Complete Guide
Fleet Preventive Maintenance - Reduce Downtime
Complete guide to fleet preventive and predictive maintenance. Mileage, engine hours, AI, and work orders for zero surprise breakdowns.
10 min read
The Real Cost of Unplanned Breakdowns
An unplanned breakdown doesn't just cost the repair. Here's the real cost:
• Emergency repair: 1.5-3x the cost of a planned repair (rush parts, overtime labor)
• Downtime: $750-$1,500 per lost day (unproductive vehicle)
• Towing: $500-$5,000 depending on distance and vehicle type
• Unhappy client: loss of trust, possible contractual penalties
• Operational cascade: trip reorganization, overloading other vehicles
For a fleet of 20 vehicles with one unplanned breakdown per month, the annual cost easily exceeds $100,000.
Preventive maintenance reduces these breakdowns by 40-60%. Predictive maintenance (with AI) can achieve 70-80% reduction.
Mileage vs Engine Hours: The Dual Trigger
Most maintenance programs use only mileage as a trigger. This is sufficient for road trucks that cover large distances.
But for heavy equipment - excavators, bulldozers, cranes, drilling rigs - mileage is a misleading indicator. A bulldozer can run 10 hours a day while covering less than 5 kilometers. Its engine endures as much wear as a truck covering 500 km.
That's why Tralogit uses a dual trigger:
• By mileage: alert when the vehicle approaches the service interval (e.g., oil change every 25,000 km)
• By engine hours: alert when engine hours approach the threshold (e.g., service every 500 hours)
Whichever trigger is reached first fires the alert. This approach is the only reliable way to manage maintenance for mixed fleets (trucks + heavy equipment).
Work Orders and Parts Management
A good maintenance program doesn't stop at alerts. You also need to manage execution:
Work Orders
When a maintenance alert is triggered, create a work order directly in Tralogit. Each work order documents: intervention type, parts used, labor hours, and total cost. Multiple work orders can be linked to a single maintenance event - the system automatically calculates the total.
Parts Management
Parts and consumables inventory is integrated. When a part is used in a work order, it's automatically deducted from stock. Low-stock alerts are configurable with severity levels.
Shop Visit Scheduling
Plan maintenance visits in advance: vehicle, visit type (preventive / corrective / inspection), description, scheduled date, and severity. The system automatically creates the maintenance record and associated alert.
Complete History
Each vehicle maintains a complete history of all interventions: dates, costs, parts, labor hours. This history feeds the predictive maintenance AI for increasingly accurate predictions.
FAQ
What is AI predictive maintenance?
AI predictive maintenance analyzes each vehicle's complete history - mileage, engine hours, past breakdowns, fault codes - to predict when the next failure is likely and recommend preventive action before it occurs.