If your business relies on vehicles of any kind, whether to transport people, goods, or to help you carry out tasks in the workplace, such as the construction site, then you need to realize just how reliant your business is on that fleet. If it starts to fail you, not only can it be a costly fix, but it can also result in productivity losses that can majorly eat into your profits. Here are some ways to make sure you give those fleet investments the kind of care they need.
Understand the Benefits of Different Kinds of Maintenance
The better you maintain your vehicles, the better you can protect your investment. There are two kinds you should focus on: preventative and predictive maintenance. A good preventative maintenance schedule will likely involve everything in the logbook, the simple fixes and replacements to make sure that common issues don’t happen down the line. Predictive maintenance is all about using data and learning what parts of a vehicle are most likely to start suffering issues first and putting a particular focus on maintaining those parts to stop the most costly failures.
Empower Your Employees to Better Care for Vehicles
This is especially true of any businesses that work with owner-drivers, but even your employees should be incentivized and empowered to better care for their vehicles. Simply put, one of the best ways to ensure this happens is to give them the workplace training for maintenance and light fixes that they need. Otherwise, you can make sure they have the paid time they need to spend time maintaining and checking over their vehicle before they take it on the road.
Ensure the Highest Quality Replacements
If a part fails, then you might want to get the easiest and cheapest replacements simply to get it on the road. However, more often than not, that will result in the same kind of failure happening not too far from now. By working directly with suppliers like Uni-Grip for things like bulb and edge seals, you can help ensure your vehicle is in better shape following a fix than it was before it even started suffering issues. With good predictive maintenance, you can even make effective replacements before a failure happens.
Have a Team of Mechanics on Hand
As with all suppliers and services, if you go through the traditional customer channels to partner with them, you can end up paying more than you might otherwise. Commercial mechanic teams such as Scott Shearing Vehicle Repairs may look at long-term relationships with businesses to ensure they have reliable sources of business. In exchange for that security, they’re often willing and able to reduce the cost per service. As such, you won’t be quite as hesitant to have true professional mechanics take a look over your fleet when it comes to fixing more serious issues.
As costly as they can be, don’t be surprised if a failure to care for the fleet vehicles in your business leads to major losses. They are one of your most valuable assets and should be treated that way.
