One of the most helpful things a good fleet management application can do is track your official fleet documents—registrations, licenses and permits—virtually anything that has an expiration date.
“You might have used a spreadsheet to keep track of these things or maybe a big 4- by 5-ft. calendar like I used to keep on my office wall,” said Dave Reed, a fleet consultant for Arsenault Associates, providers of Dossier fleet maintenance management software. He was also once a director of maintenance for a larger motor carrier. “Both of those solutions require not only that you enter expiration dates and reminders far enough in advance, but also that you remember to consult the calendar religiously.”
If you are lucky and your fleet tends to add new units in batches, then registrations might come due 10 to 100 at a time. But permits for overweight, over-length or special commodities tend to be acquired one at a time and that’s the way they expire. Driver documents come due at odd times as well. Those things are hard to keep track of. They’re easy to overlook on a busy day.
In a good fleet maintenance program, you can set up registrations when you first capture the information for a new fleet unit. You can add licenses and permits as needed. Then you can be reminded about renewals in any number of ways.
“In Arsenault’s Dossier, for example, a renewal notice will appear in the daily reminder that comes up on your screen every day,” Reed explained. “At any time, you can request a report for all permits that expire on a certain date or in a certain month. You can email that to accounting or operations or anyone else in the company. You can also print it out and post it on a bulletin board. You can have that or other reports update automatically and included in your daily reminders.
“If you’re not going to be in the office, you can have impending expirations emailed to you automatically so you will see them on your smartphone,” he continued. “In a pinch, you can deal with things from the road.”
Beyond registrations, permits and things that expire, Dossier, like other good maintenance programs, will enable you to set up notifications based on increments other than date or time. Preventive maintenance intervals can be counted off in miles or hours of operation, whichever best applies to a particular piece of equipment. Those are things you can’t do with a paper calendar or even a spreadsheet.
“It gets better,” Reed said with a smile. “When you’re setting up a new unit, for example, you can enter that unit’s VIN number so it’s immediately available to you. That’s particularly valuable when ordering parts. Today, OEMs want a VIN number so they can supply the correct replacement part. A particular model year doesn’t mean that every unit made that year has the same exact components.”
VIN numbers are an important pieces of information today. A good fleet maintenance solution makes them instantly available.
