Preventive Maintenance (PM)

Preventive maintenance is the work a shop chooses to do, on a schedule it sets, to stop failures before they occur. Everything else the shop does is repair, which is work the vehicle chose for it.

The ratio between those two is the clearest single measure of whether a fleet is in control of its own workload. A shop running mostly scheduled work can plan its staffing, order its parts and give a department a date. A shop running mostly breakdowns cannot do any of the three, and every hour it spends is an hour it did not choose.

The public-sector complication is that PM competes for the vehicle with the service it exists to deliver. A refuse packer on route, a plow in a storm and a patrol car on shift are all difficult to release, and the departments that own them are not the department that carries the cost of skipping it. That makes PM in a public fleet a scheduling negotiation rather than a technical decision.

San Diego’s fleet audit is a clear worked example: departments are responsible for bringing vehicles in while Fleet is responsible for maintaining them, and the auditor found out-of-date departmental contact lists and missing check-ins among the reasons services ran late. The same report notes Long Beach lifting its compliance from 55 percent to 90 percent partly by identifying the right departmental contacts and training them to review maintenance reports. Neither fix is mechanical.

Intervals come from the manufacturer’s schedule, adjusted for how the vehicle is actually used. Severe-duty cycles, which describe a lot of municipal work, shorten them.