When it comes to keeping your ambulance fleet and assets in a state of operational readiness, it’s imperative that you have the information needed to make critical decisions – a key requirement for every emergency response organisation.

What’s at risk? Unpredicted asset failures, maintenance budget blowouts, decisions made on incorrect data, decreased asset lifecycle, increased asset downtime and more. None of which you want to see in performance reports. You need to gain insights and confidence in the health and the ability of your assets to perform.

Taking control of your assets and inventory is a critical part of having confidence in your ability to respond. You should consider:

• Security is prevalent within fleet strategies and as fleets become autonomous and digitally powered, maintenance teams will become the critical frontline of defence to ensure transportation is safe. Not only do technicians need to inspect and ensure that back-up systems and safeguards are in place, but they are now being asked to monitor more advanced technologies on a daily basis. This technology not only sits within the confines of the vehicle manufacture, but also the complex mission-critical assets within an Ambulance. Traditional fleet management has not allowed for technology advancements and will impede fleets transitioning to new technologies or vehicle types.
• Understanding how your assets perform – from understanding the effects of driver behaviour on fuel consumption and vehicle wear and tear, to modelling vehicle utilisation characteristics and ensuring you are not impacted by lease penalties due to a favourite vehicle being used, versus maximising value out of an existing asset which is due for decommission with room to spare on the lease allowances.
• Controlling your assets and knowing when you need to intervene. Ensuring servicing is done at the correct time taking into consideration scheduled service requirements, and anticipated defects which may impact your assets shortly after. Unexpected downtime due to a predicted failure is a key focus of many organisations. Do it once and do it right. You also need to be able to model and enforce asset utilisation to maximise value. Having assets stationed at low-volume locations is sure to impact your investment.
• Knowing the finances and understanding the cost profiles of your assets from procurement to decommissioning will allow you to maximise value from your assets, but even more importantly – to be able to build compelling business cases demonstrating the impacts to operational readiness. Have you modelled and communicated the impact of a 30% rise in fuel costs to the organisation from fluctuating oil prices? Outlined the impact diesel additives have on operating costs or attempted to justify increasing preventive maintenance expenditure? Keeping assets on the road could lead to increased operational hours and a corresponding reduction in fleet size.
• Ensure your assets are ready to respond by understanding day of operations requirements. Are you coordinating your vehicle decommissioning activities with shift patterns? Do you have access to and understand who is using your assets on a day-to-day basis? Is that one vehicle constantly requiring reactive maintenance due to flat batteries? The assumption may be that it is never on the charger, but you could remotely monitor the vehicle systems in real-time and identify that an activity as seemingly insignificant as the vehicle fridge being switched on at the start of a shift four days every fortnight, with the engine off, deteriorates the battery over a 6-month period.
• Environment controls are gaining a greater awareness globally and new clean air standards will affect every organisation that has a large fleet of vehicles. Are you prepared for these changes? Tightening legislation means that fleet managers will be faced with a variety of new mandates. By understanding your fleet and the use of internal combustion engines, you are going to be ahead of the curve to quickly and effectively implement change procedures to meet and exceed government guidelines.

Supporting a holistic operational asset strategy requires consideration of a multitude of processes, data modelling and aligning this to control and management of costs. Bringing this all together has positive long-term benefits across your organisation.

With certainty, you can standardise, adapt and optimise your business processes while meeting maintenance compliance, increasing technology levels and reliability thresholds. Through working with ANZ ambulance authorities for over 15 years, Corvanta, understands what ambulance organisations need from operational asset management and how to bring this together.