The costs of planned versus unplanned downtime are miles apart.
When a vehicle has an unexpected service event, a fleet loses between $700 and $1,500 a day in revenue, and pays extra for repair costs since technicians have to go through trouble-shooting diagrams, or trucks have to wait for maintenance bays to open up and for parts to arrive.
To keep downtime to a minimum, fleet managers have to know what problems may be developing far enough in advance to flip an unplanned maintenance event into a planned event. Critical to this process is to understand the risks of when, and for how long, a vehicle can safely operate before it needs service.
Tom Howard gets email alerts whenever his fleet of Kenworth T680s or T880s detect issues that require servicing.
As fleet director of Veritable Vegetable, an organic produce distributor based in San Francisco, he uses the Kenworth TruckTech+ Remote Diagnostics service. Alerts are also sent to his local dealership, NorCal Kenworth.
“Kenworth TruckTech+ helps us avoid all these hassles by allowing us to determine if there’s an easier fix or if the truck can be driven to a Kenworth dealership instead of having it towed in. That’s great for our company’s bottom line,” he said.
Truck manufacturers and dealers have become predictive fleet maintenance information and service providers. With wireless connections to vehicles, and powerful data analytics, they are able to accurately diagnose problems remotely and initiate actions plans to help their customers maximize uptime.
