How can you avoid the most common breakdowns?

To prevent common breakdowns, follow these steps: Regular Maintenance: Schedule routine maintenance to address wear and tear. Proactive Inspections: Identify potential issues before they lead to breakdowns. Driver Training: Educate drivers on vehicle care and handling. Quality Parts: Use high-quality replacement parts for repairs. Monitoring Technology: Employ telematics for real-time vehicle health data. Emergency Kits: Equip vehicles with tools and spare parts for quick fixes. Predictive Analysis: Use data to anticipate maintenance needs. These measures minimize the risk of common breakdowns and ensure fleet reliability.

Looking for things such as abnormal, or uneven tire wear is one of the easiest ways to determine suspension issues. It can also be an indicator of overfilling or underfilling the tire. If the tire is looking more worn in the center of the tread the tire might be over-filled. If its wearing more heavily on the outsides of the tread (both sides) it could be under-filled. Uneven wear on one side or the other can indicate an alignment issue, which can come from many possibilities, but poor alignment and uneven tire pressures can cost in the form of quicker tire replacement intervals, tie rod ends, control arms etc, not to mention poor fuel economy.

'Preventative' (and "predictive") maintenance can be a great way of avoiding breakdowns, and indeed telematics data does help in these cases. It is essentially the use of data to spot deviations from normal operating parameters, inferring the potential cause and making informed decisions about how to rectify the situation. Using telematics along with visual inspections and personal experience can ensure that problems are identified as they are beginning to emerge. (this is also something that some OEM telematics services can offer as a bolt-on package to FMS too) The point is, "downtime" cannot be avoided. But given the choice, scheduled maintenance is both faster and cheaper than an unscheduled breakdown during an active job/project.

In my experience, staying on top of Preventative Maintenance schedules, Monthly tire tread wear monitoring and reviewing driver post trip reports all play a vital role in maintaining an up and running fleet. I had a mentor that taught me about what he called “planned obsolescence”…based on mileage and hours you could almost predict when certain components would fail as if it had been built in by the manufacturer. Learn your fleet, pay attention to the details and hopefully you can get ahead of some of those pesky major breakdowns. A few extra dollars on the front end to replace a part before detrimental failure will always save time and money on the back end!

In the mid 1980s, I was working for a consulting company, whose customer was a large urban passenger transport company in my city, owning 3,000 diesel buses (2,600 Mercedes-Benz from the ‘70s, and 400 Volvo + Scania from the ‘80s), preparing its move into the near future. I studied the company’s historic average mileage durability of engines and manual gearboxes, according to their status – new, 1st revamp and up to the 4th revamp. While for engines, they were of good quality and durability, the opposite was the case of gearboxes, with premature breakdowns. As solution, I developed a kanban/JIT system to control revamp process, to eliminate bottlenecks and mix of unequal life and fatigue conditions, reducing chances of failures in transit.

Leveraging AI tools for predictive analytics and real-time monitoring, fleet managers can mitigate breakdown risks, enhance reliability, and prolong vehicle lifespan. Predictive Maintenance: Analyzing data to forecast component failures, enabling proactive repairs. Real-time Monitoring: Continuous tracking of vehicle conditions for early detection of issues. Telematics Data: Utilizing telematics for insights into vehicle health and performance. Dynamic Routing: AI-driven route optimization to minimize wear and tear. Driver Feedback: Monitoring driver behavior for preventive coaching on efficient vehicle use.