Businesses lose money every time a vehicle is facing sudden downtime,telematics can help fleet managers/ owners proactively plan fleet maintenance and reduce vehicle downtime, and avoid unwanted sudden breakdowns. Keeping your drivers and vehicle safe while they are on the road is vital, however, none of that is possible if your fleet isn’t well maintained. You can prevent this by keeping an eye on maintenance costs and taking action before they pile up and escalate. Being proactive will not only save businesses thousands of dollars but also make it more efficient. A well-maintained vehicle burns less fuel, breaks down less often, and helps lower your operating cost. Taking a proactive approach also means you can stop problems in their tracks before they snowball into safety hazards.  Fleet management can be done today in many ways to keep fleets efficient and upkeep an efficient fleet operation all around. 

Here are tips that will help you manage your fleet maintenance more effectively. 

• Regular Driver Reports

Think of maintenance as a rotating job, rather than something confined to set dates. Alongside regular inspections, you should be communicating as often as possible with your drivers. After all, they spend more time with the vehicles than anyone else does. Drivers can develop a set of best practices and form productive working relationships with you and the maintenance team or contractor.

• Invest in Fleet Telematics 

Investing in telematics tools and tech can help you gain a competitive edge. In fact, according to one report, fleet management data can increase productivity by up to 15%. Financial savings also increase, with about 55% of survey respondents reporting reduced fuel expenditure of up to 10%. It notifies fleet managers of things like vehicle-damaging driving and issues warnings to individual drivers automatically. Telematics allows you to stay on top of all maintenance needs and makes scheduling and keeping track of maintenance tasks much easier. Plus, when you go digital you can get automatic alerts informing you of needed maintenance for your fleet.

• Preventive Maintenance

Properly maintained vehicles reduce unscheduled repairs and downtime. Preventive maintenance may include oil changes, tire rotation/inspection and general safety vehicle inspections. Preventative inspection and maintenance is vital to cut down on impromptu repairs and downtime for your vehicles. A great way to make the vehicle inspection process efficient is to have a maintenance checklist that your drivers or head of maintenance complete at the chosen times.

 

• Regular Vehicle Inspections

Monitoring the day-to-day activities of the fleet allows us to optimize its operation, this includes the work cycle, fleet routes, fuel efficiency, maintenance frequency, productivity and all sorts of activities relating to  fleet operation. Regularly checking tire pressure is especially important, as it affects just about every aspect of a vehicle fleet’s operations, from driver safety to fuel mileage. Fleet managers should keep a tab on how temperature changes can cause fluctuations in tire pressure, and regularly check the tread depth on tires for signs of excessive wear and tear. 

 

Final Words

Effective fleet maintenance is a productive practice for keeping enterprises on a roll. Though it is a mundane task demanding day-to-day attention it cannot be neglected. Keeping fleets ready for trips, helps enterprises optimize time as well as productivity. The time you spend now to develop your fleet’s preventive maintenance plan could save your company a considerable amount of lost time in the future. In addition, the money you spend on implementing a preventive maintenance plan will be small in comparison to maintenance costs associated with unscheduled, preventable repairs.

Predictive maintenance uses real-time data to inform fleet managers which parts on a vehicle are likely to fail, possibly even weeks before the failure is likely to happen. In the long term, predictive maintenance can extend the vehicle life span and help managers ensure that they have an adequate fleet capacity. Fleet managers are turning towards predictive analytics to stay on top of maintenance and mitigate part failures before they can occur. However, managing the large amount of new data generated by vehicle sensors is challenging.

Tangerine’s Solution for Predictive Maintenance

Tangerine’s AI integrated platform for fleet maintenance can build predictions based on direct measurements of equipment. This platform also provides contextual data like weather conditions, traffic, road quality, and driver behavior. The most important and an illustrative difference between a fleet preventive maintenance program and predictive maintenance is a paradigm shift from assumptions and strict scheduling to data-driven decisions and real-time fleet monitoring.Tangerine uses AI to improve many aspects of fleet maintenance, be it reducing unplanned downtime or increasing efficiency in the maintenance and repair process.

• Get preventive and predictive maintenance information for each asset to track maintenance services and understand RUL.
• Keep tabs on everything from required repairs to scheduled services and daily inspections to keep assets at their highest performance levels.
• Monitor vehicle issues by capturing DTCs for both OBD II and J1939 protocols.

Avoiding Vehicle Downtime

Any organization that relies on vehicles in daily operations understands how critical it is to keep them up and running. By outfitting vehicles with sensors, maintenance crews can collect useful information that helps them predict part failures on a large fleet. However, analyzing and managing this volume of new data can be overwhelming. Many organizations are moving towards ways to run analytics at the edge, on the device at the gateway level, as part of end-to-end fleet management.

Advanced Technologies Behind Fleet Maintenance

Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in building predictions based on collected telematics data. To process the data analytics and deliver fast alerts, predictive fleet vehicle maintenance platform relies on cloud computing and provides contextual data. Finally, the service and fleet managers must receive easy-to-use reports and be ready with all the tools at hand to plan relevant equipment maintenance.

Telematics Data Collection

By turning to telematics data, most fleet companies can shift from reactive to preventive measures. By doing so, it helps fleet managers address small problems before they become critical to address. Connected IoT sensors can provide real-time data on vehicle parts and send Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs) to track mechanical failures in real time while fleet management platforms use this data for analytics and predictive maintenance planning.

User-friendly and Comprehensive Dashboards

When running AI data analytics for failure prediction,the platform for fleet maintenance must provide a visual representation of data in a consumable form. Dashboards with customizable functionality allows fleet managers to choose what data is the most critical to display,cross-platform accessibility ensures that fleet managers are always connected ,can react to potential issues and monitor fleets from their mobile devices.

Increased Efficiency of Fleets and Drivers

Advanced technologies applied to fleet maintenance improves the entire repair network. Continuously monitoring each fleet vehicle results in individual vehicle profiles, which makes it easier for technicians to perform repairs and take preventive measures to avoid related issues. As a result, the fleets avoid losing their equipment for extended periods to detect all malfunctions while drivers avoid accident incidents on the road.

Final Words

Predictive maintenance helps fleets by reducing vehicle downtime due to avoidable repairs. In addition, vehicles can be utilized more efficiently because maintenance is planned only when it’s required. With a pre-trip inspection and a preventative maintenance program,  fleet managers can schedule maintenance based on accurate diagnostics and vehicle usage information and reduce unnecessary cost, fleet downtime, and jeopardy to the public safety. As vehicles with less use do not require as many maintenance stops, the availability of assets increases while losses due to unnecessary maintenance are minimized. Establishing thresholds of use for each asset and monitoring how close a vehicle gets to those thresholds makes outcomes more predictable and enables timely actions.