What is fleet maintenance?

At its core, fleet maintenance entails inspections, preventive care, repairs and parts management. Good fleet maintenance often requires a comprehensive fleet maintenance management process to maximize operations and prioritize driver safety.

The fleet maintenance process is crucial for an operation aiming to keep vehicles on the road, mitigate downtime and maintain driver safety.

Fleet maintenance is often mistaken for fleet management or fleet maintenance management. These terms are used interchangeably but serve different functions.

• Fleet maintenance is the physical, hands-on work of keeping vehicles and equipment operational: oil changes, tire rotations, brake jobs, repairs, inspections, and so on. It’s getting the hands dirty and making sure that they are ready for the road through preventive care, inspections and periodic repairs.

• Fleet management is the broader discipline of overseeing the entire vehicle lifecycle, including maintenance, budgets and driver monitoring.

• Fleet maintenance management is the strategic oversight that coordinates all fleet maintenance work, such as setting up service schedules and managing technician workloads.

Organizations that depend on a fleet need both a macro and a micro view of each vehicle’s status. This visibility allows them to accurately plan their services based on which vehicles are operational, which require emergency repairs and which ones need to be replaced.

Increasingly, companies are choosing to run their fleets on real-time fleet maintenance software, such as a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). This software can automate both a 10,000-foot and a more granular view of the availability of their fleet at any time, regardless of fleet size. This process keeps a clear focus on maintenance services and operational costs.

A comprehensive fleet maintenance program equips organizations with tools to address regulatory compliance, extend the life of automotive vehicles through preventive maintenance, monitor equipment status and improve parts and inventory management.

The fleet maintenance process is evolving, and newer, proactive approaches are gaining traction within operations.

Fleet maintenance typically employs a preventive maintenance approach to handle routine maintenance tasks. Preventive maintenance is a proactive approach to maintenance that employs scheduled, routine upkeep performed on equipment or vehicles at regular intervals to prevent breakdowns before they occur.

It’s viewed as a type of planned maintenance, and in fleet maintenance, it uses historical logs, manufacturer guidelines and odometer readings to schedule routine inspections.

However, predictive maintenance is condition-driven, meaning it uses operational data and condition monitoring (CM) for anomaly detection. A predictive maintenance approach uses fleet maintenance data to make proactive decisions before issues arise.

Predictive maintenance relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to detect early warning signs and help fleet teams identify patterns in their data. The goal is to predict when assets are likely to fail and take corrective action in advance.

This approach is becoming more significant as autonomous vehicles (AVs) become more popular among fleets. Self-driving systems rely on complex hardware and go beyond the regular mechanical care of a traditional vehicle.

Increasingly, fleet maintenance depends on both preventive and predictive maintenance. According to industry research from Fleet Rabbit, preventive-only fleets face 30–40% more unplanned downtime than the ones that use a data-driven, predictive approach. Downtime caused by reactive maintenance is unacceptable as the freight landscape gets more complex, with tighter delivery windows, driver shortages and rising fuel costs.

Predictive maintenance software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for continuous fleet maintenance. A company should implement a basic preventive maintenance schedule before deploying advanced predictive maintenance technology. Using both approaches can maximize both uptime and budget.

Human mechanics who perform inspections and track vehicle lifecycles are the ones who primarily handle the fleet’s maintenance process. The following are common elements found in many approaches to fleet maintenance:

• Emergency and unplanned repairs: Manage reactive fixes when a vehicle breaks down or fails inspection.

• Parts and inventory management: Source, maintain, stock and track components needed for service.

• Preventive service: Manage oil changes, filter replacements and tune-ups based on vehicle mileage or time intervals.

• Routine inspections: Maintain scheduled walkaround checks, fluid levels, tire pressure and brake assessments.

• Vehicle lifecycle tracking: Monitor vehicle age, mileage and repair history to inform replacement decisions.

• Compliance and safety checks: Track all driver vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs), Department of Transportation (DOT) inspections and regulatory recordkeeping.

Today, advanced fleet management solutions and metrics have simplified fleet maintenance. The right software streamlines workflows by using artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies to more accurately assess the condition of fleet vehicles and help ensure maximum uptime:

• Automated maintenance scheduling: Fleet maintenance scheduling tools trigger service reminders based on mileage, engine hours or calendar intervals. Fleet managers save mechanics’ time and operational costs by scheduling service in advance through a single, unified view.

• Battery management: Electronic vehicles (EVs) are a major part of fleet operations today as organizations prioritize sustainability. Fleet operators need a comprehensive plan for managing vehicle operating system updates and cybersecurity patches. Electric vehicles (EVs) require battery management systems (BMS) to optimize charging and battery lifespan.

• Cycle counting: Cycle counting is an inventory auditing method where a small subset of inventory is counted on a rotating schedule. It is used in place of shutting down operations to count everything at once (a full physical inventory).

• Fleet maintenance software integrations: Fleet maintenance software can automatically initiate data flows by connecting maintenance platforms with telematics, fuel cards and existing systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise asset management (EAM). This approach centralizes operations, allows for predictive maintenance and automates service reminders and tasks.

• Fleet tracking integration: Fleet providers must have real-time information on their vehicles’ location on the road. Fleet tracking uses telematics to allow fleet operators to track the location, vehicle health and activity of a fleet of vehicles. It is often achieved through GPS tracking devices installed in each vehicle that transmits data to centralized software.

• Fuel tank management notifications: Fleet management software will provide real-time alerts to monitor tank levels and notify drivers when fuel exceeds tank capacity or when refueling is required. Automated alerts and notifications prevent unauthorized fuel use, monitor fuel consumption and minimize downtime.

• Work order management: Manual work orders are replaced with vehicle maintenance reporting standards (VMRS) code automation, which transforms traditional work orders into digital, standardized data. By standardizing coding, managers can accurately track component failures and mechanics can select specific codes for a single repair in real-time.

• Warranty and compliance tracking: Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) must manage and track their warranties regularly. Tracking software helps fleet managers identify eligible warranty repairs and maintain records for drivers and vehicles.

There are several fleet maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider when tracking vehicle performance, fuel efficiency, safety and cost controls:

• Cost per mile (CPM): Cost per mile (CPM) is the average variable and fixed cost required to run a vehicle per mile or kilometer.

• First-time fix rate (FTFR): First-time fix rate (FTFR) is the percentage of issues resolved at the first service appointment without requiring a follow-up visit.

• Fleet availability rate: The fleet availability rate is the proportion of the overall fleet that is available for deployment at any time.

• Mean time between failure (MTBF): Mean time between failure (MTBF) determines the reliability of an asset. It’s measured by averaging the time that occurs between breakdowns.

• Mean time to repair (MTTR): Mean time to repair (MTTR) is the average amount of time required by a shop or mechanic to repair the vehicle and return it to service. MTTR is like MTBF but serves a separate purpose related to measuring reliability.

• Planned maintenance percentages (PMP): Planned maintenance percentage (PMP) is the measure of the overall maintenance time spent on scheduled tasks relative to unplanned repairs.

Fleet maintenance offers several key benefits to fleet operators and organizations, providing a competitive advantage over those using more manual processes.

A poor vehicle inspection can ground vehicles, even if they seem to “work fine.” No business benefits from removing fleet vehicles from circulation because they failed inspections.

Preventive and predictive maintenance strategies help keep vehicles on the road longer by preemptively alerting fleet managers to necessary repairs and automatically notifying them when maintenance is needed.

Regularly inspecting and repairing vehicles reduces the risk of road accidents and protects drivers. Fleet maintenance teams use real-time data and dashboards to track inspection timelines and repair history.

Optimally running fleet services—with more vehicles in service and fewer breakdowns or downtime—means providing more on-time deliveries and services. This approach can lead to higher revenues, lower repair costs and a more competitive total cost of ownership (TCO).

Well-oiled fleet operations increase vehicle uptime, extending asset life and maximizing the overall vehicle lifespan.

While the positives of a fleet maintenance system significantly outweigh the negatives, there are some issues any organization should consider.

A significant problem for fleet maintenance is controlling costs when operations are disrupted. A mechanical failure can halt service and cost thousands in missed or delayed deliveries.

The solution is to shift to a preventive and predictive maintenance strategy that uses telematic platforms that analyze diagnostic codes in real-time.

A separate challenge, often outside of the fleet manager’s control, is sourcing essential assets and parts. Supply chains are unpredictable and backordered components leave mechanics waiting for days, weeks or even months.

The solution is to proactively manage parts inventory to help ensure maintenance teams don’t have to stop what they’re doing, causing unnecessary downtime.

Fleet managers are overseeing both legacy internal combustion engines (ICEs) and electric vehicles (EVs) powered by batteries. The old way of maintaining fleets cannot process data specific to electric vehicles (EVs), such as charging schedules or battery diagnostics.

The solution is to find a unified platform that consolidates all maintenance data into a single dashboard.