Maintaining Performance
Published in: Utility Products
Date: 3/1/2006
By: Paul Hull
According to many professionals, the secret to success in vehicle maintenance seems to depend on our ability to devise a good program and to stick to that program (especially when it seems to be something we can postpone for other, less routine jobs). Maintenance does not sound exciting but it is one of those tasks that must be done, and done regularly if it is to work to our advantage. To think of maintenance as a negative aspect of vehicles in our fleet defeats its purpose; to equate maintenance with repair is just as pointless. We should not delay maintenance until something goes wrong, because it is in the preventive steps of maintenance that our biggest savings are probably achieved. A practical, well-planned preventive maintenance program can help fleet managers keep vehicle repair costs and downtime to a minimum, but an inefficient, poorly designed program can waste time and money. We are indebted to Robert Johnson, fleet management liaison for the National Truck Equipment Association (NTEA), for his experienced words of wisdom on this subject. You can hear Mr. Johnson and other experts at the NTEA conferences in Atlanta this month. He advises fleet managers to review several areas to evaluate whether their preventive maintenance programs are as good as they should be.
Analyze your records of fleet maintenance. Are you tracking the right information carefully enough to make informed maintenance decisions? The details matter. For example, simply recording that front end work was completed on a vehicle does not give you enough information to detect failure trends for specific front end components. As a minimum standard, your records should indicate the make and model of vehicle, date and mileage at the time of service, and services performed to specific components. Johnson reminds us that: All the records in the world wont do a thing for you if you dont analyze the data.
When you get demands for maintenance between your scheduled preventive maintenance intervals, examine any unexplained incidents. Look for patterns or trends. If a number of particular failures occur on certain vehicles, assess the incidents and see if it is possible to adjust your preventive maintenance program to eliminate those failures in the future. Vehicles are like other manufactured goods we use at work, at the office or at home in that some of them will be more prone to problems with certain systems and components than others. You may need to develop a different preventive maintenance schedule for certain makes and models of vehicles in the fleet or for those operating in specific applications. Listen to the evaluations of their vehicles by your drivers and technicians. This is not an occasion when once size fits all. A quickly-planned, fast-track, generic preventive maintenance program may not work equally well for all fleets, or even for all vehicles within a particular fleet.
A popular and reliable measure of the efficiency of your preventive maintenance program is the number of touches your technicians have on a vehicle. Lets say you have a vehicle scheduled for preventive maintenance three times a year, but discover that it was actually pulled in for service six times – the three scheduled services, plus another three times for various other services such as government-required safety and emissions inspections. Proper scheduling would have enabled these inspections to have been handled at the same time as the preventive maintenance. Every time a technician touches a vehicle, it costs you money and represents possible downtime. On average, every vehicle touch takes a minimum of an hour of labor. Proper planning can minimize these costs.
Could you be doing a better job of predictive maintenance. Use your records to calculate your fleets average service life for various components, so you know when to replace them (in a proactive rather than reactive manner). For example, say you discover that Brand XX alternators on Brand YZ vehicles fail, as an average, at around 85,000 miles. Your preventive maintenance schedule calls for 8,000-mile service intervals. Your service schedule, then, should include an alternator replacement as part of the first preventive maintenance service after the vehicle has reached 77,000 miles. It is possible to set preventive maintenance intervals too close together. Intervals should be based on the type of vehicle application, usage (mileage, hours, operating environment, etc.), OEM warranty requirements and regulatory requirements.
Lets repeat that there should be not just one, cover-all preventive maintenance schedule. Whats ideal for one vehicle may be too much for and not enough for a third. There is not one magic number of hours or miles for every vehicle in your fleet. (Just because youve always done it, doesnt mean you have to continue doing it.) Start a good schedule by going back to the manufacturers recommendations for the type of service for which you are using the vehicle. If your preventive maintenance intervals are more frequent than the manufacturer recommends, try conducting a lubricant analysis, primarily of engine oil. Also check to see how much residual lubricant is present in unsealed joints at each service visit. If the oil analysis shows the oil is still good, there is still plenty of lubricant in each joint, and you have a good failure history, you may want to consider extending the service interval by a month and checking the same factors again. Its a combination of science with trial and error.