Tips to Manage Your Fleet

There are steps fleet managers can take to ensure their people, parts, vehicles and facilities are working efficiently.

Effective fleet and maintenance management programs should provide safe, economical and reliable operation. The managers also should be proactive as heavy equipment moves through its economic life.

How? By providing numbers, and showing specific costs for replacing—or keeping—equipment.

Fleet managers need this information to help others, including the top level of management, understand the purchasing needs. To formulate its goals, upper management will want to know:

• What is next year’s expected operating revenue?
• How will the company finance new vehicles, if needed?
• Has the company budgeted for any changes?
• What are the three-, five- and 10-year plans for the fleet?

Here are some other tips/practices that fleet managers might want to consider:

1. Establish a policy that states a machine’s worth should be considered if that machine requires more than 30 percent of its residual value in annual repairs.
2. Have fleet managers sign off on corrective actions and repairs. (This keeps them in touch with where those repair dollars are going.)
3. Consider using, or updating, a fleet management information system. Caterpillar offers the Vital Information Management System, which allows data from many areas to be easily analyzed. VIMS makes it easy to determine when equipment has reached the end of the road, and helps fleet managers establish cost-effective life cycles for equipment based in part on historical data.
4. Be prepared to offer alternatives. If upper management decides to withhold capital for use elsewhere or the revenue stream shrinks, then a fleet may be forced to age. This eventually will create a need for more operating dollars to offset the increased costs for parts and labor on an aging fleet. Thus, fleet managers should provide executive management with a budget that offers capital and operating dollar alternatives.

Fleet managers need to communicate their needs to upper management while keeping the equipment running—and, ultimately, finding a way to get the material moved.