Now more than ever, trucking fleets are under pressure to perform with greater reliability, speed, and efficiency. Whether your operations span OTR Middle Mile, or Last Mile delivery or all of the above, you understand the stakes are high. Every breakdown, delay, or missed delivery has significant impacts to your bottom line.
The experts at Amerit have created this guide to offer seven strategic insights to help you keep your fleet moving, and your business thriving, even during the most challenging times. From preventive maintenance to data-driven performance tracking, these tips will help you optimize your operations, reduce downtime, and make every load count.
- Streamline your PM Scheduling
- Creative a Proactive Maintenance Plan
- Measure What Matters
- Confront Operational Challenges Head-On
- Inspect What You Expect
THE POWER OF PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE
What’s the #1 key to keeping your fleet downtime low? Regular preventive maintenance.
When economic pressures are high, or schedules are very busy, there is a natural tendency to defer maintenance on your fleet. While this may appear to save money in the short term, un-performed maintenance can cause downstream delivery challenges in the slowest of seasons, often resulting in breakdowns and unscheduled repairs, or worse, DOT fines and serious safety issues.
The implementation of an infallible PM program can alleviate the need for emergency repairs, solidify safe and efficient operations, 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.
Click here to read more about how a PM is more than an oil change.
FIND THE DELICATE BALANCE BETWEEN UPTIME AND COST
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.
At Amerit, we urge fleet executives to consider the full costs of unscheduled downtime carefully, including driver pay, fines for missed deliveries, lost load costs, and other significant impacts other than the cost of the downed vehicle. Once the analysis is done you will see that prioritizing thorough and regular PMs actually drive significant savings.
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 guidelines, Federal and State regulatory requirements and routine dwell times.
According to Freeman, “The Department of Transportation requires that trucks be inspected once per year. Alternatively, California requires inspection every 90 days. There is value and savings in syncing federal and state inspections with your own routine downtimes to satisfy all checkups at once, rather than having a vehicle sitting idle in a garage more often than necessary.”
IDENTIFY A PLAN THAT WORKS FOR YOUR FLEET
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. For example, you can predict seasonal weather conditions and how it changes driving conditions and vehicle usage, and possible component failures due to increasing demands.
Then, schedule inspections when appropriate. “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 TO DRIVE IMPROVEMENT
It’s simple — results cannot be improved if your fleet data is not captured or clean. If your trucking fleet is experiencing logistical problems or you simply wish to improve performance, measuring your results with accurate and timely data is essential for data driven decisions.
“If you want to make a change to your vehicle’s cost per mile or your cost per vehicle, you must first have measured and captured relevant information 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 TO UNLOCK OPPORTUNITIES
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 operational challenges.
In some cases, issues are completely unforeseeable. The key is to address those challenges that can be predicted or reoccur with regularity, 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.
STAY ACCOUNTABLE, EVEN DURING PEAK SEASON
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, we remind all fleet managers that when business conditions are tough, the tough focus on the data.
CONCLUSION
Your fleet is the heart of your business. As industry demands grow, your success depends on more than just keeping trucks rolling, it requires strategy, precision, and forward-thinking leadership.
By following these seven strategies, you’ll create a stronger, smarter fleet built to perform under pressure, reduce downtime, perform safely, and deliver results.
Let’s keep your fleet rolling.
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