If your business is mobile and depends on your fleet being on the road, then quality fleet maintenance is vital. Without it, your business will slowly fall apart. There are so many things to consider when keeping your fleet on the road and your business profitable. Cranberry Auto Service Center in Westminster, MD knows about all of them. You can call fleet maintenance one of our many auto service specialties. Why not, everyone else does. Taking care of a fleet can be overwhelming and quite costly if you’re not prepared. So, our fleet service experts have put together the Top 5 Tips For Maintaining a Fleet.
TIP #1:
Establish and Maintain Operational Standards For Fleet
This is just a sophisticated way of saying, make sure drivers take care of the vehicles. As with any vehicle, its condition depends largely on its driver. Your fleet will have a variety of drivers behind the wheel, and they’ll all have different driving histories, habits, and skill levels. Some of these differences will be beneficial to the fleet, while others will be harmful. Those that are harmful will also hurt your bottom line, taking the vehicle(s) off the road for costly repairs. It could be as simple as communication between drivers and managers about the fleet’s condition.
TIP #2:
Stick to a Preventive Maintenance Service Plan
The key to keeping any vehicle in tip-top shape is adhering to a routine maintenance schedule. Quality fleet maintenance means you don’t wait until there’s a problem before visiting Cranberry Auto Service Center in Westminster, MD. Our service experts will keep you two steps ahead of any repair problems that might interrupt your ability to make money. Any time that your fleet spends in the service bay, and not on the highway, is called downtime. During downtime, money is being spent instead of being earned. Preventive maintenance keeps your fleet’s downtime to a minimum.
TIP #3:
Monitor the Costs of Fleet Ownership
Proper fleet maintenance is about more than the actual servicing and repairing of the vehicles. Every fleet owner needs to carefully monitor what it’s costing them to own their vehicle(s), and how it’s affecting the business. As your vehicles get older, they may require repairs and services that are eating away at your profits. Would it be more cost-effective to sell/replace a vehicle than continue pouring money into its servicing? Some fleet owners allow profits and productivity to gradually slip away.
TIP #4:
Protect and Preserve the Tires
The tires are arguably the most important vehicle part. Everyone knows about the importance of maintaining proper vehicle tire pressure. But it’s one thing to use a Tire Pressure Monitoring System for personal vehicle safety, and it’s another to use a TPMS for your fleet’s safe operation. Proper tire pressure will affect many things, including tire tread wear, vehicle handling, gas-mileage efficiency, and more. Given the inordinate amount of wear-and-tear fleet vehicles accumulate, it’s especially important to pay close attention to tire pressure. Cranberry Auto Service Auto Center in Westminster, MD understands the importance of tire maintenance on overall vehicle safety.
TIP #5:
Keep Your Fleet Maintenance Provider on Speed Dial
This means that you should always be in constant communication with your fleet’s service provider. Cranberry Auto Service Center’s fleet- owning customers keep us abreast of any complications or red flags so that we can address them immediately. The ultimate goal for all fleet owners is to decrease the fleet’s costly downtime. Just by sharing information about your fleet that we might not be privy to, we’ll be able to fix performance issues or correct concerns before they become expensive repairs.