehicles safe, legal and available. Three goals, and they pull in different directions: the safest schedule is not the cheapest, and the vehicle you most need to service is the one nobody can spare today.

What makes it different from building maintenance is that the asset drives away, the person using it is not the person maintaining it, and a regulator can ask you for the whole record at short notice.

The four records that have to be right

Whatever else you track, these are the ones that get asked for and the ones that cause trouble when they are incomplete.

• •Daily inspections by drivers, with defects and what happened to them
• •Scheduled preventive services, with dates, mileage and what was done
• •Repairs, including who did them and what parts went on
• •Statutory inspections and certificates, with their expiry dates

The driver inspection is the whole foundation

A driver walks around the vehicle every day. That is more frequent inspection than any building system gets, and in most fleets it is recorded on a pad that gets lost, or not recorded at all because nothing ever comes of it.

Two things make it real: the defect has to become tracked work automatically, and the driver has to see that it did. A driver who reports a fault three times and sees nothing happen will report the fourth as "no defects", and nobody can blame them.

Intervals: miles, hours, or time

A van doing motorway miles and a van doing forty short urban drops a day have the same odometer reading and completely different wear. Engine hours capture idling and stop-start work that miles do not.

The pattern that works for a mixed fleet is whichever comes first: miles, engine hours, or months. Setting the interval by duty cycle rather than by a single fleet-wide number is the largest single improvement available to most schedules.

Group the work so the vehicle comes off the road once

The scarce resource is not labour. It is the vehicle being available. Combine the service, the statutory inspection, the outstanding defects and anything due within a few weeks into one visit, and you halve the number of times a vehicle is out of service.

Cost per mile, per vehicle

The number that answers almost every fleet question. Total cost of ownership, divided by miles, for each vehicle: fuel, maintenance, tyres, repairs, insurance and depreciation.

Per vehicle rather than per fleet, because the fleet average hides everything. The interesting information is the spread, and the two or three vehicles at the wrong end of it.

The measures worth watching

• •Vehicles off the road, and how long each has been off
• •Defects reported per vehicle per month, which should not be zero
• •Preventive services completed within their window
• •Roadside breakdowns, and how many were caused by something an inspection would have caught
• •Cost per mile by vehicle, trended

The maintenance record is a legal document

In most jurisdictions, commercial vehicle maintenance records are inspectable and have a required retention period. Under the US federal rules, carriers must keep systematic inspection, repair and maintenance records for each vehicle, including a schedule of the inspections to be performed. Whatever applies where you operate, the practical requirement is the same: complete, dated, and producible without a search.

Where to start if the records are a mess

Put the daily driver inspection on a phone first. It generates the defect list, it proves who checked what and when, and it is the record most likely to be asked for. Everything else can follow once that one is real.