Maintenance plan: the 3 types and how to create yours

Maintenance plans are what keep the fleet's vehicles running in good condition — and what keep the operation from discovering a problem only when the truck has already stopped on the road.

Trucks whose maintenance is up to date delay fewer deliveries and reduce the risk of accidents.

That is why having management focused on preventive maintenance may be the best option: waiting for the failure to happen and only then fixing it tends to cost more, because it adds up parts, labor and the time the vehicle is off the road.

Before choosing the best way to look after the fleet, think about the size of your company, the number of vehicles it has and the differences between them — model, age, type of route. This will be crucial information for creating more efficient maintenance plans.

But first of all, you need to identify the types of fleet maintenance.

In this post, you will find:

• What are the types of fleet maintenance?
• How does preventive maintenance work?
• How does corrective maintenance work?
• How does predictive maintenance work?
• How do you create maintenance plans?
• Why are maintenance plans necessary?

What are the types of fleet maintenance?

You can find some more in-depth explanations of what corrective, preventive and predictive maintenance are (in Portuguese), but, basically, you can understand them as three different responses to different moments in the vehicle's life. Keeping this distinction in mind is what stops the plan from becoming just a repair calendar.

Preventive maintenance

Its goal is to prevent failures and breakdowns with scheduled interventions, done before the problem appears: oil and filter changes, brake inspections, small tasks and routine adjustments.

The person responsible for creating the fleet's maintenance calendar is the fleet manager or the maintenance manager.

To do this, you should analyze the information collected by the driver during trip routines and the maintenance history. From these observations, you create the servicing schedule.

The intervals do not come from a single rule. They start from each model's manufacturer manual and are adjusted according to what your operation shows: type of route, cargo transported, road conditions and that vehicle's breakdown history.

Corrective maintenance

This maintenance deals with a vehicle that already has a failure, and it tends to be the most costly for the operation. This is due both to the need to replace parts and to the labor, which is more laborious than an inspection — not to mention the indirect cost of the vehicle being off the road.

The consequences of neglecting prevention and focusing on correction are vehicles that break down more often, remaining unavailable for long periods, late deliveries and higher risks of accidents.

It is worth noting that corrective maintenance does not disappear: no plan eliminates all breakdowns. What a well-made plan changes is the proportion — how much of the budget goes to the unexpected and how much goes to what was scheduled — and where the breakdown happens, in the workshop instead of in the middle of the route.

Predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance also seeks to find failures in advance by keeping track of the vehicle's performance and condition. But here, you use technological devices to measure the component's condition before deciding on the intervention.

Such as ultrasound, thermal imaging cameras and vibration sensors.

These are more expensive instruments and require someone capable of interpreting the measurement. That is why it tends to pay off first on the components where a breakdown is most costly or dangerous, and not on the entire fleet at once.

Another point that avoids frustration: predictive maintenance does not replace preventive maintenance. It helps decide whether an intervention that was already planned should be brought forward, kept or postponed.

How do you create maintenance plans?

The steps below form a cycle, not a list to go through only once: each round of data collected feeds the next version of the plan.

Gathering all the necessary information

To do this, you need to know all the trucks in the fleet and their data: make, model, year, year of purchase, mileage driven, previous repairs and maintenance history.

It is worth remembering that, when we describe these maintenance plans, we are referring to the most accessible and essential model: prevention.

Some information that can make a difference in your planning includes, for example, how many times the same part has problems, how many times the vehicle stopped working on the road, which parts break down the most, etc.

Likewise, through this data, you can analyze how often the truck needed to be taken in for maintenance and set an interval with greater accuracy.

If the fleet brings together very different models and ages, it is worth separating this data by vehicle group. What a high-mileage tractor unit needs is not the same as what a recently purchased light vehicle needs.

Surveying costs and getting quotes

Even before starting to inspect the vehicles, you can begin surveying possible costs of damage and getting quotes to understand the average costs of some services and part purchases.

After all, you need to plan the inventory of parts and fleet assets too, so it is a step that helps the operation as a whole.

You also need to know how much it costs to have a team of mechanics available in the fleet or a partnership with a workshop, in order to speed up the necessary maintenance and set the expected monthly amounts in advance.

From this survey onward, it is worth separating what is parts, what is labor and what is the time the vehicle is unavailable. These are three accounts that behave in different ways and that, added together without distinction, hide where the money is going.

At this point, you can already analyze the possible checklist solutions to use in the fleet.

Defining the vehicle inspection checklists

The checklist consists of a list of all the truck items that must be checked before the vehicle leaves to make a delivery. For effective maintenance management, it is indispensable.

This list can be made on the computer and printed, by hand in a notebook or with an electronic checklist platform.

Items are included in it strategically, according to the moment of the inspection and the vehicle model. Some items generally common to all lists are tires, headlights and safety items.

You can plan the checklists with the following in mind:

• Specific and/or very different vehicle models in the fleet (for example, fleets that have trucks and motorcycles);
• Quick checks on the operation's short/daily routes, the so-called “vehicle entry and exit checklists”;
• Specific aspects of the vehicle, such as items focused on the mechanical or electrical part of the vehicle.

A short list that the driver actually fills out tends to yield more than a long list filled out on autopilot. If an item never fails on any vehicle, it is probably there out of habit, and not because of risk.

Putting together a schedule

Just as important as defining how the inspection is done is defining how often it is done. As you noticed, there is a daily checklist, which focuses on the crucial items of vehicles used every day — normally those that run shorter, urban routes.

The check includes the headlights, fuel level, safety items and visible external damage, among others. In fact, it is used when the vehicle leaves and arrives to also have greater control over the drivers, identifying when an incident occurred and who was responsible for it.

In general, the schedule needs to take into account the two most important factors:

1. how often the vehicle is used; and
2. the distance of the trip for which it will be used.

The following intervals are a reference from practice, and not a rule to be followed. A vehicle that is used every day calls for the daily check. One that is used once or twice a week can go through a single weekly inspection.

A vehicle used once a month for longer trips, on the other hand, usually goes through the full inspection at each departure for a trip and return to the operation — it can also be inspected on each day the driver stops to rest, both when they finish their trip and when they return to the route.

Keeping track of the data collected and analyzing KPIs

Everything recorded in a spreadsheet or in the truck checklist app is available for the maintenance manager to review, to understand whether their maintenance plans are meeting expectations or need improvements.

The number of corrective maintenance jobs, maintenance costs per vehicle and the number of incidents per vehicle are some useful indicators for generating analyses and conclusions that help your management.

But indicators depend on complete records: if half of the work orders do not note the part replaced or the actual date of the stoppage, the number that comes out of the spreadsheet describes the record-keeping, not the fleet. Standardizing how each incident is recorded tends to yield more than adding new indicators.

Constant communication with the fleet manager is important, since they have a broader view of how the operation works as a whole and can also generate insights for new actions in the maintenance plans, in pursuit of ever better results.

Why are vehicle maintenance plans necessary?

For a transport operation to work, it depends on its vehicles. So it is essential that all of them be in good working condition.

Maintenance prevents:

• Accidents;
• High costs for buying new parts;
• Expensive labor;
• Risk of losing cargo in forced stops;
• Delivery delays due to mechanical failure.

In addition, trucks have a high acquisition cost, as does replacing their parts. That is why it is important to keep track of their structure and wear, in order to find the means and provide what is necessary for their life to be extended as much as possible.

There is also the legal side, which often goes unnoticed in planning. In Brazil, the Brazilian Traffic Code classifies as an infraction driving a vehicle “in a poor state of repair, compromising safety, or that has failed the safety, pollutant emission and noise inspection” (article 230, item XVIII). In this case, the Code provides for a serious infraction, a fine as the penalty and, as an administrative measure, the detention of the vehicle until it is brought into compliance. An up-to-date maintenance plan is no guarantee against a citation, but it is what gives the operation a record showing that it is keeping track of the vehicle's upkeep.

Want help optimizing your maintenance plans? Discover the Prolog App Electronic Checklist — the leading checklist on the market built exclusively for fleets and transport operations.