As the owner of any size fleet of commercial vehicles, maintaining that fleet should be a top priority. Unfortunately, many people overlook fleet maintenance until something breaks, leaving you with downtime and lost productivity. Here are some tips to help you implement the right truck fleet maintenance services to help keep your business operating smoothly and keep your drivers on the road.
Understand What Each Of Your Trucks Will Need
Spend some time researching the manufacturer's recommendations for your trucks. If your fleet includes trucks from different manufacturers, you'll have to look into each one. Each manufacturer will publish a recommended maintenance schedule, including not only what to do, but when it should be done. These recommendations are important because they help you avoid some equipment failures. You'll also need to consider each truck's age, mileage, and current usage level. The more thorough you are with the information, the more effective the maintenance plan will be.
Build A Maintenance And Inspection Checklist
There are certain things that will need to be addressed on a pretty regular basis, including brakes, oil, fluids, plugs and wires, and more. Further, there are things that your drivers will have to inspect before every trip, such as lights, tires, brakes, signals, and indicator lights in the cab. Create checklists for all of these things and make sure that the pre-trip inspection lists are distributed to all of your drivers.
The maintenance checklists should be distributed to whomever handles your routine maintenance. Using these, and requiring that they are physically checked off each time a truck comes in, will help you reduce the risk of oversight and other issues along the way.
Create A Calendar
Take the information obtained from your maintenance needs research and your general maintenance checklists and sit down with a year calendar. Plan out all of your preventative maintenance appointments and put them into the calendar so that you have everything organized.
When you're planning the maintenance schedule, you need to also consider the use of each truck. You don't want to have multiple trucks down at once, because that will slow your production for that period. Further, if you have drivers who only work certain days, so their trucks sit a couple of days each week, plan their maintenance when those trucks are typically sitting out of service anyway. That way, you limit the downtime that affects your drivers.
Review Your Unscheduled Maintenance History
Go back through all of your records to see what kind of history your company has of unscheduled maintenance. If you've had a trend of equipment failures and emergency repairs, consider incorporating some preemptive replacements into your maintenance schedule to avoid the same problems with other trucks.
Hire A Mobile, Same-Day Truck Repair Service
There are many different repair services out there for large truck repairs. Many offer mobile services, which means that they will come directly to your truck. This is an advantage because it saves you the cost of towing and the added downtime that can come with it. In addition, it gets your drivers back on the road faster, because repairs happen on the spot.
You can also find many mobile truck repair services that offer same-day services. That means they can send someone out right away to address any emergency repairs, getting your drivers back on the road in the same day with little to no lost productivity. Your loads will be delivered in a timely fashion, even when you have a breakdown along the way.
The more you understand about keeping your trucks on the road and dealing with fleet maintenance, the better the chances are that you will keep your trucks running. Don't risk costly equipment failures that lead to lost driving time when you can be proactive and prevent many of those problems.
Share21 August 2018
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