Fleet Managers: Cost Per Day, Spare Ratio and the Order Units Go In

The figure has four parts and most operators carry only the first. Lost contribution from the work the unit was booked to perform. Labor standing idle beside it, because a two person crew does not become productive the moment the truck stops. The cost of covering the gap, whether that is a rental, a subcontractor or overtime on another asset. And the fixed carry that continues regardless: lease or depreciation, insurance, licensing, the telematics subscription. Add the four and you have something defensible instead of a hunch.

Build it per class, not per fleet. A three quarter ton service truck and a heavy flatbed do not cost the same day, and averaging them produces a number nobody in finance trusts. Once a figure exists per class you can answer the only question that matters at authorization, which is whether removing three days from a schedule is worth paying for. Roughly half the accounts that hand us a number end up declining an expedite they would have bought on instinct.

• Exclude anything you would have spent whether or not the unit was damaged
• Exclude driver wages where the driver was redeployed rather than sent home
• Count overtime on a covering unit, not that unit's whole day rate
• Count a rental at the difference against the down unit's own running cost

Spare ratio is spares divided by units in service, and at fleet level the number is close to useless. What matters is the ratio inside each function. Twelve vans and two spares reads comfortable until you notice both spares are plain cargo bodies and the unit that is down is the only lift equipped one. We ask which function an asset serves at intake for that reason, and where several units arrive together we stage them so no single function loses everything in one week.

The practical use of the ratio is deciding how long a repair may run before it becomes an outage. A function carrying two spares absorbs a three week structural job without anybody noticing. A function carrying none turns a four day cosmetic repair into a service failure, and that is precisely where paying for expedited freight is obviously right. Tell us the ratio and the decision writes itself rather than being argued over in week two.

Cumulative spend against a unit is the number that decides whether body work is an investment or a write off in slow motion. Pull the unit's history, add the current estimate, and hold the total against what a replacement costs now and what the repaired asset would fetch at auction. Fleets keeping per unit cost history make that call in an afternoon. Fleets keeping costs at department level argue for a fortnight and usually repair something they should have retired.

Where a unit sits near that boundary we will split the estimate deliberately: the work needed to return it to safe service, and the work needed to return it to presentable condition. Plenty of operators authorize only the first and run the asset out its last eighteen months looking rough. That is a legitimate answer and we would rather quote it that way than present the whole scope as mandatory.

Accounting treats work that restores a unit differently from work that extends its life, and which side a line falls on is your finance team's determination rather than ours. What we control is whether they have the detail to make it. Invoices separate labor by department, list parts and materials apart from labor, and describe each operation plainly enough that somebody who never saw the vehicle can classify it. We give no accounting or tax opinions and we will not guess on your behalf.

One request saves the most time in practice. Tell us at authorization whether any part of the work is being posted to the asset record rather than to the maintenance account, and we will present those operations as their own group with their own subtotal. That costs us ten minutes at estimate stage and saves a controller a reconstruction exercise at year end.

Managers rarely arrive with one problem. A typical first conversation covers four assets in varying states, and the instinct is to send the worst one first. Frequently that is the expensive choice. The cheapest order is the one clearing the highest daily figure per shop day consumed, which often puts a two day repair on a heavily used unit ahead of a three week structural job on something a spare already covers.

So we ask for a short list and propose a calendar across several weeks against it, with the long job dropped into whichever window your own operation is quietest. Nobody wins when four units arrive on the same Monday and three of them sit in the yard waiting for a bay to open.

1. Unit number, class and the function the asset serves
2. Daily figure for that class, and whether a spare covers the function
3. Whether the unit drives or has to arrive on a truck
4. Any fixed date the unit is committed to, such as an inspection

Almost every fleet we work with runs a maintenance management system, and almost every friction point between us and one of those systems is a missing field rather than a disagreement about money. We need the unit number as your system spells it, the VIN, the current meter reading, and the cost centre or department code the charge belongs against. Supply those four at intake and the invoice imports without anybody retyping it.

Where a work order has to exist before an outside vendor can be paid, send the number and we carry it on every document from the estimate onward. Where a completion record is wanted in a particular format, say so before the job closes rather than after. Reissuing paperwork is trivial in week one and tiresome in month three.

Units out of service against spares available in the same function. Four components: lost contribution from the work the unit was booked to do, idle labor beside it, the cost of covering the gap, and fixed carry that runs regardless. Built per class rather than per fleet.

• A downtime figure that was guessed once in a meeting and never rebuilt
• Two spares on paper, neither of them the configuration that is down
• Repair history kept at department level, so no unit has a cost story
• Paperwork that has to be reissued in month three to close a work order