What your fleet is really costing you | Gearbox

Most fleet managers have no shortage of reports.

You can see maintenance spend, pull work order reports, look at parts, fuel, downtime and utilization. If you need to, you can probably export most of it into a spreadsheet.

But there's a question that can be surprisingly difficult to answer:

What is each asset actually costing you to keep in service?

That's different from knowing what the fleet spent last month.

A total maintenance figure tells you how much was spent. It doesn't tell you which assets are driving that spend, whether those costs are increasing or whether one asset is becoming significantly more expensive to keep than another.

And that matters when you're making decisions about the fleet.

Fleet costs don't sit in one report

The cost of running an asset builds up over time.

There's:

• Scheduled servicing and repairs
• Parts and labor
• External work
• Tires
• Fuel
• The time an asset spends out of service

And, depending on the type of fleet, plenty of other costs around keeping equipment available and working.

The information for all of that often sits across different systems:

• Your accounting system knows what was purchased.
• Your telematics system knows how an asset has been used.
• Your maintenance system knows what work was carried out.
• Your parts system knows what was issued.

Each system is useful, but the problem comes when you try to put the whole picture together.

If the information isn't connected back to the asset, it becomes difficult to see what that asset is actually costing you over its life.

A fleet-wide number only tells you so much

Say your fleet spent $500,000 on maintenance last year.

That number might be useful for budgeting, but it doesn't tell you very much about what is happening across the fleet.

• Maybe most of that spend came from a small number of older assets.
• Maybe a particular model is consistently costing more to maintain.
• Maybe maintenance costs have increased sharply on an asset that used to be relatively inexpensive.
• Maybe one machine has had repeated repairs that are starting to add up.

Those are very different situations, and they call for different decisions. Looking at costs by asset gives you a much better place to start.

The asset tells the story

Maintenance history becomes much more useful when it stays with the asset.

You can see what work has been done, when it was done and what it cost. Over time, that starts to give you a picture of how the asset is performing.

You might see that an asset is requiring more repairs as it gets older and notice that a particular type of failure keeps appearing. Or you might find that two similar assets are operating very differently, even though they are doing broadly the same job.

That information can help with decisions around replacement, repair, utilization and future purchasing.

It doesn't make the decision for you, it most certainly gives you better information to make it.

Reports should help you make decisions

Good fleet reporting isn't just about producing more numbers.

It should help answer questions like:

• What does each asset cost to maintain?
• Which assets are costing significantly more than others?
• How are those costs changing over time?
• What types of work are driving the spend?
• How much maintenance activity is each asset generating?
• Which assets have a history of repeated repairs?
• How does maintenance activity compare with how the asset is being used?

Those answers are much more useful than a single fleet-wide maintenance total and they give fleet and operations teams something they can actually work with.

Compliance is part of the picture, not the whole picture

Compliance reporting has an important job to do. You need to know that inspections have been completed, registrations are current and the right records are available when they're needed.

But a fleet can be fully compliant and still be expensive to operate and that's why cost and performance deserve the same level of attention. The useful question isn't just whether an asset has been serviced or passed its inspection. It's also whether the maintenance history is telling you something about that asset.

Are costs increasing? Is the asset spending more time in the workshop? Are repairs becoming more frequent? Is the amount of work being done on it starting to look out of proportion to its use?

Those are the signals that can influence much bigger fleet decisions.

The information needs to stay connected

This is where fleet software can make a real difference. When maintenance activity, parts and labor are recorded against the asset they relate to, you can start to see the cost of maintaining individual assets rather than just the cost of maintaining the fleet.

That gives you a more useful view of what is happening across the operation. It also means the information is there when you need it, without pulling data from several systems and trying to piece it together in a spreadsheet.

The goal isn't to create another report. It's to make the information you already have more useful and know what your fleet is really costing you. The cost of a fleet isn't just the number on the maintenance budget. It's the work being done, the parts being used, the labor going into that work and the pattern that builds up around each asset over time.

When that information stays connected to the asset, you can see more clearly where your money is going and how your fleet is performing.

And that gives you a much better basis for deciding what to maintain, what to replace and where to focus your attention.

That's the kind of visibility Gearbox is built to provide.

Get a clearer view of your fleet costs

See maintenance activity, parts and labor connected to the assets they belong to, so you can make better decisions about your fleet.

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