Prescriptive fleet maintenance: what it is and how it works

Prescriptive maintenance is presented as the most advanced step in fleet maintenance, an alternative for making vehicle inspections faster and more reliable.

Initially, fleets used only corrective maintenance; then preventive maintenance emerged as a way to reduce costs and increase vehicle durability; and with advances in technology came predictive maintenance, based on keeping track of component condition.

However, although many still do not know much about predictive maintenance, there is a next step on this scale: prescriptive maintenance.

It works through technologies and is usually identified as an advancement of predictive maintenance. In other words, it aims to predict and anticipate vehicle failures, indicating maintenance at the right time and helping make better use of vehicles’ useful life.

It is also presented as a way to reduce operating costs. Learn more:

• What prescriptive maintenance is;
• What this type of maintenance is for;
• Why prescriptive maintenance matters in fleets;
• How prescriptive maintenance works.

What is prescriptive maintenance?

Prescriptive maintenance is the type of maintenance that emerged as an advancement of predictive maintenance. Its main goal is to let technology take on much of the work of analyzing and diagnosing vehicle condition.

In this case, the proposal is to reduce the mechanic’s investigative effort: the mechanic receives the problem already identified and focuses on correction. In practice, this depends on the quality of the data feeding the system and does not eliminate validation by whoever performs the service: what technology delivers is a recommendation, not a verdict.

The technologies prescriptive maintenance uses range from temperature and vibration sensors to artificial intelligence and IoT (internet of things).

It is worth making clear where this layer of data comes from. Onboard sensors, connectivity and telemetry systems are provided by companies specializing in this type of solution and contracted separately, making prescriptive maintenance an arrangement between suppliers, rather than a standalone feature of a single system.

How does prescriptive maintenance work?

Like predictive maintenance, it also anticipates a failure, but goes one step further: it identifies an alternative solution and generates the work order needed to correct the problem.

You can think of it as a way of answering: “What leads to this problem in the vehicle, and how can it be controlled?”

Although it seems quite advantageous on its own, it works best when the other maintenance types (preventive, predictive and corrective) are fully operational.

This is no minor detail: without an up-to-date preventive plan, organized maintenance history and inspections that generate reliable records, there is no database for any algorithm to prescribe anything. Prescriptive maintenance is the top layer of a process that needs to be working beneath it.

Another important aspect of how it works is that it operates only through smart technologies. So, if your fleet does not have a separate budget for this goal, implementing prescriptive maintenance will not be possible.

What is prescriptive maintenance for?

Its main function is to make fleet vehicle maintenance more reliable and, in doing so, sustain the availability of those assets.

In addition, one goal of this type of maintenance is to monitor asset health with automation. This speeds up problem identification and helps prevent noncompliant vehicles from going out on routes.

After finding problematic situations in vehicles, the intelligence in prescriptive maintenance technologies also suggests repairs based on the data collected and maintenance history.

Why is prescriptive maintenance important in fleets?

Increase vehicle availability and reliability

These two maintenance indicators tell the manager, respectively, whether a vehicle is fit to complete a route and how long a vehicle can perform before a failure occurs.

Since this is one of the functions of prescriptive maintenance, it also helps define its importance. After all, better results in these KPIs tend to be reflected in reduced costs, delivery deadlines met and greater productivity in transport operations.

Optimize fleet maintenance management

Even when the services are simpler, vehicles commonly remain idle for a few days to undergo a complete maintenance process.

For example, if a problem such as a burned-out headlight bulb is found during the daily inspection, the vehicle should be sent to the workshop, which needs to have the bulb and labor time available to replace it.

Otherwise, it is necessary to wait for the part to arrive or an available workshop slot so the vehicle can be repaired and fit for use. This ends up causing delays and even overloading other vehicles that need to take on the workload.

This is the kind of wait that prescriptive maintenance aims to reduce. Applied to the example above, the reasoning behind prescriptive maintenance would be to identify component degradation before failure, so the part could be purchased and the service scheduled in advance, instead of the vehicle arriving at the workshop with the problem already present.

Its scope, however, depends on what the fleet can measure: it is only possible to anticipate what some data describes. A component with no sensor, no history and no inspection record tends to be discovered only at breakdown, in any type of maintenance.

Higher quality in transport operations

If problems are addressed before becoming failures, vehicles tend to perform better, positively affecting transport operations.

Internal processes also gain in quality because communication between inspection, workshop and management becomes more direct: the same data that identifies the problem also indicates the service.

Process automation and standardization

One of the major advantages and distinguishing features of technologies is the ability to automate processes. While manual work requires several small tasks to record information, the same activity can be done digitally in a few clicks, which also contributes to process standardization.

In prescriptive maintenance, artificial intelligence can even suggest process and record-keeping improvements so your operation has even deeper logistics optimization. It is worth treating these suggestions as hypotheses to validate: the manager remains responsible for the decision.

Reduce decision-making time

Because of the speed of the technologies used in prescriptive maintenance, and with fleet analyses already processed, decisions tend to happen faster. The maintenance reports themselves are available without having to compile them for every query.

Reduced decision-making time may be linked to other benefits: lower costs, fewer fleet asset losses and more commercial business opportunities.

Before looking at prescriptive maintenance, however, it is worth checking whether the basics are in place — an up-to-date preventive plan, inspections that generate records and a reliable history for each vehicle — because this is the raw material for any layer above. Want to understand how to bring even more efficiency and optimization to your fleet maintenance management? Read our full post here.