Happy New Year from Velocitor Solutions! It is time for the new year and one of the tasks on a lot of fleet managers minds is maintaining their fleet. A well-maintained vehicle provides higher service time, helps lower operating costs, and burns less fuel. Managing your maintenance can stop problems proactively before costs become high and potential safety hazards occur. Proactive fleet maintenance is a team effort between drivers, maintenance teams and management. Our V-Track platform provides key technology tools to make this process easier to implement and manage. Functions such as vehicle inspections, managing regular maintenance schedules and management of expenses keep this process streamlined. There are several key factors that can help make this process easier.
1. Task your Drivers to Do Daily Vehicle Inspections
Most fleets require driver to perform pre- and post-trip vehicle inspections, however we find that many times these inspections are not very thorough. Our V-Track Mobile application has a pre-and post-trip vehicle inspections that are very easy to use and requires the driver to sign off on the inspection every day. We can even enforce the workflow to where they cannot see their route stops until these vehicle inspections are performed. This data is available to fleet managers and should be reviewed often. Drivers can proactively identify issues, such as incorrect tire pressure, or non-working safety equipment. This will allow fleets to proactively address any concerns before they snowball into a safety hazard or an expensive repair event.
2. Use Telematics for Preventative Maintenance Scheduling
Managing the maintenance of a large fleet of vehicles can be challenging, however utilizing technology can make this process much easier. The beauty of real-time telematics is that a system like V-Track can allow for scheduling of maintenance events such as oil changes, tire rotations based on mileage milestones and/or defined time periods. A daily report can provide a list of trucks that require preventative maintenance making it easy to schedule these events and proactively get them done. This makes planning, scheduling of routes based on available equipment as well as reports of completed maintenance events an easy task.
3. Provide Vehicle Health Reporting to Maintenance Staff
Often the in-house maintenance team, or an outsourced maintenance provider handles maintenance requests reactively. Giving these teams access to vehicle inspections and diagnostic trouble codes available from the V-Track Telematics system can provide a proactive maintenance strategy. The active communication between drivers, fleet managers and maintenance teams can prevent emergency maintenance events. Our clients that have used this strategy have been able to prevent large maintenance repair costs while having a maximal availability of their vehicles.
As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of a cure. Fleets of any size that take a preventative approach to vehicle maintenance, while performing regular inspections will always save time and money in the long run and will always have good running equipment on the road.
Please contact us for more information on V-Track with V-Track Video to learn more about how to manage idle times. We would be happy to share our experience and demonstrate our extensive capability.