Maintaining a fleet of vehicles is a necessary, but expensive undertaking by nature. Oftentimes the maintenance department of an operation can be seen as a “cost center” by the finance team, explains George Williams, CEO of asset management consultant company ReliabilityX. So naturally, when cost cuts come around, the maintenance budget is often a target.
A Fleet Advantage survey confirms that 34 percent of fleet executives believe finance doesn’t understand the benefit of investing in newer equipment. Furthermore, 31 percent said finance doesn’t understand various operating costs associated with the fleet.
In other words, fleets need to be able to translate their data and ROIs into something that makes sense for the entire operation in order to avoid unreasonable budget cuts.
That can be quite the undertaking for some, especially when data sets aren’t universal across all functions of an operation. Matthew Hendrix, senior director of fleet services at analytics company Fleet Advantage, says miscommunication is common when maintenance and finance are looking at two different – sometimes completely different – indices.
That’s something Fleet Advantage wanted to combat with recent enhancements to their fleet analytics software, ATLAAS Unified, which offers the same data for all functions in a fleet from maintenance, to finance, to operations. While the software’s “dashboard” can be customized by a user to focus on the most relevant data for their position, every function funnels the same data sets.
“If you have 10 mechanics and you predominantly spend an hour longer diagnosing one OEM versus the other, that would be 10 hours a day you could be saving and focusing on preventive maintenance,” Hendrix says. “ATLAAS just gives better visibility and dissects the data to a friendly user interface where it’s very easy to be understood.”
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