If you manage a commercial fleet, you don't want your vehicles off the road. Not just because you'd rather be on the road than behind a desk, but because downtime is expensive.
Software vendor Decisiv found that downtime can cost businesses $448 to $760 per vehicle, per day. One vehicle off the road for three days could cost you anywhere from $1,344 to $2,280. Even at the low end, that's the equivalent of 520 gallons of gas (as of this writing).
The more time you spend on the road, the more money you make. But, how can you make that happen? Fleet maintenance software can help you avoid downtime.
We've got three fleet maintenance case studies that show how the right software can keep your wheels turning.
Three fleet management case studies to learn from
1. Lemoore, California, gets a hand up
Thanks to Dossier Fleet Maintenance, these days the city of Lemoore, California, is keeping more vehicles on the road, longer.
Using Dossier's fleet maintenance program, Lemoore project coordinator Jason Shaw found a critical flaw in the city's vehicle maintenance. "Turns out we hadn't been servicing transmissions on any vehicles," Shaw said. The software identified a major cause behind the retiring of old vehicles. By letting Shaw and his fleet crew know when transmissions needed to be serviced, the vehicles in question had longer lives.
Dossier sends manufacturer-recommended vehicle maintenance reminders to system users. In Lemoore, this feature helped managers identify their transmission oversight, and realize that a simple fix could save a lot of vehicles and money.
Cars and trucks that would have been scrapped by the city were fixed and kept in rotation. The result? A savings of up to $70,000 per year, and more police cars and utility repair trucks on the road.
2. Kern County keeps vehicles on the road
Fleet maintenance software doesn't just reduce downtime, however. It can actually save a fleet.
Larry Werts, fleet manager of Kern County, California, used RTA's fleet maintenance software program to save a failing maintenance department from bankruptcy. Thanks to RTA's system, Werts increased his fleet size by 112% and his staff by 30%.
How? Through increased efficiency delivered by the maintenance software. Before RTA, Kern County's maintenance management practices were split between paper and an archaic software program. Kern County Fleet Services repaired vehicles for multiple city departments, including the Kern County sheriff's office.
The old, inefficient maintenance management program kept maintenance costs unnecessarily high, and the sheriff's department pulled out of their service agreement. It looked like Werts would lose even more customers over the same issue.
Here's where RTA comes in. The software organizes maintenance tasks, and includes preventative maintenance features. Rather than waiting for vehicles to break down, RTA's software tracked the maintenance schedules of the fleet's hundreds of cars and trucks, and scheduled fixes on a regular basis.
The cumbersome job of aligning the necessary maintenance for 354 vehicles was now automated, turnaround time improved, and clients didn't abandon Werts and his team.
3. EmergyCare improves fleet maintenance
Maintaining your own vehicles is one thing. Taking care of your vehicles and other people's is another beast entirely.
EmergyCare of Pennsylvania maintains its own fleet of 68 vehicles while also performing maintenance for 15 other fleets. As you can imagine, the company's need for organization—scheduling in particular—is great.
Enter CollectiveFleet's fleet maintenance software, which helps EmergyCare keep its information in line.
David Leicht, EmergyCare's fleet manager, praised CollectiveData (the maker of CollectiveFleet) for the program's ease of use, nothing that it's "much easier to manage" than other program's he's used.
Leicht cites the usefulness of the program's fuel reporting, reporting that CollectiveFleet has helped him reduce report-writing time from a full day to a few minutes. Leicht tracks his fleet (and others) with CollectiveFleet's preventative maintenance features, switching his problem solving approach from reactive to proactive.
How has fleet maintenance software helped you?
While these three fleet maintenance case studies make for great success stories, be careful not to overlook their key takeaways. Fleet maintenance software can:
Alert you to things you might otherwise miss
Organize your processes and slash busywork
Ease your reporting process
Do you have a fleet maintenance success story from your fleet? Share it in the comments below!
Interested in more ways fleet maintenance software can help your fleet? Check out this other Capterra article:
How Fleet Management Software Helps You Avoid DVIR Fines