Fleet service

What a fleet visit actually looks like

It starts with a walk of the yard, clipboard in hand, before anybody quotes anything. Every unit gets looked at in daylight: what damage is on it, whether the paint is intact over it, whether it is worth repairing at all. That produces a line per vehicle, and the lines go to the fleet manager as one document before a single panel is touched.

Then a day, or several. The van parks in the yard, units get brought over as they come off the road, and the work happens in whatever order keeps your drivers moving rather than in the order that suits us. Each vehicle gets its own work order with its own registration or unit number on it, and at the end there is one invoice with everything on it.

The part fleet managers actually want

Which units to skip. A vehicle eight months from lease turn-in with two dings in a door is worth repairing, because the turn-in inspection is going to price those dings at more than we will. A vehicle with a folded rear arch and cracked paint, three years from the end of its life, is not: that is money spent on a panel nobody is going to look at again. A cosmetic dent in a box van that lives on a construction site is generally not worth the invoice at all.

So the assessment comes back with a recommendation on every line, including the ones that say leave it. A fleet quote that finds work on every single unit in the yard should be read carefully.

Downtime is the real number

The saving on a fleet is not the price of the repair, and anybody selling it that way is selling the wrong thing. It is that eleven vehicles did not each spend a day off the road being driven to a shop, sat in a queue and collected. They were in your yard the whole time, and most of them were back on the road within the hour. On a working fleet that arithmetic is not close.

Livery, wraps and racks

Decals change the job and they need mentioning at the assessment. A dent underneath vinyl cannot be worked without lifting the graphic, and a vinyl that has been baked on a van for four Florida summers may not survive being lifted — so the honest sequence is often to repair the metal and replace that panel's graphic, and the graphic is somebody else's invoice. We will say that before we start, not with a curled decal already in our hand.

Ladder racks produce a particular kind of damage: rub marks and shallow dents along the roof rail and the upper edge of the side panel where a ladder has been dropped onto it a thousand times. Those are repairable and they will come straight back unless the rack gets a rubber stop, so we tend to point at the rack as well as at the panel.

Recurring visits

Most fleets that use this settle into a rhythm — a visit every few months, catching dings while they are still small and the paint is still whole, rather than one enormous reckoning before a lease return. It is cheaper, and more to the point it is the version where fewer units end up in the “this needs a body shop now” column.