Efficient construction fleet maintenance and management is crucial to running a smooth operation. It’s the glue that holds our construction projects together by providing safe and fully operational equipment so our teams can focus on achieving project deadlines with confidence.

The challenge, however, is that many different types and models of construction equipment make the unification of a construction fleet maintenance program challenging at best. Traditional equipment and fleet maintenance governance is further complicated by a series of written reports, documents, and other information that take time to review, sort, file, and analyze. Not to mention, retrieving data at a later date to perform further trend analysis can be a challenge in itself.

What if we stop trying to unify the different equipment types and instead unify our process itself? After all, we’re in the age of mobile apps and computing capabilities that our great-grandparents only dreamed of. It’s time we put our technology to work so that we can master efficient construction fleet maintenance once and for all.

The Importance of Efficient Construction Fleet Maintenance

Equipment maintenance and efficient use are critical factors in the success of a fleet relating to its intended purpose. For example, consider the airline industry. Although it’s far from the construction industry, it’s an excellent example of industries where efficiency is paramount. ⁽¹⁾

Due to cost issues and a number of other factors, airlines are under increasing financial pressure. This pressure can, when mismanaged, potentially result in hard to maintaining their fleets while they scramble to avoid shutdowns. Just look at what happened to Boeing when they neglected critical aspects of plane construction, leading to panels blowing out of the aircraft while in flight. ⁽²⁾

Why Efficient Construction Fleet Maintenance Matters

Aside from the apparent headache when a much-needed piece of equipment fails when we least expect (or want) it to, there are three primary reasons why setting up a robust construction fleet maintenance program is essential to the longevity of operations.

Cost Savings

Tracking equipment repair, use, and maintenance using an efficient and effective tool saves your organization money in a number of ways. First, properly maintained equipment is less likely to break down. Keeping a spare piece of equipment around is a good idea, but depending on the cost of the equipment, it may not always be feasible.

Unexpected repairs come with unforeseen costs. Whether it’s the time it takes for the equipment to reappear fixed and operational or the cost to rent a replacement, equipment failures cost money, so avoiding them with innovative management is much more cost-effective.

Minimizing Downtime

Speaking of cost savings, if your operation has vital pieces of equipment, what would you lose by having downtime? In most cases, construction projects have an expected timeline, so ensuring the construction fleet maintenance is up to date is crucial to predicting and minimizing equipment failure that could result in extremely high costs from downtime.

Safety and Compliance

Did you know that 47% of construction fatalities in 2019 were due to being struck by a moving vehicle? ⁽³⁾ Furthermore, in 2021, approximately 5% of construction deaths happened because of people getting caught in or between equipment and machines. ⁽⁴⁾

Now, not all of these fatalities are due to equipment failure, indeed. However, that doesn’t mean that equipment can go without maintenance, as we blame operators or even pedestrians for wandering into areas they don’t belong.

Safety and compliance relating to equipment and fleet vehicles within the construction industry should, in my opinion, be maintained and inspected regularly to ensure safe operations. With the industry’s poor track record with OSHA, it only makes sense to strengthen health and safety protocols.

What Does Fleet Maintenance Do?

Fleet maintenance is the act of performing regularly scheduled inspections and basic functional repairs (lubricate, test, and adjust for optimal performance). It is a regularly scheduled inspection/adjustment/lubrication of equipment to ensure its safe and efficacious use. Fleet maintenance helps to prevent premature wear and breakdowns and documents observations during fleet inspections.

Challenges in Construction Fleet Maintenance

Common Challenges in Maintaining a Construction Fleet

One of the challenges that many construction equipment managers face is the feasible integration of equipment tracking solutions. For example, it’s hard to find appropriate equipment that matches each make, model, type, and even year of equipment manufacture. Some newer equipment has better run time tracking and similar. Still, again, the problem of integration with other equipment types and models means that managing a fleet of mixed equipment is a real challenge.

Studies have shown that using custom aftermarket equipment like installing accelerometers is a viable option, but if you aren’t familiar with innovating your circuits, that option is best left unexplored. ⁽⁵⁾

We’ll look into a workaround solution for this challenge later when I discuss the solutions that the 1st Reporting mobile application provides for efficient construction fleet maintenance.

Tracking Maintenance Schedules

When using different types, makes, and models of equipment, you have to keep track of the various maintenance schedules. Having a solution like the 1st Reporting app is a great way to track maintenance, as it is the perfect solution for mobile inspections, incidents, and events (like maintenance, for example). Documenting your equipment maintenance procedures is one way to track the requirements for maintenance scheduling. Furthermore, you could use the 1st Reporting custom form builder to create follow-up maintenance reports and generate them with notifications at specific intervals. This method helps you not only track maintenance schedules but also makes documentation of the maintenance and collaboration of the findings easily accessible to your appointed team members.

Documentation and Reporting

Documentation of maintenance is often messy. The problem is that equipment mechanics deal with industrial-grade machine grease and other such soils that can carry from hand to paperwork. However, using a solution like a mobile inspection (or maintenance) reporting tool like 1st Reporting is a great way to overcome the dirty and sometimes lost paperwork of the past.

Emergency Repairs and Response

Emergency repairs and response for construction fleet equipment is every construction project manager’s nightmare. They have enough riding on their shoulders, so adding in unexpected equipment breakdowns – when the equipment is critical to project continuance, is one headache I’m sure you want to avoid.

Using digital reporting tools like the 1st Reporting app means you can insert a custom notification into the process. So, when a worker starts an equipment failure report, you can ensure that a notification goes to the right person at the right time, in real-time. With powerful custom-triggered notifications, you can ensure that your equipment managers can react with observational data in hand.

What Is Construction Fleet Management?

Construction fleet management is the act of ensuring that all equipment is safe, inspected, certified, and ready for use by appropriately licensed personnel. It also includes overseeing construction fleet maintenance practices and analyzing results to make better data-driven fleet management decisions.

Tools like the 1st Reporting app are powerful digital applications that make documenting and recording equipment maintenance, breakdowns, inspections, accidents, and management easy and headache-free.

How 1st Reporting Streamlines Fleet Maintenance

When managing a mixed group of equipment types, such as trucks, bulldozers, cranes, earth movers, dump trucks, and other standard construction equipment, unifying solutions to work for all equipment types typically finds people looking to develop a custom management-oriented solution. ⁽⁶⁾

Some look for a developed fleet management system to attempt to unify equipment data collection and analysis. However, such systems are often costly and are also often single-purposed, meaning that you may wind up needing several different systems just to manage equipment. There is, however, another more efficient way to manage various types of equipment: by focusing on the process of management of field data and not focusing on the equipment. Still, the data collection pertains to it instead. If you find that confusing, don’t worry, I’m about to explain.

Streamlining Maintenance with 1st Reporting

1st Reporting is a secure mobile application that streamlines an organization’s documented processes in the field. The app provides an easily scalable solution for both workers and management alike. Robust features, an intuitive interface, and a customer service team that’s one of the best in the industry are why many organizations have made 1st Reporting the industry benchmark.

Efficient Documentation

Using 1st Reporting, maintenance of fleet equipment and its subsequent documentation is easy. The app is mobile but cloud-based with a powerful offline mode. Put these together, and you’ve got a way for your equipment technicians to document their maintenance activities right from their mobile devices. However, because the app syncs its data to the cloud, you can access reports the moment they are uploaded, giving your team unprecedented collaborative ability.

Real-Time Access and Management

As mentioned, the 1st Reporting app uploads input data from your team to the cloud. That means that you have access to their reports in real time. That means you could read their maintenance report before they’ve had a chance to call you and tell you they are done with the maintenance on the equipment.

Customizable Forms

The robust form customizer in 1st Reporting means that you can use the app for much more than just construction fleet maintenance documentation. You can use it to document pre-use inspections, incidents, accidents, or any other documentable event you wish. Add that to the powerful dynamic linking relationship field, and now you can have a fleet maintenance report automatically to generate a follow-up repair request or a post-maintenance safety or operational inspection report. Because the forms are customizable, you can use one from our massive template library or make one from scratch to suit your specific fleet or equipment needs.

GPS and Map Integration

The 1st Reporting app has GPS integrated, so when your team completes a report, it notes the time and place the report was completed. Although this is not the same as a physical vehicle tracking system, it can work in much more powerful ways when implemented appropriately.

For example, all equipment should get a pre-use safety inspection and a post-use equipment lock-up at the end of the day. In doing so, you have a digital record of the last place/time that team members used the equipment, inspected it, or locked it up for the night. Given the ability to create custom forms, you could make any equipment reports and ensure your team completes them as a part of their daily duties. In this way, you can track equipment by way of monitoring the inspections, use forms, lock-outs, or other equipment-related forms. It’s a way of monitoring the process, not the equipment, and indirectly getting the equipment tracking information you need, plus the other information gathered in the field. That’s a win-win for equipment fleet managers.

Customizable Notifications

I’ve mentioned custom notifications, but I’ve not mentioned how powerful they actually are. Let me explain: In the 1st Reporting application, you have many customization options, like the custom forms I’ve mentioned. However, you also have the option of using custom-triggered custom notifications. 

These are notifications that you pre-set for delivery of the notification to trigger at your preferred action – like when a team member starts to fill out an equipment accident form, for example. You have control over the various types of triggers and their conditions. 

Of course, you also have control over the message and recipients of the notification. In short, you can make the notification say whatever you want and have it trigger at your preferred action, giving you complete control over automating critical communications.

Enhancing Efficiency and Accountability with 1st Reporting

I have managed a fleet of service technicians and the equipment they use for over a decade, and I can tell you firsthand that managing your fleet with accountability as a cornerstone of the process is crucial to successful fleet management. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard equipment operators complain that they didn’t notice something critical about the equipment they used. 

I think that may be a problem in many industries—equipment operators aren’t held accountable for equipment malfunctions due to wear and tear that should have been noticed by the people operating the equipment. The problem here is equipment operators who don’t care about the hand that feeds them and thus act towards company equipment in an unprofessional and unaccountable manner.

Enhancing Efficiency and Accountability

Enhancing efficiency by using digital tools makes fleet inspections, maintenance, repair, and even accident documentation by your team members easier. Our clients, from the tourism industry to conservation management, are reaping the benefits of enhanced efficiency and accountability in their reporting processes.

Dynamic Linking Feature

I mentioned earlier how using the custom form builder, you can make entire digitally automated workflows by including the relationship field within your digital forms. By adding this field, you can control triggers and actions like creating a linked repair request or work order when equipment fleet maintenance finds an issue with a piece of equipment that will need further attention.

Adding custom automation like the one mentioned above can help decrease your bottom line by increasing and improving workflow efficiency and documentation. Furthermore, it provides a way for you to ensure that the next steps in your fleet workflows are completed.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Having real-time information about your fleet vehicles and equipment right from the field means that your decision-making just got that much easier and more effective by delivering the information you need to make data-driven decisions at the moment, even from another location.

Implementing 1st Reporting in Your Fleet Maintenance Routine

Our users have seen as much as 75% improvement in documented reporting process efficiency.

How to Implement 1st Reporting for Fleet Maintenance

By now, you likely want to give 1st Reporting a try. I don’t mind saying that I wish I’d had 1st Reporting when I was managing mobile crews some years back. Hindsight, in this case, is going to work to your advantage because if you’re reading this, then you have the opportunity to benefit from using 1st Reporting right here, right now.

Integrating new software like 1st Reporting might seem a daunting task. However, I’ve got a sure-fire way of achieving integration success with a simple yet powerfully effective process:

Initial Setup and Customization

First, sign up on this site or go to Google Play or The Apple App Store if you’d like to get the app running on your phone or tablet. Keep in mind that you can set it up using your desktop or laptop, too, so you don’t necessarily have to start with it on your phone (just know you could if you want to).

Step 1: Sign up for a trial of 1st Reporting.

Next, after a quick tour of the app, I recommend starting by either choosing a pre-built form from our robust template library or building your first custom form.

Step 2: Build or Choose a Form

Of course, a form is only as good if someone can fill it out, so now you should invite your first team members to the app. I recommend starting with a small test group. Choose a group that will benefit from using it while also providing you with appropriate feedback so you can fine-tune the setup for your second group.

Step 3: Invite Team Members.

Training Your Team

As mentioned, I recommend starting integration with a small test group. That way, you can not only discover any issues with how the team interacts with the app but also help the teams figure out other ways they can use the app to make other processes easier and more efficient.

Step 4. Train Team Members 

Continuous Improvement

I mentioned getting feedback from your first group (and subsequent groups, actually) to enhance how you train your team members. Furthermore, you’ll learn valuable information back from them about things like other ways your team could incorporate some of the app’s other features in ways you may not have thought of yet. With customizable forms, dynamic linking, and customizable notifications, your ability to enhance processes and improve process efficiency, collaboration, and communications is about to get a whole lot better – Sign up for 1st Reporting and find out for yourself.

Maximize Your Fleet’s Potential with 1st Reporting

Efficient construction fleet maintenance is the cornerstone of a successful and cost-effective operation. By leveraging the innovative features of the 1st Reporting app, you can streamline documentation, reduce downtime, and ensure safety and compliance. Whether it’s real-time data access, customizable forms, or dynamic linking, 1st Reporting provides a comprehensive solution that meets your unique needs.

Imagine having a unified process for managing your fleet’s maintenance, regardless of the equipment’s make or model. With 1st Reporting, you can achieve this and more, transforming how you handle maintenance tasks and emergency responses. The app’s powerful tools not only enhance efficiency but also foster accountability among your team.

Take the first step towards mastering efficient construction fleet maintenance. Implement 1st Reporting today and experience the benefits of a well-maintained, fully operational fleet. Don’t just maintain your equipment—optimize it with the power of modern technology.

Article Sources

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