Mastering the Essentials of Effective Fleet Maintenance

Recently updated on August 12th, 2024

If you are reading this post about effective fleet maintenance, chances are you already know how complex of a task it can be to operate a fleet efficiently. Whether your fleet is five or five hundred, ensuring that your fleet is maintained properly is absolutely essential for the success of your operation, and it can sometimes feel like Whack-A-Mole if things get out of rhythm. Effective fleet management ranges from the technical, like fuel efficiency, to the qualitative, like customer satisfaction — with so many other metrics and factors to keep track of.

Part of your job as a fleet manager is to make sure that you are nailing the essentials of fleet maintenance to keep things running smoothly and predictably. It’s an important job, and there are a lot of people relying on you to get it right. In this post, we go over some of the essentials for this key function.

Understanding the Importance of Preventative Maintenance

Before we get into the specifics, it’s important that we talk about why it’s so important to keep on top of your preventative maintenance. Running a fleet isn’t just about handling issues as they arise — your job is to make sure that, as much as possible, these issues don’t arise to begin with. This comes with predicting upcoming issues, recognizing when it’s time to get a fleet vehicle into the shop, and making sure that your drivers know what to look out for to support this goal. Here are a few of the main reasons for focusing on preventative maintenance:

Minimized Downtime

When a vehicle breaks down unexpectedly, your logistics are immediately disrupted. Customers are left upset, and without their orders, drivers need to be shuffled around to fill in the gap, and all of this costs money. When you stay on top of routine checks and servicing, you can predict these issues before they become a problem and plan a single vehicle’s downtime in a way that doesn’t disrupt your fleet’s schedule.

Extended Vehicle Lifespan

Preventative maintenance like semi truck oil changes, filter changes, and more all play a crucial role in extending the useful life of a fleet vehicle. Regular service, most obviously, makes sure that the parts of the vehicle are getting the care and attention they need and reduces wear and tear, but the added benefit is that there is a skilled technician looking under the hood at regular intervals. Their trained eye can recognize the start of problems like leaks, corrosion, or other problems that may snowball if ignored.

Improved Fuel Efficiency

When your fleet vehicles are operating correctly — with properly inflated tires, regular oil changes, and a smooth-running engine — this reflects in your fuel efficiency. No matter what size your fleet is, a difference in fuel efficiency directly impacts your bottom line, and those savings can be put towards growing your business and continuing to serve your customers.

Fuel management is, in many ways, a form of preventative maintenance in itself and is important to teach to your drivers. It helps to reduce your costs, and additionally, the driving techniques that will improve fuel efficiency are often gentler on the vehicle, resulting in less wear and tear. A win-win! Training drivers to avoid rapid acceleration, long idles, and speeding will help reduce fuel consumption and will, in turn, help save money on brakes and issues that may arise from running a vehicle “hard.”

Attention to Safety

As a fleet manager, you want to make sure that your drivers are as safe as possible while out there on the road. Of course, a big part of this lies with their own driving skills, but the other side is the vehicle they are operating. Preventative maintenance checks can identify potential safety issues before they become serious problems, including things like worn brake pads or tires, alignment issues, and anything else that could possibly put your drivers — and others on the road — in danger.

Designing Effective Preventive Maintenance Schedules

Preventative maintenance isn’t something that just happens when you feel like it. You need to make sure that each of your fleet vehicles is on a schedule to ensure that drivers know about the needs of each vehicle and that nothing slips through the cracks until it becomes a major issue. You already know how important it is to have structure while running a fleet, and your maintenance should be no different.

LubeZone can help you develop a preventative maintenance schedule for your fleet vehicle maintenance that suits your vehicles so you can stay focused on running your business and nailing the logistics.

Here are a few pointers on designing a preventative maintenance schedule for your fleet:

Identify Key Preventative Maintenance Services

Here are a few of the crucial preventative maintenance services you will want to consider for each vehicle:

• Oil and filter changes
• Tire inspections and maintenance
• Brake inspections
• Fluid checks
• Battery checks
• Belt and hose inspections
• Air filter replacement
• Injector and Fuel Filter Inspections
• Alignment checks

Preventative maintenance is all about preventing issues before they arise, so each of these services mentioned is crucial when it comes to avoiding issues outright or identifying them before they become much bigger (and more expensive) issues. By staying on top of these services, you can keep your fleet running smoothly.

Start With the Manufacturers’ Recommendations For Each Vehicle

If each vehicle in your fleet is the same make, model, and year, then this part is pretty straightforward. It gets a bit more complicated when you have a number of different models, but regardless, this is an important first step. The manufacturer’s recommendations will be foundational guidelines as you start to form your schedule and will include helpful information like when to do oil changes, how often to replace filters, details about your brakes, and more.

Determine Your Specific Fleet’s Needs

Your fleet is unique, so even though the manufacturer’s guidelines will be helpful, it’s up to you as a fleet manager to tailor those recommendations to the many different factors that go into your own operation. Things like operating conditions, vehicle usage, and your local climate will all impact your maintenance needs. If you operate in a snowy climate, you may find that the road salt wears your calipers and rotors  out faster than in dryer parts of the country. This is just one of the many variables you might run into.

Prioritize Regular Inspections

At LubeZone, even an oil change comes with a broader inspection of each vehicle, so something as simple as making sure that your vehicles are getting in for their regular oil changes is a great way to get some other pairs of eyes on the other components of your vehicles. An oil change and subsequent oil inspection can be very telling about the condition of your engine, filtration systems, and more, while even just a visual inspection of the engine can tell a technician things about the function of the vehicle. Each inspection is an opportunity to catch something before it turns into a time-consuming, expensive, and disruptive issue.

Develop a Budget and Cost Analysis System

Your fleet has an operating cost, and in order to keep it under control, it’s important that you, as fleet manager, devise a budget. In this budget, there must be allocations for your preventative AND unexpected maintenance. Set goals based on your future projections, and use existing data to come up with a realistic range of costs based on individual vehicles, miles traveled, and any other benchmarks that factor into your unique operation. Make sure that the resources are allocated accordingly, including short- and long-term maintenance, vehicle amortization, and the cost of future replacements. Check your actuals against your projections and budget regularly to identify any outliers or discrepancies.

Train Your Team

The best preventative maintenance plan is only as good as how it is executed, so it’s important that you properly train your team to understand the importance of this type of maintenance, as well as how to use the schedule. This includes your drivers, who are the front line of prevention when it comes to damage to your vehicles, both in terms of the way they treat the fleet vehicles and their ability to monitor for unexpected issues as they arise. Regularly training your team can help everyone stay informed and engaged while making sure that prevention is top of mind during normal operations.

Adjust As Necessary

Taking a plan from paper to real life will always lead to unexpected deviations, and even a schedule that is working perfectly well may end up not suiting your fleet’s needs as your operations change, your vehicles’ performance shifts as they age, and countless other variables that will change the way things work. Continuously checking your schedule against the way things are really going is an important way to stay in front of major, systemic issues that can lead to poor performance and a runaway budget.

LubeZone Is Here For Your Preventative Maintenance Needs

If you would like to partner with a trusted service technician for all of your fleet’s preventative maintenance, LubeZone is happy to assist. With many locations across the country, we are here to help you keep your fleet running safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Contact us today to learn more about the ways we can help keep your fleet in top condition so you can keep serving your customers with the reliability and consistency they expect from you.