How Can Fleet Management Service Reminders Help You Cut Down On Downtime?
Summary
Downtime is costly when you are running a commercial fleet because every vehicle you run costs around $448 to $760 a day for downtime only. But if you keep at least one vehicle off the road for a day, it might cost you $1,344 to $2,280, which is quite expensive.
If you can keep more vehicles on the road, the more money you will make per day, and it will cut down your downtime.
There are various fleet management service reminders that help you do that.
Here we are going to show you some theories to help you understand how fleet management software programs reduce downtimes.
What is Vehicle Downtime?
Vehicle downtimes can happen intentionally or unintentionally based on different factors. But when you are using cars or vehicles to ship services from one place to another, you can’t entirely avoid fleet downtime. But you can minimize it.
Fleet or vehicle downtime refers to the period of time when the vehicles are not working.
It might be because the drivers are on a break or because some incidents occurred that caused the vehicles to not work properly.
The latter scenario is called unplanned downtime that can occur due to delayed service delivery, maintenance work, investigation works, and more.
Planned downtime can refer to your vehicle going for servicing, inspections, or installing new technology, etc.
When you plan a vehicle downtime from beforehand, it will help you manage the costs efficiently. But unplanned downtimes can cost you millions of dollars each time.
As a result, it can cause a failure in your business operations and will also cost your reputation. That’s why Fleet management software was invented for fuel monitoring purposes.
Here are the downsides of vehicle downtimes that you can avoid with fleet management software:
- Delays in delivering services to the customers
- Vehicle replacement takes a lot of money
- You will still have to pay the drivers even when the car was in downtime
- Additional costs might be required when your car is in downtime
Frequent servicing, maintenance, repair plans, using safe driving practices, replacing vehicles on a timely basis, etc., can help you avoid downtime.
It’s not always easy for a person to keep track of all these things.
How to Avoid Downtime with Fleet Management Software?
Fuel monitoring can help you reduce downtime, and along with that, you will have to manage your drivers and schedule driving on a regular basis.
To avoid downtime, you will have to spend some time on maintenance and training programs to improve the vehicles’ performance.
You can work together with human resources and technologies to cut down the downtime of your vehicles. And to do that, fleet management software or FMS is your best bet. There are high-end GPS fleet management software programs that gather data about your vehicle as well as the drivers.
For example, it uses telematics to track the information of your data, including fuel usage, how many miles the car has run, the driver’s performance, etc. These data are stored on a central database.
The software will check out all the relevant data of your vehicles and drivers and will help you avoid downtime in various ways.
1.FMS Monitors Drivers’ Performance
FMS or fleet management software programs monitor how the drivers are performing.
They take help from GPS as well as accelerometer data that help them track the speed of the car and the driving patterns of the drivers.
With the help of this information, you can determine which driver is suitable for a particular job and help you find out negative driving habits. This will also help you in training the drivers to drive more safely.
2.Examine Downtime Data
FMS analyzes the downtime data and catches designs and frequent failures, and the software will help you notice if a particular driver is causing more downtime or there is an underlying cause of downtime.
With that data, you can choose to change the driver or fix your vehicle.
3.Create Service Reminders
You can create reminders using fleet management software for the intervening time of the vehicles. The reminders might include how much mileage the vehicles have and how many hours it has used.
You can set these reminders with the help of fleet management software so that you can perform servicing whenever required. Setting up service reminders helps you create a maintenance plan to make sure your cars are running well.
It will help you keep your vehicles in proper operational condition.
4.Track Data for Repair
You can use your fleet management software to track data so that maintaining your vehicles becomes easier. The FMS will show you the details of your vehicles along with the history of the services they have provided.
It will help you determine whether or not you will have to go for maintenance service for your car after a short time period.
5.To Decide Timelines
Fleet software shows you the data of vehicle trends and their service history practices. If you are not sure when you can replace your vehicles, using the fleet software will help you decide on a proper timeline.
This way, you can ensure that your vehicles are always operational.
These functions of an FMS will help you track the data of your vehicles so that you can manage your business easily. You can cut down your downtime and reduce the cost of vehicle management at the same time.
Conclusion
If you have the right schedule for every task you want to make with your vehicle, then you can avoid downtimes effectively.
For example, use Daily Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIR) to find out concerns immediately so that you can fix them as well.
Create a maintenance schedule that will help you schedule your vehicles and service your automobile from time to time. This will help you to make sure that your car is running all the operations safely.
You can take help from an FMS or fuel monitoring device by setting up reminders so that you don’t miss a task at all.
In the end, it will reduce your downtime and help you create a better business plan.
Team VAMOSYS
Team VAMOSYS have been into GPS business since 2014 and have good experience on GPS Vehicle Tracking, Fuel Monitoring, Fleet Management and GPS Tracker Devices. Writes article on various topics to share the industry experiences and knowledge.