Now more than ever, your trucking fleet needs to perform at its best. Whether you are OTR, Middle Mile, or Last Mile or all of the above, you’ll want to make sure your maintenance initiatives are set up for success. Reliability and performance are essential as you manage this crucial part of the year, and to win in the game of trucking you’ll need to focus effort where it counts.
Consider the following seven strategies in order to maximize your trucking fleet performance:
- What’s the #1 Key to Keeping Your Fleet Downtime Low? Regular Preventive Maintenance (PM).
Unpredictable maintenance can cause downstream delivery challenges in the slowest of seasons, often resulting in breakdowns and unscheduled repairs, or worse. The implementation of an infallible PM program can alleviate the need for emergency repairs, solidify high-quality service, and even help deter the effect of normal wear and tear.
PM programs are meant to be just that — preventive. Proactive and prepared to handle repairs before they escalate to an emergency, preventive maintenance ensures that your vehicle stays on the road, improving performance and minimizing impact to your bottom line.
- Find the Delicate Balance Between Your Goals
The challenges faced by hard working trucking fleets are many, but most can be mitigated by a fleet maintenance program that maximizes uptime at the lowest possible cost.
That said, herein lies the delicate balance that many fleet executives overlook. “Theoretically, we can touch a vehicle every day to ensure that it’s working properly (check the lights, oil, etc.), but then uptime is significantly decreased, not to mention that this can get very costly,” says Andy Freeman, Executive Vice President at Amerit Fleet Solutions, adding that he urges fleet executives to prioritize the balance of PMs and inspections versus cost to unscheduled repairs carefully.
- Simplify Your PM Schedule
Creating a structure that works with your schedule instead of against it helps pave the way to meeting both your uptime and financial goals. Returning to the idea of increased uptime and cost savings, it is wise for fleet executives to schedule repairs that coincide with component manufacturers and regulatory offices.
According to Freeman, “The Department Of Transportation requires that their trucks be inspected once per year. Alternatively, California requires inspection every 90 days. There is value in syncing federal and state inspections with your own PM’s to satisfy all checkups at once, rather than having a vehicle sitting idle in a garage more often than necessary.”
- Identify a Plan
Now that a streamlined inspection calendar has been outlined, it is crucial to be proactive and plan the remainder of your internal timeline. Know what to look for, and when. Predict seasonal weather conditions and how it changes driving conditions and vehicle usage.
Then, schedule appropriate inspections when necessary. “Each vehicle in your fleet is not created equally. The best inspections for a Freightliner truck might not be best for a Volvo,” Freeman says. Understanding how each vehicle behaves in different environments and climates adds insight to inspection timelines, which ultimately helps create an advantageous overall plan.
- Measure Your Performance
It’s simple — results cannot be improved if your fleet data is not initially measured. If your trucking fleet is experiencing logistical problems or you simply wish to improve performance, measuring your results with accurate data is an essential function to implement.
“If you want to make a change to your vehicle’s cost per mile or your cost per vehicle, you must first have measured specs to use as a guide. Know how often your trucks break down, what parts they most frequently need, and which routes are most or least effective,” Freeman says. Without a basis of where your fleet’s performance metrics lie, improvements are nearly impossible to calculate.
- Focus on Your Challenges
When a fleet’s measured results reveal an issue with performance, we advocate for trucking fleet executives to acknowledge and highlight these problem areas as a key to improving the entire fleet.
Asking “What could have been done to make it better?” or “What can be changed to prevent this from happening on a reoccurring basis?” helps maintenance teams and managers create a better process for the future and avoid delivery challenges. In some cases, issues are completely unforeseeable. The key is to address those challenges, rather than avoiding them, in order to solve the underlying problem, put an action plan in place and mitigate the risk of it happening again.
- Inspect What You Expect
At Amerit, we believe in tracking, measuring and monitoring everything we do.
As busy season sets in, or the weather turns into a challenge, we encourage all of our clients not to lose focus on their KPIs. Our proprietary data portal makes this an easy task, but if you are managing your own data, peak season is not the time to lose focus on these important metrics.
Now more than ever, the demands on your trucking fleet are high. Focusing on these 7 keys will help ensure your fleet performs safely, effectively and with minimal downtime.
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