Significance of Corrective Repairs for Your Fleet

Managing an entire fleet is no easy task. It is extremely difficult to reduce costs while simultaneously managing hundreds of vehicles and equipment.

To achieve this, it is essential to prevent corrective maintenance, but deciding which costs to skip and where to spend can be stressful.

What can you do when several types of maintenance come up at the same time and hit your budget? Is the technology in use up to date? For some useful tips, we take a look at what this practice consists of and what characteristics preventive and corrective maintenance has.

What is corrective maintenance?

This type of maintenance rectifies and repairs defective systems in the equipment. Its purpose is to restore systems that are faulty and could be affecting important aspects of the vehicle, such as performance or safety. Corrective repairs require pre-planning and a logbook of outstanding work orders.

And how can you identify corrective maintenance needs? These are usually determined when an additional problem is discovered during a separate work order. For example, if a technician detects a failure during an emergency repair, a routine inspection, or while performing preventive maintenance, that problem may become a corrective maintenance order.

Features of corrective maintenance

The objective of corrective maintenance is to restore the vehicle as quickly as possible. This provides some benefits such as:

•   Reduce emergency maintenance orders: If corrective tasks can be executed on time once initiated, a company can likely reduce the amount of repair work on these assets. This is reflected in the importance of the preventive maintenance program for the vehicle fleet.
•   Increases employee safety: In some cases, problems identified and labeled as corrective maintenance have significant safety implications. Therefore, we can avoid unfortunate events in the future.
•   Reduces service interruptions. Corrective maintenance work orders on vehicles are managed in a computerized management system. This system helps the teams in charge of this work to resolve problems before delays or interruptions in production occur.
•   Extending asset life: Corrective maintenance prevents failures on other components, thus preserving or extending the life cycle of critical assets.

The value of corrective maintenance of vehicles

It's essential to keep vehicles and drivers safe on the road to maintain your level of client service. But what can you do to keep your fleet in top shape? Follow these recommendations:

•   Implement preventive maintenance. Vehicles treated under this scheme reduce unscheduled repairs and downtime. If maintenance costs are rising faster than incoming revenue, consider outsourcing management to a fleet vehicle maintenance provider.
•   Invest in the right technology. By implementing a computerized monitoring solution, you give maintenance personnel the ability to track and access critical data.
• Specify vehicle usage. Not specifying the tasks to which a vehicle's use is determined (e.g., based on the load carried) leads to maintenance issues down the road that could impact the budget.
  
  

In conclusion, the key to fleet performance is to use sound maintenance data and analysis. In this way, you will be able to identify which areas of your fleet that require preventive care and reduce them, thus impacting corrective maintenance costs in the short, medium, and long term.