Understanding tire management should be in a fleet manager’s top interest. Understand how tires are used in a day to day basis. Learn where all the expenses go. From tire benchmarking to data analysis to management action, creating a tire management program can help the truck in a profitable range rather than that of an awful headache.
An effective tire management program has to address four things: Air pressure; Rotation; Mechanical/Alignment Maintenance of the vehicle; finally, speed. Maintaining these four key elements, a fleet manager will be able to keep the cost of tires down when It comes to purchasing new tires.
Knowing how the tires perform and maintaining continuous data on them is valuable when it comes to making good decisions on tires. Having a good system to document the maintenance and the performance of the tires can also help reduce the costs of them.
An effective tire management program includes tracking, analysis, preventive maintenance and much more. To keep track of tire costs, use a worksheet. On a monthly basis, record all tire related expenses, from new tires to retread ones, to repair and road call costs. From that point on, subtract things such as warranty and discounts. Finally figure out the monthly tire cost-per-mile. Dived net costs are by the total tire miles for the fleet. Discover where the expenses go.
When performing a tire performance analysis, consider the many different things effecting the outcome. Identify the average miles expected on each tire. This helps with budgeting and fleet cost predictions which and helps identify areas of opportunity for improvement.
Here are a few other things that could be considered when analyzing your tires:
- Tire pressure data
- Average miles expected
- Loads carried by each vehicle
- Miles gained from original tread
- Miles gained from retread
- Number of retreads from original casing
- Frequency of tire expectations
- Inspection of failed or end-of-life tires
- Expected life of tire casing within fleets
- Number of expected retreads for each tire.
Once this data has been compiled, and the fleet manager is comfortable with the results, they may begin to evaluate other products against these performance checks. Besides this, the manager will be able to discover where all the expenses go. For example, one might be gathering a lot of expenses from emergency breakdowns. By noticing this and evaluating the cause(s) they may be able to take a different approach that would reduce the expenses in this area.
Feel free to give Truck-n-Trailer a call at 405-912-5800 and talk to Kirk, or Service Manager! Kirk will be able to answer any questions regarding this topic or any other topic!
