The fleet industry is geared toward data measurement: cost per mile, preventive maintenance frequency, miles per gallon, etc. These common metrics are pervasive throughout the industry but mean nothing without accuracy and access.

Let’s look at a few common ways that data — or lack thereof — impact everyday fleet maintenance decisions.

Warranties

When filing warranty claims you need to know your “Three Cs”: complaint, cause, and correction. You need to record what you did, but just as importantly, you need to also know the background details of the asset by asking these questions:

• What is the vehicle’s service history?
• What specific services or repairs were performed?
• Why did that vehicle come in in the first place, and is this a repeat occurrence?

Without this information you do not have a full historical picture of this vehicle’s issues, costs, and remedies, which leaves you at a road block — you cannot submit a warranty claim without these key data points.

Employees

Data is also important to ensure accountability. This is particularly true if you are managing a technician workforce, but is also a key factor to managing outside maintenance vendors.

Knowing what task times were recorded and whether the technician doing the task performed that service within the standard task time not only helps you hold vendors and employees accountable, it also helps you gauge overall performance. This gives you a clear view into your costs and any possible improvements.

Costs

When proving ROI, accurate and comprehensive data is mission critical. When you pull the costs for a vehicle you must have confidence that those costs are accurate and reflective of the actual vehicle history.

At Amerit, we are often directed by clients to code costs to the vehicle itself — not to a general department code. This helps our clients know the true cost of operating that vehicle so they are able to make informed decisions, like should they buy that vehicle type again? Or is there a problem with driver behavior that is leading to repeat problems and a high cost of ownership? Conversely, accurate and complete data will also prove that a cost-savings initiative did indeed save money and deliver greater profitability.

Data is directly related to the financial bottom line. Collecting the right data and using it for informed fleet maintenance decisions about lifecycles and other fleet operations not only will save money, but will make the fleet more efficient, and will allow the company to increase revenue.