Reducing unplanned vehicle downtime is essential to reducing your fleet costs, but is it easier said than done?
Vehicle downtime represents a heavy burden for businesses. This is part of the proper functioning and efficiency of vehicles. However, breakdowns are inevitable, leading to unscheduled repairs.
However, when downtime is unplanned, its costs are often higher than expected, making it more complex to manage.
Let's take a closer look at what causes these costs and how they can be managed.
How much does downtime cost your fleet?
Even if businesses budget for fleet maintenance costs, these can quickly be overwhelmed by expenses related to unplanned downtime.
Having a clear understanding of the causes of vehicle downtime costs is a good starting point for determining how it can be reduced or avoided.
First, there are the visible costs of downtime, such as regular maintenance checks and associated repairs to get vehicles back on the road. Depending on the age of a vehicle, costs for labor, parts and repairs can be somewhat anticipated and managed. But when unexpected outages occur, there are much less visible costs to charge to the budget.
These may include:
- Failure to deliver goods or provide service to a customer on time;
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- Costs relating to a replacement vehicle;
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- A negative impact on the driver's productivity if he is no longer able to fulfill his missions;
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- Pay drivers for unscheduled stops.
Practices, processes and plans that limit downtime
While some downtime within your fleet is out of control, a proactive rather than reactive maintenance approach can curb excessive costs. Even small changes and more effective planning can make a big difference in results.
Use technology to improve uptime
Fleet management and maintenance software offers many features and benefits that help businesses achieve goals related to reducing downtime and reducing costs. The software can efficiently schedule and track vehicle maintenance and repair with the ability to receive automatic alerts to notify fleet managers.
In the long term, complete visibility of maintenance activity from your software is very valuable in reducing vehicle downtime costs. For example, using stored and easily accessible vehicle maintenance and repair histories, you can see where process inefficiencies and asset issues are causing higher downtime costs.
