Tracking PMs with Fullbay

Ah, preventive maintenance. We know it and love it. That’s why we talk about it a lot.

Tracking PMs is like hitting two birds with one stone. You’re keeping trucks on the road where they belong and bringing much-needed work and revenue to your shop. A lot of shops would love to offer a PM tracking service to their clientele, but they’re put off by the idea of, well, doing the tracking.

Good news: You don’t have to do it by hand.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee (or any other beverage of choice) and let’s talk about how you can use Fullbay to track PMs for your customers.

Why PMs Matter

Even the most routine PMs are a big deal. If you’re a commercial repair shop, offering a PM tracking service can mean a steady stream of business from your ideal customers.

Let’s say you want to service fleets. Great idea – it’s constant work. Smaller fleets have plenty of trucks that need PMs, but they usually don’t have the resources or structure in place to track them.

They should track them, though, if they want to maximize uptime.

This is where your shop can swoop in and be the hero. Tracking PMs for private fleets keeps vehicles compliant, safe, and on the road. Scheduling downtime is infinitely less expensive than surprise repairs stemming from lack of maintenance. If you can do this for a fleet while handling their regular maintenance, they’ll have more and more reason to keep bringing you their business.

What PMs Should I Track?

We’ve talked up preventive maintenance before, so we won’t rehash how important it is.

PMs are much more than just oil and filter changes. They can also include a service or an inspection. If your shop is certified to handle DOT and CVIP checks, you can roll those into PMs, too, along with even state- or province-mandated inspections. Some PM checklists look a lot like pre- and post-trip checklists to ensure everything is looked at on a regular basis. Basically, every time you touch the unit, you should perform some kind of inspection to keep it safe, compliant, and on the road.

Other vital PMs that should be on everyone’s radar include:

• Air braking system
• Air intake inspection
• Automatic transmission
• Battery and charging system
• Engine cooling system
• Engine drive belt and pulley system
• HVAC system
• Internal engine and overhead adjustment

Those are some common PM tasks, but you can also roll canned jobs under that banner. Think about work that doesn’t always have a scheduled interval, but is generally handled at the same time within the lifespan of a part or truck. Wheel alignments, wheel seals, and even a good waxing can fall under PMs.

How to Track PMs in Fullbay

The philosophy behind Fullbay is to mirror human medicine, with the viewpoint that it’s more cost-effective to prevent illness than cure it. Therefore, Fullbay was designed to be a medical record for trucks and heavy equipment. Fullbay gives you access to PM histories and compliance reports on any Internet-connected device.

Here’s three ways for you to keep an eye on PMs through Fullbay:

The Fleet Report shows which units are coming due for PM service, which ones aren’t, and which ones are due right now. It also displays information on mileage, DOT stickers, and inspection dates.

The Fleet Cost Per Unit Report can be run according to date blocks; it lets you see labor and parts costs, mileage, cost per mile, and even service call costs and sales tax attached to individual vehicles within whatever timeframe you choose.

Unit Records are the medical records for individual trucks. Everything you need to know about the vehicle is in this report, including the VIN, mileage history, and the PM schedule. Use this feature to track individual trucks in a fleet or track them all. You can add parts and intervals at the unit level, and can even modify the list according to components of certain types of vehicles and customize the PM intervals based on miles, hours, days, or months. What’s more, any repairs the customer pushes to a later date get added to a pending repairs list, and you can create service orders based on which PMs and services are due.

How Fullbay Can Help You Attract The Right Customers

So. You know you want to use Fullbay’s PM tracking as a selling point for your shop. You’ll need to approach each customer a little differently, as a tracking service will help them all in various ways. As soon as you’ve worked that out, show them!

You can target over-the-road customers, local fleets of varying sizes, and other businesses. Those “others” can include businesses that have construction or farm equipment, but they might not even be heavy-duty customers. They might be restaurants, florists, and any business that delivers goods.

In a private fleet scenario, your potential customers will include drivers, safety compliance officers, fleet managers, and the owner. Ultimately, the end customer the fleet serves is another one that benefits from staying on top of PMs.

If you’re pitching your PM tracking to a private fleet, share the tracking tool with the safety director, fleet manager, and drivers. They’ll love it because they can log in notes on pre and post-trip inspections. In cases where that information affects the PM schedule, managers and drivers can make corrections mid-stream to take care of maintenance on their terms without worrying about unscheduled downtime.

Fullbay isn’t just about tracking PMs – it offers a lot of other goodies to help streamline shop management and make your life easier.