TIME FOR A CHANGE?
Page 12
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
WORKING out how long a vehicle should be kept in a fleet can be a bit of a black art unless a very simple formula of replacing at a predetermined age or mileage is adhered to. Once a vehicle is over a certain age and has been paid for, the cost of ownership may reduce dramatically, but the cost of maintenance and operation can rise dramatically. The trick is to decide the point at which the combined cost is the lowest. At that point, a vehicle should be replaced, as costs are going to rise from then on.
Trio Consultancy services has looked at this problem and come up with a computer package called Age/Con, to help operators make the right decisions. Age/Con is designed to run on any IBM or IBM-compatible personal computer, if the operator has one, or it can be run using the operator's data on Trio's own machine.
Age/Con is a set of nine programs, each designed for a particular type of operation. With each, the program leads the operator through a series of questions, the answers to which give the computer the data it wants in the form it needs to produce the answers. It is constructed in such a way that possible changes in business circumstances (like Changes in interest rates, or inflation or freight rates, or dery prices) can be experimented with to see what effect they would have on total costs.
Along with Age/Con (and a related program designed for plant and machinery called Perdec), Trio is also marketing an Australian-developed program designed to help operators decide when to replace components on vehicles. This program, called Relcode, uses the operator's own statistics on the lives of components to predict when failure is most likely to occur and from that to establish the most economic time before failure for those components to be replaced. The program can cope with everything from simple components like fan belts to major ones like complete engines.
The key to decision-making with this program seems to be the ratio of the cost of replacing a component when it fails to the cost of replacing it before failure during routine maintenance. Trio's Andrew Jardine says the higher the ratio, the lower the risk of failure that can be tolerated and therefore the more important it is to replace before failure.