Your fleet management system accumulates data from year after year of repairs and vehicle maintenance. However, there may be one critical method with which you can examine this data that you aren’t using yet – failure analysis. It is important to understand why vehicles are coming in for repair, and especially why they are coming in for unexpected repair. In addition, you may want to know why some classes of vehicles are not reaching their expected life spans, which directly affects your bottom line.
Let’s explore five ways that you can analyse and record your data elements in your fleet system to help you figure this all out.
1. Job Reason Codes
For every task on a work order, you have to assign a reason code. These will tell you if the job is routine – since we do know that key parts need to be replaced at regular intervals – or if repairs are driven by unusual events, ranging from collisions to out-of-cycle failures.
This is a basic statistic and it pays to review the distribution of jobs by visit reason every month.
You need to check if codes are being assigned properly, and it may not be a bad idea to look at your code sets and see if any revisions or restructurings are needed so that this data will properly reflect what is happening to your fleet. Becoming aware of this information may paint a larger picture of your fleet and where its maintenance issues may be coming from.
2. Part Failure Codes
Oftentimes, the failures come at a more granular level than just the “job.” What if a part or part vendor is causing you issues? You can configure your system to require that a failure code is recorded when you are replacing any and all parts that are issued. Even if you are mostly recording Normal Wear as the reason for replacement, you have the basis for mining part issue data for exceptions and trends. This can allow you to understand if there is a systemic problem with the class of vehicles, or maybe a problem with the parts coming from a particular vendor. Equipped with this information, you can make more effective decisions regarding your part purchasing.
3. Repeat Repair Analysis
If you want to take a step back and observe the recurrence of a particular job type, you have that power as well. Your system can be configured to tell you how many times a particular repair job is done within a specified interval of time and usage. You can even drill down to have different intervals for a job code for different types of units. Additionally, the system can send you a warning in real-time when a job is completed too soon again to focus attention on the issues with the vehicle or with the prior repair.
4. Standard Reports
Your standard reports can readily give you repair cost per usage reports at the push of a button. And if you run these reports by vehicle segment and sub-segment, you can drill down on your data to find out which sets of vehicles are truly driving your repair costs.
Furthermore, the Performance Measure Monitor module can quickly generate trend data for your utilization analysis, which allows for more holistic decision-making for your vehicle assets and purchasing options.
5. Custom Reporting
If these standard reports are not sufficient, AssetWorks staff can assist your organisation with the development of custom crystal reports, dashboards, or ad hoc reports to enable detailed data mining to help your organisation develop customised failure analysis or Mean Time Between Failure statistics. These unique reports can help you find out how reliable your vehicles and your repair methodology are, as well as point out how these can be improved.
