Vehicle downtime torments fleet managers. A non-working vehicle will cost the company money in lost productivity, on top of repair costs and other related expenses such as rentals. How well are you minimising vehicle downtime, and have you exhausted your search for ways that technology can improve how you do this?

Think about those alarming times when you learned how long one of your critical fleet vehicles was stuck at a repair shop, not getting the work it needs and—more importantly—not doing the work you need it to do.

Now think about managing downtime two or more steps ahead of this. Analysing Big Data can do more than tell you which vehicles are in the repair shop today—it can help you predict which vehicles will likely be heading to the repair shop tomorrow, for what reason, for how long and what it’s likely to cost you.

It is not uncommon for fleets to experience multiple vehicles of a specific model or spec having the same breakdown issues at the same place in their lifecycle. Using Big Data analysis to identify this kind of costly pattern gives you insight into developing options for proactive downtime management. For example, you could:

• Plan and budget for the downtime and repairs;
• Adjust your replacement cycle to avoid impending repairs;
• and/or change your vehicle selector to eliminate the issue.

This shows that not only can you analyse Big Data to help maintain vehicles and keep them running, but you can also learn from Big Data—see if there are patterns when things start breaking and then plan for it going forward or improve your approach. The more you can get ahead of downtime, the greater success you will have in achieving your productivity and budgeting goals.

Holman is a fleet management partner that invests in technology so that you and your fleet can get it right and grow. We have expanded our telematics integration capabilities to take downtime tracking one step further.

Our network of repair shops is GPS geo-fenced, so the system will notify you the longer your vehicle stays in the shop via telematics location services. These notifications give you a detailed awareness of vehicle downtime so you can minimise the costs and impact on productivity.

Our data warehouse can receive all of this Big Data from your fleet and then feed it through our fleet management system so that you can track it, analyse it, and then make more intelligent decisions to manage downtime and driver productivity proactively.

Holman can help you address your fleet challenges to develop and implement process improvements and cost-reducing initiatives to perform better as an organisation. Contact us to get started