An Insider’s Guide To Facing the Challenges of Mobile Fleet Management
Maintaining regular vehicle service can be challenging and mobile maintenance services are rapidly expanding. Not just for personal cars and trucks, regular mobile services are now available for commercially operated vehicles, including fleets. Yes, that’s right! Fleet management services are available right at your home or business.
Managing fleet maintenance can be costly and difficult to schedule, track or monitor. There can be a lot of variable factors including engines, transmissions, tires and brakes. Mobile maintenance service providers at your location can lower your cost and easily increase the efficiency of operation.
There are now many mobile service options available. Fleet management services include wash, wax and detailing options; engine oil and filter change, differential oil change, fuel filter change, topping off fluids, changing the air filter, logging and tracking mileage and service interval requirements. Just being able to pick your preferred time of day and location for service can have dramatic and immediate improvements.
Example Service Provider – Companies like Unique Otto serve customers from both fixed locations and provide mobile maintenance and fleet management services.
To consider cost benefits, first let’s establish some basic assumptions. For our purposes, let us assume all vehicle fleet managers/owners have sufficient financial resources or budget to have vehicle maintenance performed in timely accordance with each vehicle manufacturers’ maintenance requirements. Deferred maintenance is not addressed in this post. It may also be important to mention there are different fleet aging and replacement strategies organizations follow. These three areas: financial budget, deferred maintenance, and vehicle replacement should be acknowledged considerations for good planning.
The cost of labor in having a qualified mobile mechanic or technician perform your vehicle maintenance service is an obvious factor in overall cost. However, this may be the least portion of an overall look at the expense picture.
The cost and quality of basic parts, filters, fluids and soft supplies is the other major component in looking at mobile vehicle maintenance expense. Opportunities may exist to improve the quality level of components used or lower component cost.
The “time” cost in having a vehicle out-of-service for regular maintenance may be significant. This impacts the amount of time a service vehicle is available to make service calls. There may be earnings potential from increased productivity or improved quality of service.
The cost of having the vehicles driver travel and wait at a service shop for basic vehicle maintenance services may be obvious to some, but overlooked or hidden. When you or your driver arrive at a fixed location for vehicle maintenance service, there is almost always some form of wait even though an appointment was made in advance. Either way, having your driver manage the maintenance creates inefficiencies in most cases.
There are many areas of possible expense or cost savings with fleet management services. Consulting with a reputable mobile maintenance representative could easily uncover other opportunities. As an example, many service companies include mileage and maintenance service logging and tracking. Service companies offer features and services to help improve the financial return on your fleet investment.
Quinn Turley is a motor industry veteran with GoPro Engines – Used engines and used transmissions supply chain management. https://www.facebook.com/pg/goproengines
