Wondering what is the true cost of vehicle downtime? Unplanned vehicle downtime is a serious issue that fleets deal with every year, incurring heavy losses and downgraded operations. Come what may the reason, vehicle downtime can grind a fleet company’s growth to a hard stop, if not resolved soon. It is estimated that fleets lose an average of $448 to $760 a day, per vehicle, or $79.33 per hour due to vehicle downtime, and these figures tend to add up fast.
For this reason, it is important managers devise a strategic fleet management program, that offers proactive remedies for potential breakdowns and cut down on recurring costs.
5 Downtime Prevention Tips For Your Fleet To Reduce Downtime Cost
- Monitor Vehicle Health
- Track Driver Behavior
- Identify Faults Early With Predictive Maintenance
- Apply Remote Diagnostics
- Extend Remaining Life & Reduce Cost of Vehicle Downtime
Read more about it below
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Monitor Vehicle Health
It goes without saying, but if you are in the business of ensuring that your fleets run without a hitch, then monitoring the health of your fleet vehicles takes top most priority. A strong understanding of the past as well as current asset health, in addition to real-time information on critical vehicle parameters such as battery temperature, engine health, warning indicators and more, can go a long way in preventing unwanted downtime.
A fleet management software, such as from CerebrumX, gives you access to such information in real-time, along with insights to track the vehicle’s service history, conduct routine quality control and much more. With CerebrumX, you can dive deep into the vehicular health data on a minuscule level, find out key areas that require improvement and cut downtime to a minimum.
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Track Driver Behavior
Another crucial factor that affects fleet downtime is driver conduct and behavior. How a particular driver is operating the vehicle plays a major role in deciding if that vehicle would need to undergo frequent maintenance. Unsafe driving could result in both the driver and the vehicle being reprimanded by the authorities, while reckless and impulsive driving could lead to greater wear and tear of the vehicle – resulting in increased downtime.
Fleet managers are expected to pay great attention on the conduct of their drivers, ensuring that they are following the standard operating procedures (SOPs) to the word, avoiding rash driving and not indulging in idling or other undesired driving practices.
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Identify Faults Early With Predictive Maintenance & Reduce Cost of Vehicle Downtime
As vehicle sensors provide insights into vehicle health, it becomes convenient to predict when a vehicle would need maintenance or identify a part in need of replacement. This concept of predictive maintenance has been getting good traction in the fleet management industry for its ability to notify vehicle maintenance based on the actual vehicle condition rather than on a fixed schedule.
Preventive maintenance can help avoid maintenance activities at the very last moment, saving time and cutting costs. Further, having a clear pipe line of service/repair schedules can help feet managers anticipate and plan expenses. Often, unplanned part failure and malfunctions prove to be big money holes for commercial fleets, as it directly impacts their productivity. Setting up a proper structure for preventive maintenance works wonders in minimizing unplanned downtime. It also enables managers to set reminders at set periods of mileage/time to ensure that a vehicle never misses a service appointment, preventing redundancy.
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Apply Remote Diagnostics
If a vehicle ends up breaking down on the road, remote diagnostic tactics can help fleet managers save significant amounts of time and money in preparing to get it up and running again. The idea is based on tracking the vehicle movement as well as crucial health parameters in real-time, so that if the need arises, the observer can speed up emergency response to facilitate quick resolution.
Fleet service providers can access and analyze historical data as soon as a breakdown call would arrive, helping them troubleshoot repeat issues, convey precise information and accelerate the next set of steps to follow.
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Extend Remaining Life
As fleet managers streamline the preventive maintenance flow for their fleet vehicles, they unlock the ability to identify remaining life of assets. In simple words, technicians get a clearer picture of the remaining lifespan of several vehicle components, such as battery and tires, and are able to identify if further services would help extending their life or not.
As a result, fleet managers can proactively dispose of the components that are nearing their end of life, and ensure installation of new components at appropriate intervals so as to minimize downtime and boost performance.
Undo Fleet Downtime with CerebrumX
At CerebrumX, we are committed to assisting you in developing future-ready fleet maintenance solutions that’ll help pave the path for sustainable driving solutions and safe experiences. We bring the power of industry’s first AI-driven Augmented Deep Learning Platform (ADLP) to ingest mobility and telematics data from millions of connected vehicles, enrich it using advanced AI signals and data standardization process, to generate predictive insights for you to act on.
We adhere to global privacy regulations to maintain driver confidentiality and offer a white-label consent management platform, CerebrumX Secure Consent, that can be easily integrated within your brand’s existing web/app architecture, to reap the benefits of connected vehicle data.
For more information regarding connected vehicle data and the evolving ecosystem around it, Contact us or reach out to our experts.