FLEET REPAIR AND MAINTENANCE
Businesses need to maintain and take care of the cars it owns just as much as as a regular person or car enthusiast needs to maintain their personal cars.
The term ‘fleet maintenance’ is what it says, it refers to the overall money and effort put by a business. It consists of scheduled servicing, inspections, and repairs to prevent potential problems and maximize the amount of time the vehicle is available for you.
It is used in fleet management as a preventative measure against vehicle breakdowns and makes use of metrics such as time, mileage, engine hours, and fuel consumed.
Preventative actions in detail include inspection, lubrication, cleaning, testing, repair, and adjustment, replacement, and repair of worn or damaged parts.
IMPORTANCE OF FLEET MAINTENANCE
The primary weight to the importance of fleet maintenance is to maximize the availability of vehicles. To this end, the appropriate services should be performed on a scheduled basis which is regular in design.
The life-span and overall health of vehicles will be worn out greatly and quickly otherwise.
Proper fleet maintenance can keep your company out of costly litigation resulting from negligence as there are some vehicles that are prone to excessive breakdowns that require extensive repairs.
These vehicles also tend to be out of order when least expected and needed the most.
Apart from the fact that fleet vehicles should be chosen in the first place for their reliability, build quality, and ease of maintenance. Timely maintenance of these ‘wildcard’ vehicles can help you mitigate problems to quite a substantial degree.
Thus, we can see that fleet maintenance holds as much importance as driver safety programs in your business’ efforts to minimize the possibilities of dealing with accidents and legal action resulting from them.
An unsafe vehicle due to lack of maintenance and repair can cause the fleet manager to be held liable for negligence.
To put it simply, a vehicle MUST be safe to operate. Something as unfortunate as a brake fail or differential snap resulting in a serious crash or fatality will cause the vehicle to be impounded by the police for investigation, which will in turn lay the finger on your business.
You may be ordered by the court to produce vehicle maintenance records, which would be used to prosecute your business for a negligent act which was preventable.
METHODS OF VEHICLE MAINTENANCE
It is typically accepted among fleet management circles that vehicle maintenance and repairs fall into two categories, proactive and reactive. Proactive maintenance is scheduled preventative maintenance while reactive maintenance is unscheduled diagnosis of breakdowns and other glitches.
Reactive maintenance usually comes as a result of a lack of preventative maintenance and is costlier than proactive maintenance in every way.
The main objective of a well organized and equipped maintenance team is to get most maintenance and repairs within a schedule, in expense of unscheduled fixes.
An effective proactive maintenance outline should consist of a checklist of preventative maintenance service tasks, an overview of the service intervals and frequencies, inspections and complaints written directly by the drivers, a group of trained professional mechanics, whether in-house or third party, and detailed scheduling and record-keeping that is preferably part of your business MRP.
Undoubtedly, scheduling of maintenance programs is greatly eased by the use of a stand-alone fleet management system or better yet, a fleet management system that is a module of a larger MRP system such as Odoo Fleet.
Computerized systems are indeed a more efficient method for gathering timely reports on all aspects of fleet management as reports can be generated faster, automatically, and more accurately.
This allows a fleet manager to make critical decisions in a timely manner. It also important that the system you are using is customizable to your specific requirements and this is where Odoo Fleet comes in
ODOO FLEET
Odoo Fleet is the free-of-cost fleet management module for your Odoo MRP system.
Its integration with other important modules such as Accounting, Employees, Projects, and Human Resources gives you total control over the entire fleet management process and helps open up new avenues for you to increase its overall efficiency.
The module enables you to comprehensively manage your vehicles by the ways it classifies vehicle brand, model, type, registration number, and chassis number. All these help you easily identify each vehicle of your fleet.
Vehicle maintenance is managed by day-by-day follow ups of all vehicle maintenance needs, service forecast and accurate repair tracking.
Tracking of overall costs of each vehicle and their odometer readings also help in this regard, improving how you keep track of a vehicle’s repairs.
You can accurately follow each car’s fuel consumption and keep track of fuel consumption trends over time.
It is generally known that a car suffers in gas mileage as it gets older but proactive maintenance can keep the bar constant for a great length of time.
Odoo Fleet has a dashboard that gives you a clear overview of each and every vehicle in your fleet by way of live and real-time reports and graphs with the ability to provide custom reports with all the specified information that you need.
Odoo Fleet’s range of features and extensive integration with other modules also allows you to extend your capabilities to fleet security as corroborated data from Human Resources and Employees helps your fleet manager ensure that only good drivers take the driver’s seat.
Recent advances mean integration with sensors and cameras is possible, providing a basis for remote vehicle safety measures.
Fleet security and control is still a burgeoning field in fleet management and Odoo Fleet will certainly employ developed features and methods in the future.
Syncoria is a digital transformation company based in Canada and an official Odoo Ready partner.