Checklist analysis for fleet management

Fleet checklist analysis is a way to better understand your vehicles and identify the main recurring problems in your operation.

The checklist is a tool for keeping maintenance services up to date and recording nonconformities found during inspections. In digital tools, when a nonconformity is indicated, it can automatically generate a work order.

Analyzing these checklists therefore also means understanding how many services were requested from these inspections over a given period, which failures recur and how often.

See below:

• Why perform fleet checklist analysis?
• When should you perform checklist analysis?
• How can you perform fleet checklist analysis?

Why perform fleet checklist analysis?

Because this analysis makes problems easier to identify in fleet vehicles and also easier to resolve. From there, you can apply improvements to the checklist completion process.

Fleet checklist analysis also makes it possible to gather short- and long-term information, making decisions more effective because they are based on data.

Some possibilities in fleet checklist analysis include:

• Number of NOK items per fleet license plate;
• Number of checklists completed per day;
• Checklist completion time (exclusive to digital tools);
• Average time to repair an item opened through a checklist, from WO opening to closure;
• The most frequently reported item in the fleet;
• Number of incidents per driver;
• Problem recurrence rate (by driver, vehicle or responsible mechanic);
• Criticality level of the identified problem.

All of this concerns the results of a fleet checklist.

On the other hand, you can also analyze a completed checklist. In this case, you check whether items were filled in correctly, according to the standard set by the company, and what was unclear and should be improved.

When should you perform this analysis?

When you begin noticing many problems and inconsistencies in checklist completion, it may be time to perform an analysis and identify improvements.

In addition, if maintenance costs are above average, you can perform checklist analysis to find the main problems that may be causing the increase.

Some tools and methodologies you can use to complement and support your analysis in this second situation are the PDCA cycle and fault tree analysis.

How can you perform fleet checklist analysis?

Create an analysis plan for fleet management

Your analysis plan can be general or specific to an area, such as the vehicle checklist. It is important for its structure to follow a logical pattern and answer the main questions the company's board may have.

Here is an example structure:

1. Presentation of the company's goal and/or objective.
2. Description of your analysis plan's objective.
3. Analysis base used over the period specified in the plan (month, quarter or six-month period).
4. Definition of the means of collecting and analyzing the necessary data.
5. The people responsible for each stage: data collection, organization and analysis.
6. Rules for creating fleet analysis reports.

Having an action plan makes it easier and more straightforward to move on to data collection and analysis itself.

Here are some tips for performing fleet checklist analysis:

Starting point: fleet objectives and goals

The fleet's objectives and goals guide every decision you make. What you should consider is how much the decision contributes to or moves you away from achieving those objectives.

Checklist analysis starts from the same principle: why are you performing this analysis? Is it consistent with what was defined for the fleet during this period?

For example, if there is an objective of reducing corrective maintenance performed over a month, it is worth analyzing fleet checklists to understand which main items are leading to corrective maintenance and what can be done to prevent it from occurring.

Use maintenance history

Maintenance history is built through work orders generated by fleet maintenance processes, including those opened from checklists. In a way, when a WO originates from an inspection, this history also preserves the context of the checklist that gave rise to the service.

This history is a fundamental tool for your analysis, bringing together data from completed checklists and services performed. It makes it possible to compare different periods to understand, for example, which types of services occur in periods of lower and higher demand.

It also allows comparisons of the number of incidents per vehicle and responsible driver, among other information. You can use it both to analyze a completed checklist and to assess problems and solutions for your maintenance management.

Develop hypotheses for the problems you find

A fundamental stage in fleet process analysis is developing hypotheses about results. Negative results are generally analyzed to identify improvements.

When developing a hypothesis or solution, the analyzed data available to you needs to make sense and support your conclusion.

The theory as a whole needs to make sense, as does the proposed direction of the solution.

Generate complete reports

Reports serve to summarize the most important data and present your hypothesis and arguments for improving fleet results. In the report, you should show what you found, what you conclude from the data and the next steps toward achieving objectives and goals.

Some fleet data collection and analysis platforms already have automated reports, such as the electronic checklist system itself. This makes the work easier, but it is still worth complementing the generated output with your conclusions and observations, also highlighting the most important information.

Want to learn even more about the electronic checklist and start using it in your fleet? Schedule a free system demonstration with our team.