[Stay on top of transportation news: .]
Real-Time Cost Pressures Test Fleet Preventive Maintenance Schedules
Rising Expenses Push Fleets to Balance Uptime Demands With Disciplined Shop Planning
Key Takeaways:
- Fleet experts warn that deferring preventive maintenance may reduce short‑term costs but ultimately drives higher repair expenses and downtime.
- Industry leaders say data from telematics, fault codes and equipment usage is increasingly essential for prioritizing PMs and managing shop capacity amid rising operating pressures.
- Companies emphasize that consistent PM schedules, technician training and early issue detection are key to maintaining uptime and avoiding off‑schedule breakdowns.
With a soft freight market and rising operating expenses continuing to squeeze profit margins in the trucking industry, fleet maintenance leaders must negotiate a tricky balance between controlling costs and maximizing vehicle uptime through preventive maintenance.
“There is a lot of pressure on fleet managers to reduce costs,” said Steve Berry, global field service director for Hendrickson, a major supplier of truck and trailer suspensions and commercial vehicle parts.
Those pressures, he explained, can sometimes lead to preventive maintenance decisions that are not in a fleet’s best long-term interests.
“I’ve seen it many times. A fleet manager can decide to push maintenance schedules out, and it looks great for the first two years. He’s a hero,” Berry said. “Then all these maintenance costs come in year three. Deferring PMs looks great early on, but it will come back to bite you, financially and in [equipment] uptime.”
To meet their cost and reliability goals, fleets should know their equipment well and work with original equipment manufacturers to establish effective PM strategies.
“Knowledge is power,” he said. “You can make proper decisions on what you need to do now, what you can let go, and knowing the trade-offs.”
Setting Priorities
Prioritizing inspections and utilizing shop and tech resources efficiently are constant challenges for fleets, particularly large operators like Penske Truck Leasing, which has 396,000-plus pieces of equipment and nearly 1,000 shops.
“Since we run all different types of equipment, we have a multifaceted approach,” said Chris Hough, Penske’s vice president of maintenance design and engineering. “First, we prioritize PMs around what [equipment] is being used the most. Then, we work down through the rest of the fleet.”
Penske incorporates input from OEM partners and data points monitoring lubricant life, idle time and the operating environment, he said. This helps technicians make informed, proactive decisions.
Top indicators that deferred maintenance is creating reliability issues include increased road calls and events that sideline a truck on the highway or in the yard.
“An event could be something as minor as a truck not starting at the beginning of a shift, air leaks, flat tires or something else not caught on a PM,” Hough said.
Pay Now or Later
Another PM challenge for fleet leaders is balancing demand for the truck versus the time and resources it takes to perform the maintenance work, said Victor Cummings, vice president of service operations at Rush Enterprises, the largest commercial vehicle dealer in North America.
“Sometimes, the maintenance work comes in waves, and can overwhelm a shop’s resources and capacity,” he said.
In those instances, Rush can augment a customer’s team by providing a vetted technician to bolster resources, dispatching a mobile service unit or sending the overflow work to another nearby shop.
There is a clear connection between completing planned maintenance and preventing unplanned equipment downtime, said Chad Wellborne, general manager of RushCare, the company’s customer support operation.
“When you take the time to do proper PMs, the truck is more available and has higher uptime,” he noted, adding that a repair from a preventable breakdown could take longer than the actual PM work.
Image
(Rush Enterprises)
Wellborne gave an example of a fleet that performs 1,500 PMs a year.
“Once they implemented and followed a more structured PM plan and schedule, the fleet went from 39% PM compliance to 97%,” he said. “Asset utilization rose to 99%, the highest they had ever seen.”
PMs are considered especially crucial in fuel hauling, where it’s all about risk management, said Todd Singleton, director of maintenance and compliance for motor carrier Gemini Motor Transport, an affiliate of Love’s Travel Stops and the primary fuel hauler for the company.
“In a fuel fleet, safety critical systems come first — brakes, air systems, steering, suspension, tires, anything related to containment or securement,” Singleton said. “We prioritize based on risk. Telematics, fault codes, brake and tire wear trends and roadside history tell us where the risk is. At the same time, our technicians often spot patterns before the data does.”
The key, he said, is spending more time preventing than reacting.
“In a fuel operation, even small reliability issues get amplified because the margin for error is so low,” Singleton said.
Proper Procedures
Fleets often encounter peaks and valleys in fleet usage, which can impact the regularity of preventive maintenance activity, said Bryce Kinsley, vice president of maintenance operations for truck leasing and logistics firm Ryder, which holds 250,000 pieces of equipment under management and has nearly 760 shop locations.
“Utilization can fluctuate in some of our transactional business, but we have one set PM schedule throughout the year, and we stick to that,” he said. “We might be working on one truck that’s 10 years old and another next to it that’s 10 days old.”
Kinsley noted Ryder’s PM schedule is built on the type of vehicle, its needs, mileage, usage application, data from telematics and driver input.
“Trucks can get busy,” he added. “The advantage of a comprehensive scheduling process is we can see if there is a higher volume of PMs required during a specific period, then we can choose to start pulling in units early to smooth that out.”
Image
(Aurora)
Kinsley stressed that the best way to avoid off-schedule events or breakdowns is to inspect, identify and address everything on your plate at that scheduled PM.
“With deferred maintenance, you start to see trucks come back into the shop off schedule,” he said, noting that it leads to losing revenue-generating uptime and dealing with costly repair issues.
As trucks have become increasingly complex and computerized, onboard sensors have generated more data that techs need to absorb and understand, Kinsley added.
“That’s changed some of the things we do with a PM, like service intervals on certain components,” he noted. “We get fault codes [in real time from truck telematics] that may tell us to change a part right now or take a certain service action” that could happen outside of a PM window.
In the past, the action might have been triggered by a static mileage interval.
“Now we have a fault code that says change the part now, regardless of miles,” Kinsley said. “That saves you from changing a part too early, and missing operating revenue, or too late [and experiencing a failure].”
Technician Training
This explosion of new and evolving data and electronics has put technician training at the forefront, Kinsley said.
“We place a ton of focus on technician training,” he said, adding that technology advancements as well as tools and skills continue to evolve, which means fleets have to keep their technicians up to speed.
New hires are placed in instructor-led training, which takes them through Ryder’s process toward becoming trained and qualified PM technicians.
Ryder also has a “reliability team” that monitors and analyzes data on repairs, events and truck performance, and serves as a knowledge resource, along with a technical assistance center to offer real-time support.
“You have to be consistent with your PM processes,” Kinsley stressed. “When you defer PMs, you are creating a mountain for yourself. It’s very hard to catch up once you are behind.”
