Why You Should Love Preventive Maintenance

Think of your truck as a star athlete. There are certain things your athlete needs to turn in incredible performances game after game. We’re talking about the right kind of fuel, the right gear, and the occasional visit to the doctor to make sure everything is operating the way it should be.

Still with us? Let’s take it a step further. If your truck is your athlete, then preventive maintenance — which we’ll alternately refer to by name or as PMs from here on out — is the occasional visit to the doctor.

In this case, your doctor is your mechanic.

Top 3 benefits of preventive maintenance

Stop a problem before it stops you
The key to preventive maintenance lies in its name: prevent. If you’ll excuse a little hyperbole, you are preventing something from going horribly wrong.

The modern era has been good to trucks: they’re being built better and safer than ever. But that doesn’t mean you can drive them forever without taking them in for service now and then. Everything wears out after a certain amount of time and punishment. The brakes go, the alternator goes, the steering goes.

The problem is these issues rarely happen without some kind of warning sign. Sure, you may get the occasional truck that just suffers a catastrophic failure, but that’s a rarity these days. Usually a good mechanic can see the beginning of a problem: the number of engine hours a unit has, for example. By spotting the issue and servicing the engine — or any other part that’s showing signs of wear — early on, you’re saving your vehicle a lengthy stay in the bay.

Lower your maintenance and repair costs
As Spider-Man’s uncle once said, “With great repairs comes great expenditures.”

Okay, maybe he didn’t say exactly that, but he came close.

Big repairs are expensive. Ignoring your truck’s maintenance schedule or the suggestions of your mechanic can lead you down a rabbit hole of problems. It’s not just the failure of major parts you need to think about, either; try picturing ignored maintenance as a domino effect. As one part starts to fail, others follow in its wake.

Before you know it, you’ve got multiple major parts that need replacing and probably additional repairs on top of that. Why not make the smaller, cheaper repair when it comes up instead of dragging it out and tripling how much you’ll end up spending?

Less overall downtime for your truck
Big repairs take time.

Lots of time.

That’s time your truck could be out on the road earning its keep.

Think about it: get your truck in for its preventive maintenance and get things repaired or adjusted while they’re still functioning. You’ll probably be in and out in less than a day.

Or ignore the preventive maintenance. A part fails, the truck breaks down, and you lose days or weeks of time it could be earning money for you while it’s worked on in the shop.

We know which option we’d pick.

So why don’t more people do it?

Preventive maintenance sounds pretty darn good to us. Manufacturers like it, too — actually, .they like it so much they even provide suggested maintenance intervals for most of the vehicles they produce. Get your truck tended at these intervals and most of your mechanical problems won’t be problems at all. They won’t even happen.

So why do we keep having to jump on the horn and chat about why PMs are so great?

Here are some of the reasons they slip through the cracks:

I’m busy.
Yes, it can be tough to imagine losing a half-day or day of work while the truck is in the shop for PM work. Instead of worrying about a lost day, worry about how not busy you’ll be if your truck is out of commission for a week during the busy season.

I’m on a budget.
Everyone’s trying to save cash these days, and we’re totally on board with being frugal! But putting off important maintenance now basically sentences you to handing over your wallet to your mechanic when something inevitably fails down the line. That will kill your budget.

It takes too much time to schedule it out.
We know. You’re sick of looking at your mileage and trying to remember if you needed to bring the truck in for service at 30k or 40k miles. Your mechanic isn’t too keen on digging through all their paperwork to figure it out, either.

That brings us to our big pitch.

(C’mon, you knew it was coming.)

The wonderful world of Fullbay

Fullbay was created in part because preventive maintenance is a) incredibly important, and b) it can be a pain to track by hand.

When you bring your truck to a shop that runs on Fullbay, your mechanic will input your truck’s information into the software. They’ll pull the usual data: make, model, engine type, year — and from there Fullbay does the rest. Fullbay’s integrations allow it to pull manufacturer-recommended maintenance schedules from the cloud, so it can tell you exactly when your truck is due for maintenance. It also keeps track of what maintenance and repairs you do receive; every time you want to have a look at what your truck has had done or what’s coming up, all you need to do is hop into the customer portal and pull it up. If your mechanic sees something they’re concerned about, they can make a note of it and that information will be available to you as well.

Fullbay takes over the “tracking” part of tracking PMs and makes it easy to create a maintenance schedule and stick to it. Your truck will spend more time on the road earning you money instead of sitting in the shop spinning its wheels (sometimes literally).

That’s not all it does, of course. Fullbay takes over a lot of the stuff that sucks up the time of techs and shop owners — like invoicing, ordering parts, and inventory management. If you’d like to see how Fullbay tracks PMs and makes repair shops run more efficiently, check out our free demo.