How to Save Money on Fleet Maintenance

The vehicles in your fleet are critical assets for your business. Without them, you won’t get far—literally. 

It makes sense to invest in your vehicle’s maintenance. You need them to be in tip-top shape to keep your business and your drivers safe. 

However, just because fleet maintenance is essential doesn’t mean that you want to spend money on upkeep all the time. And, even with the best of intentions, keeping up with fleet maintenance management can be incredibly overwhelming. 

Equipping your commercial vehicle fleet with reliable GPS trackers can save you serious money on fleet maintenance and repair work, even extending the useful lives of your vehicles. Not only can you avoid the higher costs associated with a poorly maintained fleet, but fleet management software can also make maintenance more manageable for everyone involved. 

Here’s what you need to know. 

The High Cost of Poor Maintenance

Think skipping a trip to the mechanic can help you save a few bucks? Think again.

Fail to keep up with proper maintenance for your vehicles, and you’re leaving money on the table. For example: 

• Delaying routine maintenance may seem like a cost-savvy strategy, but it’ll make emergency repairs much more expensive later. Think of it this way: Vehicle problems don’t disappear with time. They just get bigger, like a snowball rolling downhill. If you keep up with maintenance, you can resolve problems while they’re relatively minor.

• If you don’t keep up with maintenance or check in with the health of your fleet, your vehicles will break at the worst possible time. Be it bad luck or Murphy’s law, deciding to roll the dice (or inadvertently letting maintenance deadlines roll by) will probably lead to vehicle downtime during your busiest season. 
• A poorly maintained fleet will result in poor customer service, which will almost certainly lead to lost business. No matter how hard your drivers work, if your vehicles aren’t working, your customers will be dissatisfied. And, as a bonus, consider what it looks like if your drivers are going around town in clearly underperforming vehicles with your branding. (Hint: It doesn’t look good.) 

By keeping up with your maintenance, you can avoid heightened fuel costs, keep your fleet healthier for longer, avoid purchasing new vehicles, and even enjoy other cost-saving benefits to help you boost your bottom line. 

Here’s Exactly How GPS Tracking Can Help Fleet Managers

GPS tracking might be a form of maintenance, but it’s one that amplifies your maintenance efforts.

Don’t believe us? 

Here, we’ll talk about three specific ways that having a robust GPS tracking system will help you stay on top of fleet vehicle maintenance: 

1. GPS tracking helps you react more quickly to existing vehicle problems. 

GPS tracking devices connect directly to a vehicle’s onboard diagnostic system. So when the vehicle registers a fault code, the tracking system will know what’s happening immediately. 

Once your GPS knows about an issue, you know. Or, more accurately, your GPS tracker can send a fleet maintenance alert to the appropriate person at your company. 

Because you know about an issue right away, you can react promptly. Instead of waiting for your driver to report that something’s amiss—or worse, waiting for that fault code to turn into a broken-down vehicle—you can be far more proactive.

2. GPS tracking allows you to handle service scheduling ultra-strategically. 

You may already schedule maintenance when your fleet hits certain milestones. After all, many vehicle maintenance tasks are tied to specific times or mileage intervals. 

As you’re likely aware, tracking those milestones for an individual vehicle’s maintenance can get overwhelming. It’s all too easy to confuse vehicles, miss milestones, or just waste time and resources manually checking each vehicle’s odometers. 

With the right GPS truck tracking solution, you can have your tracker send your team a fleet maintenance software alert when a vehicle reaches a specific mileage or time milestone. 

Even better: With some GPS tracking solutions, you can connect a mobile fleet maintenance solution, such as Fleetio, within the service. Then, not only do you get a perfectly timed fleet maintenance alert, but you can also set a trigger to schedule maintenance automatically or even manage repair cost approvals.  

3. GPS tracking can predict issues and keep your vehicle healthier longer.

We’ve talked about reactive maintenance—or noticing issues and scheduling maintenance shortly afterward. 

We’ve discussed planned, ongoing maintenance tied to expected vehicle milestones. 

As it turns out, GPS tracking can help you be even more forward-thinking than that. 

GPS trackers are constantly gathering and analyzing data about your fleet’s performance and the performance of thousands of vehicles like yours. 

That data is invaluable. 

With that information, you can schedule preventative fleet maintenance to solve vehicle issues before they even happen. 

Not only does this feel like magic, but it can also keep your employees safe, reduce vehicle downtime, and extend the lives of your vehicles. 

Interested in Winning at Fleet Maintenance with GPS Tracking?

Bottom line?

At ClearPathGPS, we know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—and we’re here to help you get in on that value. Interested in learning more? Request a demo, or contact us today!

At ClearPathGPS, we are focused on helping our customers improve their operations and bottomline. Our top-rated GPS fleet tracking solutions provide real-time data insights and tools needed to more effectively manage the vehicles, people and assets businesses send into the field everyday. Can ClearPathGPS help your operations get better results? Let’s find out – request a demo or contact us today!