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Concrete Pumping
From boom pumping to telebelts, RapidWorks helps concrete placement teams deliver best-in-class service with every job.
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Heavy machinery is complicated, and even a small malfunction can result in massive downtime. Preventive maintenance is an important factor in ensuring your fleet is ready to take on jobs at the drop of a hat. But staying on top of maintenance requires planning. While many large or fast-growing fleets rely on software like RapidWorks to automatically track their maintenance requirements, brand-new heavy equipment service teams might be looking for a simpler place to start.
Get Your Heavy Equipment Maintenance Tracking Spreadsheet
That's why we built our free heavy equipment maintenance tracking spreadsheet — to give you an easy way to keep track of your fleet's upcoming maintenance. From annual inspections to regular engine service and equipment checks, this heavy equipment maintenance tracking spreadsheet includes pre-built templates to help you track your most common maintenance types.
Access your free heavy equipment maintenance tracking spreadsheet here.
Why Track Preventative Maintenance?
Following a heavy equipment maintenance schedule helps you keep your equipment running smoothly by issuing repairs in phases. Done correctly, this means fewer breakdowns and more billable hours. It also eliminates emergency costs and brings work disruptions down to a minimum.
Consider this: If you're forced to pull a truck off a job for last-minute maintenance, it can delay the job, meaning the equipment can't be used on other worksites. Even worse, you may lose a customer entirely or be forced to turn away potential jobs.
Here's the bottom line: Any truck that's stuck in the shop instead of working on the jobsite isn't contributing to your revenue.
So how can you avoid snags caused by maintenance? Use a heavy equipment maintenance log to set a routine schedule. Then, you know ahead of time when trucks will be in the shop getting mandatory maintenance done. This significantly increases the likelihood that you always have working equipment ready for a job.
Ultimately, planning for maintenance ahead of time means you know exactly when your trucks will be active and inactive. This puts the control back in your hands and results in less severe, non-disruptive repairs.
How to Use a Heavy Equipment Maintenance Tracking Spreadsheet
A heavy equipment maintenance template is a great first step. However, you must fashion the spreadsheet to handle your unique needs.
There are different types of preventive maintenance to track. On one hand, engine maintenance is typically tracked based on the engine's run time. On the other hand, equipment maintenance usually depends on the specific piece of equipment.
For example, a concrete pumping hose is checked based on the amount of concrete that it has pumped. Maintenance requirements for other types of equipment depend on mileage or a specified time frame, like an annual or quarterly inspection.
A proper heavy equipment maintenance spreadsheet like this one should help track engine maintenance, equipment maintenance, and regular inspections based on usage and maintenance type.
How to Track Preventative Maintenance as Your Fleet Grows
Using a spreadsheet to track maintenance can work for small fleets, but manually keeping tabs on every piece of equipment can become a burden as your fleet grows. For example, tracking engine hours or equipment usage every day would mean manually checking each piece of equipment and punching it in to the spreadsheet. Relying on daily checks can eventually lead to errors, and when maintenance is concerned those errors often lead to costly downtime.
As your fleet grows you may want to consider switching from a manual spreadsheet to an automated maintenance tracking system. These programs use your fleet's telematics data to stay up to date so you don't have to manually keep track of equipment usage, and will proactively send you alerts when maintenance is coming up.
Best-in-class fleet management systems like RapidWorks are useful for more than just your maintenance team. By showing dispatchers when maintenance is going to be required for every truck and piece of equipment, they help dispatchers plan in advance and build smarter schedules that account for downtime before maintenance even gets scheduled.
Tracking maintenance with a manual spreadsheet is a good place to start — you'll learn a lot about your equipment by being so hands on. But as your fleet starts to grow it's helpful to keep some of these growing pains in mind so you can be ready to level up your maintenance tracking when the time is right.
