Wouldn’t you like to see into the future?
It would be so cool. You could win the lottery, become a superhero—or take the boring (but practical) route and stop truck breakdowns before they happen.
Fullbay can’t give you actual superpowers (though that would be a fantastic selling point). But we can help you with the next best thing—an easy way to schedule preventive maintenance.
Below, you’ll find the information you need to manage PMs and create a heavy-duty equipment maintenance schedule.
Why Preventive Maintenance Matters
Everyone’s familiar with the typical type of reactive maintenance, like a flat tire. Something already went wrong with the truck, so now you need to repair the broken components and get your vehicle back on the road.
On the other hand, preventive maintenance is proactive—meaning you can address issues before they happen. Crucially, this is different from just doing periodic fleet-wide inspections. Each of your trucks drives different routes and experiences different conditions, and your heavy-duty equipment maintenance schedule should take that into account.
Keeping up on PMs is one of the best ways to:
- Protect drivers. You don’t need us to tell you how important safety is—so we won’t. Just know that minimizing breakdowns through preventive maintenance might be the best way to minimize accidents and keep drivers safe.
- Extend truck lifespans. It shouldn’t be shocking to hear that trucks last longer when they get the attention they need. Taking care of minor issues prevents them from getting worse—and potentially doing severe damage to your fleet.
- Boost your efficiency. The time your trucks spend in the shop is time they could have spent on the road. Dealing with PMs in the present helps you avoid days (if not weeks) of downtime later on.
Start By Tracking Truck Data
There’s a decent chance you already run periodic inspections of the trucks in your fleet. There’s nothing wrong with that—checking on your trucks’ well-being every six months is a massive improvement over not performing maintenance at all.
Creating a full-fledged maintenance schedule for your fleet is a bit more complex than just checking on trucks twice a year. It considers individual trucks’ needs, which means each truck will be on its own personalized schedule.
The best place to start is by forming a complete picture of your assets’ current condition. As soon as you can, begin keeping track of the dates and details associated with:
- Inspections
- Repairs
- Gas station stops
- Any other relevant events
But you don’t have to handle this process on your own—today’s technological advances can make it much more manageable. GPS integration can help you automatically track vehicle mileage, and fleet management software can organize the data for you. No more getting lost in an Inception-like world of spreadsheets!
Automate Alerts
Even if you know manufacturer recommendations for replacing parts and taking care of repairs, keeping track of every detail for every vehicle in your fleet would be difficult, to say the least.
So work smarter, not harder. Fleet management and maintenance software can take over the tracking and scheduling and send you an alert when it’s time for a truck to get service. You won’t have to monitor your mileage totals and service dates manually.
This software can also automate aspects of communication for your fleet or repair shop. For fleet managers, tracking software can help direct drivers to nearby repair shops or back to HQ for large-scale repairs. Meanwhile, software automation can help independent shops quickly request service authorization from fleet customers.
Perform Full Inspections Every Time
Let’s say you have a truck in your garage for a single preventive maintenance item. If that’s the case, you can take care of that issue and call it a day, right? Not quite. No matter how small a vehicle’s issues may seem, you should perform a full inspection.
If you’re in charge of an independent shop, the benefits are obvious—the more services you provide, the more money you’ll make. And if you manage a commercial fleet, thorough inspections deliver peace of mind and catch potential issues well ahead of time.
Fleet maintenance scheduling tools can also let you know if a truck has any other services due soon, add it to the service order, and take care of everything in a single trip!
Choose Fullbay for Your Preventive Maintenance Needs
If you’ve been neglecting preventive maintenance due to the sheer effort required to handle it manually, you’re not alone. That said, there’s no better time than the present to develop and stick to a heavy-duty equipment maintenance schedule. And Fullbay can help!
As a top provider of fleet maintenance management software, we make scheduling and managing PMs a piece of cake. Enjoy a more efficient, reliable, and safe fleet–without adding extra workload to your team. See for yourself—set up a demo today!
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