Fleet management software provider, Mycompanyfleet, has launched new ‘intelligent maintenance’ functionality aimed at saving fleet managers up to 25% per year on their vehicle maintenance costs.

The new functionality, which is part of the company’s mainstream FleetAcumen fleet management system, is intended for fleet managers who outright purchase their vehicles or who lease them but elect to carry out maintenance management themselves.

The new module was originally developed for a Midlands-based civil engineering group which operates a fleet of around 300 vehicles which it purchases and manages itself.

However, the company has decided to make it available to all users within its FleetAcumen system.

The new ‘intelligent maintenance’ functionality allows a maintenance history and cost profile to be built up for each vehicle part or a specific piece of servicing or maintenance work on every vehicle on the fleet.

The system then signals any deviations away from previously incurred or standard costs for that part or piece of work performed at the next service so they can be flagged up and investigated.

At the same time, pre-negotiated discount  structures for each part or item of work can be built into the system to ensure they are applied correctly to the job task in hand. Any deviation from those again can be easily flagged up and identified.

The system also looks at the time intervals involved in replacing parts and automatically flags up where they fall within existing manufacturer warranty periods, so that additional costs are not needlessly incurred.

The system can also be used to identify where replacements parts other than manufacturer recommended OEM parts are entirely suitable for purpose and can be legally used without infringing manufacturer warranties.

Full management reports of all costs incurred, and cost savings achieved, can then be produced to show management where under or over spends are being achieved and whether overall budgets are being met.

Any areas of major discrepancy are automatically flagged up in highly visual exception reports for investigation by the fleet manager to ensure that all maintenance costs are kept under close control.

By intelligent management of all fleet servicing and maintenance in this way it has been proved to be possible to achieve cost savings of up to 25% of the total maintenance budget.

Jon Tandy (pictured), business development manager at Mycompanyfleet, the automotive software arm of HR software specialist NorthgateArinso, said: "Its smart functionality allows maintenance history to be built up right across the fleet and for cost trends to be easily identified.

"In this way, maintenance costs can be challenged and managed more effectively, resulting in reduction of up to 25% in maintenance spend across even a relatively small fleet.

“The potential for large fleets which manage the maintenance of several thousand cars and vans is enormous."

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