Three ways predictive maintenance can help your fleet operations

If you’re a fleet manager or in the fleet industry, you’ve most likely heard the words predictive maintenance. Maybe you heard about it through a connection in your network or saw it mentioned in a corporate announcement.

A common challenge for fleet professionals has been standardizing the multitude of data they receive daily across vehicle manufacturers, make or models. This issue is followed by the question of how to leverage that data into actionable insights in order to make business decisions.

The problem with this perspective is that it’s disruptive to operations and becomes extremely costly.

That’s where predictive maintenance comes in.

What is predictive maintenance?

Predictive maintenance, in its simplest form, leverages the real-time, customized telematics data to identify vehicle or truck failures before they occur across all Class 1-8 vehicles.

A predictive maintenance platform takes hundreds of thousands of vehicle data points, such as sensor data, driver usage plus more, and learns from analyzing the vehicles across all asset classes to pick out patterns that have led to distinct failures in the past. It then alerts the fleet manager in real-time, of a potential failure weeks before it will actually happen.

Let’s look at three ways that predictive maintenance can impact your operations for the better, using real-life examples.

1. Eliminate expensive surprises

In a case study done by Pitstop, a Geotab-enabled logistics fleet noticed significant inconsistencies in its maintenance schedule. Some trucks were on a normalized 3-month preventative maintenance scheduling. Other underperforming trucks were in the shop every 2-3 weeks.

A V12 study found that the average age of the U.S. vehicle fleet has increased by 17%. This has led to an increased time spent in repair, with the older vehicles twice as likely to spend more than $1,000 per year.

When the logistics fleet introduced a predictive maintenance platform to the fleet's operation, the manager was able to identify several underperforming trucks with potential battery and brake failures, as well as non-safety-related maintenance tasks.

By knowing this, they were able to prioritize critical battery and brake failures and avoided expensive unscheduled maintenance.

2. Reduce total number of shop visits

By leveraging the actionable recommendations, the fleet manager reduced its total number of shop visits per vehicle. This was achieved by identifying non-critical or non-safety issues and by combining those repairs with the next oil change.

With predictive maintenance, a fleet manager is able to keep the trucks on the street by booking ahead of time to ensure the vehicle is in the shop once rather than twice.

3. Improve the safety of your fleet

Predictive maintenance can help improve the safety of your fleet. Brake predictions allow a fleet manager to remotely detect the health and ability of a vehicle to stop in a reasonable distance.

Worn out brake pads cause longer stopping distances. According to NHTSA, of the collisions caused by vehicle-related causes, 22% of those are brake-related.

With predictive maintenance, fleet managers are able to minimize risk by leveraging the vehicle health score and insights and remove any dangerous assets on the street or remarket underperforming ones ahead of the normal replacement cycle.

See also: Geotab’s fleet safety solutions

Conclusion

These points combined resulted in $2,000 average cost savings per truck per year for the poorest performing vehicles, ensured safety, as well as increased vehicle uptime by 25% for the studied logistics fleet. Predictive maintenance is helping turn a reactive industry into a proactive one.

No matter the size of fleet, accessing and understanding the breadth of telematics data in order for managers to make informed business decisions is the future for fleet professionals. Take advantage of a predictive fleet maintenance platform today.

About Pitstop

Pitstop is a predictive maintenance platform that allows customers to clearly understand and leverage data from their automotive assets. Pitstop aggregates data with proprietary algorithms, AI and machine learning to provide real-time insights for the transportation ecosystem. By predicting vehicle failures before they happen, enterprise companies, fleet managers and vehicle owners use Pitstop to understand and organize maintenance needs, while avoiding costly repairs and reducing downtime. For more information visit Pitstop on the Geotab Marketplace.