If you manage a commercial fleet for your business, you may have asked:  How often do you maintain fleet vehicles? We look at what you need to know about fleet vehicle maintenance.

What is Fleet Vehicle Maintenance? 

Fleet vehicle maintenance is the act of continuing to keep your organisations vehicles in perfect working driving condition. It combines thorough planning, habitual work, genuine real-time service, and frequent repair scheduling. Good fleet vehicle maintenance ensures consistent, efficient and reliable performances. 

Not only does it preserve the health of fleet vehicles for the short term, but it is also successful in saving thousands of pounds in long term fleet repair and maintenance costs. In addition, frequent fleet vehicle maintenance is also great for preventing downtime that may be costly in the long run and unproductive. 

Maintenance for fleet vehicles is key in keeping your car or van on the road and safe. In addition, maintenance maximises overall profits as a working vehicle in perfect condition, has increased value and allows you to avoid any drastic or unexpected costs in the future or trouble during resales. 

The most significant existing fleet vehicle maintenance programs combine numerous factors to give customers the best experience. For example, they combine real-time telematic with pre-emptive fleet maintenance to provide maximum efficiency for all customers. 

What To Look For in a Daily Walkaround

Inspect Your Fleet Vehicles Often

After doing so, experts test the tire pressure and use a dipstick to check all the oil levels to ensure that everything is in good condition and working order. 

We recommend that you keep track of your vehicle's mileage, especially when specific problems occur. Doing so will enable you to anticipate further issues in the future, and you can plan maintenance for your fleet vehicle around those benchmarks. 

Here is a list of the services our team can offer for fleet management:

•  Full engine inspection
   Oil testing and metal deposits from bad engine parts
   Full fleet vehicle tune-up
   Inspection and replacement of all belts and hoses
   Brake testing, repair and replacement
   Tyre alignment and rotation
   Spark plug replacement
   Steering fluid replacement
   Fuel injection line clearing and repair

Anticipate Fleet Maintenance Needs

It is crucial for those working in fleet vehicle maintenance to address the problems that occur before they become more severe issues that could profoundly impact your vehicle's bottom line, why it is best to keep your car, van, or vehicle maintained.

Any last-minute emergency repair can often be four times more expensive than those that are reported prior. It can also cause prolonged and unexpected downtime whilst professionals finish up on other clients or prepare their equipment for repairs. 

Such is why it pays much more to invest in assets such as telematics solutions that provide alerts for maintenance problems in real-time. In providing services and devices such as real-time alerts and remote visibility for multiple areas of the vehicle (fuel usage, engine fault, idling, fleet management software, etc.), these things can help you anticipate, prepare for and report several issues. 

Constant monitoring of any wear and tear of your vehicle allows you to prevent catastrophic failures, unavoidable damage or accidents out on the road as you can plan and report damage much faster. 

Overall, doing so can assist in creating effective, manageable maintenance plans; you can minimise professionals unexpected downtime and reduce any significant repair expenses. 

Fleet Vehicle Maintenance

Every 3K to 5K Miles

Many fleet vehicles in the industry require an inspection and frequently tuning-up about once a month or every 5,000 miles to ensure everything is working in order. 

Routine maintenance allows you to increase the number of miles by an extra hundred thousand, which earns you many benefits in the long run, especially on longer journeys or more significant tasks. 

Like most professionals in the field, Fleet managers aren't so fond of wasting money or time on over maintenance. 

All around, auto repair allows them to keep the process simple with completed inspection checklists and numerous services to request based on each of the things your drivers report over previous months. 

10K Miles and Beyond

It doesn't matter whether you have several box trucks making many deliveries all over different areas of the country or worldwide, or if you have a fleet of transit vehicles going out to a hospital or hotel for different tasks; you require some maintenance plans. 

Maintenance plans on long journeys that carry plenty of cargo and deliveries are essential for preventing severe engine problems and allow your vehicles to move smoothly throughout the day. 

Be sure to have your company or fleet managers schedule you to come into fleet vehicle maintenance shops at least every few months or so so that our professionals can take great care of your auto services.

Develop a Plan for Fleet Vehicle Maintenance

Having a sound understanding of your vehicles' health and upkeep is essential to ensuring smooth journeys and deliveries of all services. Integrating fleet technology for management helps you streamline and keep track of all maintenance requirements. 

These devices are almost like GPS for fleet tracking systems and are critical for improving your vehicles overall performance and health. In addition, any real-time alerts make life so much easier when managing huge fleets and maintenance checklists. 

Establish a Consistent Maintenance Schedule

A significant aspect of a wildly successful fleets vehicle maintenance program is a focus on a well-structured maintenance schedule; thorough checklists and plans allow for comprehensive maintenance, repairs, replacing parts and more productivity. 

Develop and use a fleet vehicle maintenance checklist for drivers 

Upon establishing a baseline schedule perfect for all mobile maintenance needs, professionals can create a suitable driver list. Such ensures inspections on fleet vehicles are incredibly thorough and aim to cover all vital vehicle performance areas. In addition, it can assist drivers in maintaining upkeep and uptime by identifying any issues or damage as soon as they arise. 

How often should fleet compliance checks be carried out?

You also want to ensure that your business and fleet management is compliant with all necessary regulations that won't put your company at stake. In many organisations, regular auditing is vital due to new employees' frequency in changing job roles and even old employees leaving. 

Standard, robust licence checks are also needed to ensure this compliance is ongoing. Whilst there is no set timeframe, many fleet operators can often fail to ensure each driver's credentials are regularly checked. In failing to do so, these companies risk falling behind on their compliance with regulations. 

Many businesses conduct annual licence checks for each driver at least once. However, it is essential to remember that drivers pick up plenty of points in a short period or few hours. One-off safety checks are just as helpful along the way, whether they are conducted randomly or set up to check drivers with any reported issues. Such a thing ensures much more rigorous compliance, fleet management and overall maintenance. 

If you manage a commercial fleet, there is a good chance that you will require commercial fleet spraying. For vehicle painting in Doncaster and Scunthorpe, follow the link below.