Vehicle Off Road

A vehicle in a workshop costs everything it costs when working, plus whatever the work it should have been doing is worth.

Why it is not measured

It falls between departments. Maintenance counts repair cost; operations counts missed work; neither counts both.

The unit is ambiguous: a day off the road on a quiet Tuesday is not a day off the road on a Friday.

And there is no invoice, so nothing prompts anyone to record it.

Measuring it usefully

Days off road per vehicle, split by cause: scheduled service, unscheduled repair, waiting for parts, waiting for a workshop slot.

That split is the finding. Scheduled downtime is planned and cheap; waiting for parts is neither.

Value a day — at contribution from the round, or at the cost of the hire vehicle you would otherwise take — and be consistent about which.

A rough, consistent figure beats a precise, contested one, because the purpose is comparison rather than accounting.

What the causes tell you

Waiting for a workshop slot: a capacity or scheduling problem, and the argument for the rolling service schedule.

Waiting for parts: a supplier or stocking problem, and one of the few genuine cases for holding stock.

Repeat repairs on one vehicle: a whole-life cost signal, and probably a replacement candidate.

Unscheduled repairs rising across a model: a purchasing finding for the next cycle.

The spare vehicle argument

Holding a spare costs the standing cost of a vehicle.

Not holding one costs hire at short notice, or the work not done.

Which is a comparison you can now make, with the downtime figure on one side and the annual standing cost on the other.

Most fleets have never made it and hold spares by tradition or hold none by austerity, neither being a decision.

What telematics contributes

The dates a vehicle stopped and started moving, which is a more honest downtime record than a workshop log.

Because a vehicle collected on Tuesday and returned Thursday may have been unusable since the previous Friday, and only the movement data shows that.

Reconcile the two, and the gap is usually reporting delay rather than repair time.

The measure

Days off road per vehicle per year, by cause.

As a proportion of available days, so fleets of different sizes compare.

And the trend, because the level depends on fleet age and the direction depends on how it is managed.

Use movement data, not the workshop log

The more honest downtime record.

A vehicle collected on Tuesday and returned Thursday may have been unusable since the previous Friday.

Only the movement data shows that.

Reconcile the two, and the gap is usually reporting delay rather than repair time — which is itself a process finding.

Turn the boundary into a test

For a concrete product reference, employee time tracking during fleet downtime can help turn this boundary into a test. Verify the current behaviour with representative fields and record what reaches the destination.