Downtime, whatever the reason, is costly and stressful. From planned maintenance to unexpected failures, downtime happens, and sometimes at truly inconvenient times. Use these tips to make sure that the only downtime you experience is the time you plan for.
Assess The Fleet and Power Usage
Before you can take steps to preventing downtime, you need to understand your fleet and its power performance.
Issues likely to come to light through an assessment are poor charging practices, old equipment, and incomplete maintenance procedures. Once you’ve completed a thorough assessment you can implement changes and improve procedures to better manage your power and performance.
Adjust The Power Purchase Plan
Over time, power management can get off course when purchasing decisions are made as package deals with fleet purchases, instead of based on exact needs. Post-assessment results should have brought to light the precise areas to focus on for improved power performance.
Issues such as trying to charge batteries with old or outdated chargers can be quickly remedied by purchasing equipment that fit your needs.
Unplanned downtime can be reduced rapidly by treating power purchases as a component to improve performance and productivity.
Battery Rotation: First In First Out
Improperly rotating batteries can lead to downtime at the worst time.Mo
When trying to keep your fleet up and running it’s imperative to have a battery rotation schedule that not only charges the oldest batteries first but can also increase the life cycle of your batteries.
A first-in, first-out system also increases your ability to identify older batteries that are nearing the end of their life cycle or are experiencing decreased performance ability.
Routine Service And Maintenance
Proper power management relies on complete battery maintenance as well as proper maintenance of the fleet.
By following a maintenance schedule, you can more readily identify if there is a problem with a battery or one vehicle in the fleet that is causing the batteries to fail more quickly.
Performing load tests during these maintenance cycles is a good way to quickly determine if power issues are from battery failure or if there is a bigger issue with the equipment itself.
Consider Alternate Solutions
In the world of motive power management, it’s worth a look at management and maintenance contracts.
By contracting out the power management many fleet managers can off load the challenges of maintaining the proper batteries and charger technologies as well as lock in prices.
Maintenance contracts are also a good way to ensure that your downtime is limited. By outsourcing fleet and power maintenance, your equipment will be more likely to undergo regular diagnostics that will quickly highlight issues as soon as they arise allowing for prompt solutions.
Eliminating downtime is impossible, but limiting your downtime is completely within your capabilities.
Understanding the power needs of your fleet and managing key performance factors will help prevent unnecessary downtime and help identify potential failures before they happen.
By creating a process that involves regular assessments, routine maintenance and proper rotation cycles you’ll be able to keep your fleet on the road longer and performing better.