Your fleet serves a vital function in delivering services or products to customers. Yet, it’s easy to take your vehicles for granted when they don’t give you obvious trouble.
This is one area where the old adage that, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” doesn’t apply. If you let your fleet maintenance slip, it can put a serious dent in your bottom line over time.
Let’s jump in and look at some of the ways regular maintenance saves you money.
Fleet Maintenance Keeps Labor Costs Down
If you saw employees standing around, doing nothing, you’d get on their cases. Idle employees drive up your cost of labor.
If one of your fleet vehicles breaks down in the field, though, that’s exactly what happens. Your employees are stuck by the side of the road and getting paid to wait for a tow.
Staying current on vehicle maintenance minimizes the number of times trucks break down. Your employees stay busy providing services or making deliveries. That means you get maximum value for your cost of labor.
Limits Repair Costs
When it comes to vehicle repairs, the repair costs are always higher than the repair bill.
You must soak up the cost of employee labor. You lose money on lost or delayed business while the vehicle is down. Not to mention the intangible damages to your brand reputation that goes along with service problems.
Taken in total, the actual repair costs can soar into the thousands of dollars. Regular fleet maintenance lets you catch problems before they interfere with daily business. You only pay for parts and labor, instead of scrambling to fix things in the eleventh hour.
Avoid Accidents, Lawsuits, and Fines
When vehicles break down, it’s not just inconvenient. It can cause fatal accidents. If someone connects the cause of the accident to poor vehicle maintenance, it can open you up to lawsuits.
That is, of course, the worst-case scenario. The more likely scenario is that poor maintenance will leave a headlight or turn signal bulb burned out. This can get your drivers pulled over and ticketed.
Depending on your state and local regulations, you could face fines. Regular maintenance frees you from these kinds of avoidable costs.
Improves Fleet Longevity
Vehicles are the biggest expense in any fleet. The longer you can keep vehicles on the road and fuel efficient, the better off you are. Regular fleet maintenance activities like oil changes extend the working life of every vehicle.
Say that each vehicle brings in an estimated $300 of profit per day and averages 22 working days a month. If you extend the working life of just one vehicle by six months, you bring in an extra $39,600. Do that for 15 vehicles and you’re looking at around $600,000 of extra profit before you replace them.
Parting Thoughts
Regular fleet maintenance saves you money on several fronts.
It keeps the cost of labor down because employees aren’t waiting around for a tow. It keeps your total repair costs down. You avoid accidents, lawsuits, and fines.
It also improves fleet longevity, which offsets vehicle replacement costs with additional profit.
Pacific Truck Colors provides maintenance services and truck painting in the Portland, OR area. For more information about our fleet services, contact us today.
