Operational Maintenance

Regularly servicing and maintaining the commercial vehicles in your fleet isn’t simply good practice – it’s often a mandatory prerequisite for keeping warranties valid.

In fact, most vehicle manufacturers publish “recommended” servicing schedules to ensure their products remain in optimal working order. These guidelines are usually based on the longest recommended intervals, meaning you should service your vehicles with comparable or greater frequency.

Failure to honor these recommended servicing schedules increases the risk of your vehicles no longer being fully covered by their original warranties. And as a result, future repairs will have to be paid for out-of-pocket.

However, there are other – less obvious – consequences of inadequate vehicle maintenance.

The Hidden Costs of Not Maintaining Your Commercial Fleet

Sudden lapses in warranty coverage are bad enough. But in the absence of regular maintenance:

  • Your vehicles will need repairs more often in the future. And many of those repairs will be more expensive since the intervals between maintenance will have been longer.
  • Your team will experience more downtime as the commercial vehicles in your fleet are out of commission.
  • The projected useful lifetime of each vehicle will become shorter as a result of delayed maintenance and servicing. Simply put, you won’t get as much mileage out of your fleet as you could have.
  • Poorly maintained vehicles pose a greater safety risk for drivers – both your own and others. Under certain circumstances, you might even face litigation and penalties for putting “unsafe” vehicles on the road.

However, it’s not enough to simply maintain your commercial vehicle fleet. You must also document all repairs to prove to the manufacturer that you’ve followed the recommended servicing schedule. This documentation should include regular inspections, cleaning, and repairs of all the vehicles in your commercial fleet. This is especially important for high-stress components such as engines, brakes, transmissions, and suspensions.

Our Approach to Operational Maintenance

Staying on top of this ongoing maintenance isn’t easy – particularly when managing a large fleet. And given these challenges, many companies cut corners by outsourcing the job to an operational mechanic.

But at PCTS, we use a slightly different approach

We employ expert journeyman technicians to perform comprehensive operational maintenance. Our journeyman can provide the routine servicing, cleaning, and even lubricating you’d expect of a more generalized mechanic. But they’re also qualified to perform more involved tasks like inspections and diagnostics to ensure your fleet benefits from:

  • Fewer repairs, with less downtime between each visit.
  • Longer useful lifetimes – even if the warranty has lapsed.
  • Lower operational costs and cheaper overall repairs.

In addition, the PCTS team can service all commercial vehicle models and components, including those manufactured by Ford, GMC, RAM, Isuzu, Hino, International, and Freightliner.

Moreover, we provide comprehensive documentation (including for BIT inspections) to help safeguard your warranty protection. We even provide hard copies and scanned backups to ensure you never lose this paperwork.

To learn more about our full range of operational maintenance solutions, schedule a free consultation with PCTS today.

Interested in one of our products? Give us a call at 510-429-0303 or click below to get started with a free quote now!

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