Lift Truck Tips: Plan of attack for planned maintenance

In the past, as long as equipment was available when needed, a lift truck fleet was free to draw as much money as necessary from both capital expense and operating budgets. Lately, fleet owners have learned there are a variety of ways to save money and improve productivity by scrutinizing those costs. The concept of continuous improvement has replaced the notion of lift trucks as an inescapable cost of doing business. However, continuous improvement and rigid maintenance agreements are not good bedfellows.

According to Mike McKean, fleet sales and marketing manager for Toyota Material Handling USA, the pace at which things can change makes a dynamic maintenance plan essential. “As opposed to a dynamic plan, a static plan might call for planned maintenance (PM) every 500 hours,” says McKean. “It’s all decided up front in the maintenance plan, the service provider is going to take care of it and everything is fine. In reality, very few of your lift trucks will be serviced every 500 hours.”

Under-servicing or over-servicing a lift truck wastes money, and it ought to be relatively simple to monitor the usage of each piece of equipment. Whether the customer or service provider is doing the monitoring, the details of service levels and costs should be outlined in any service contract—as well as provisions for changes over the course of the agreement.

“A person who purchases a plan and then walks away from it for those two or three years does not have much interest in costs,” McKean says. “Say a three-year plan is based on the previous year’s 2,000 hours of use per year, and the service provider is scheduled to come every 90 days for a PM. What happens when the hours go to 2,800? Or 1,200?”

McKean recommends a PM program over a full maintenance program any day, but says any contract should at least include a clause for an annual review. He recognizes that as many as 90% of customers prefer to “set it and forget it.” They figure out their fleet spend in their budgets and appreciate the peace of mind a predictable monthly expense can offer.

“Others want to count pennies, but the only way to know if you can save money is to try it and compare,” he says. “Set the expectations up front before you sign. If it’s designed as a dynamic contract, you can still ‘set it and forget it,’ but you will have an opportunity to adjust as needed.”

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