Maintenance
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A good preventive maintenance program will reduce the over all operating cost of your truck or fleet, if it doesn’t don’t do it. 

There are two types of maintenance, they are planned and unplanned.  A preventive maintenance schedule is planned maintenance, and ideally all other repairs should be a result of the preventive maintenance inspection.  Unplanned maintenance includes breakdowns and non-anticipated repairs.  Unplanned repairs are twice as expensive as planned repairs.  Break downs will cost you: towing charges, service call charges, driver wages, loss of load, customer satisfaction, increased secondary repairs i.e. air compressor failure may result in engine damage, hydraulic failure may result in personnel injury and environmental damage, MTO/DOT violations, decrease in resale value, and the list goes on. 

   Although preventive maintenance will increase your operating cost it will reduce your unplanned expenses.  Ideally preventive maintenance should make up 70% of your maintenance expense, excluding fuel and oil.  The remaining 30% should be planned repairs resulting from the PM inspection.

Here are some very good PM check lists which I have designed.  Tractor page 1  Tractor page 2    Tractor page one and two can be printed on each side of a page, tractor 1 and tractor 2 form a single inspection, they are not two separate inspections. 

Also see my Equipment operators daily check list. 

For a very good printable copy of these PM sheets or a trailer specific sheet you will need a Microsoft Word program, click on the hyperlink to download the file yourself.  Word Tractor1    Word Tractor2     Word Trailer. 

Record keeping is of paramount importance in the business world, and maintenance costs are no exception.  If you do not track your expenses then you can hardly tell if a preventive maintenance program is working in decreasing your over all expenses.  Expenses must be tracked.  You can track expenses on paper or use the inexpensive program below (click on the banner).

K-Jon vehicle software banner

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Disclaimer: All information offered within this web site is offered "as is" without warranty expressed or implied.  Information offered here in, may or may not be accurate use at own risk.



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Copyright © 2001 Gary Anderson. All rights reserved.
Last modified: Saturday August 04, 2001.