South Central Reporter

Greenville leaders recently were presented with a new fleet maintenance program that will help keep track of all city equipment, repairs, and costs to better manage their assets and plan for new purchases.

“This helps us for our long-range planning for budgeting,” City Treasurer Michelle Liggett said at the March 14 council meeting. “It's kind of nice to have a scientific method of with their algorithms to determine replacement.” 

City worker Ryan Johnson recounted how last summer, when they were dealing with all their various maintenance projects for their equipment, they decided to come up with a better system for handling and tracking it. In the fall, they trained and adopted a program used for tracking all the info into their city network

“Of course, we set the conditions and the parameters,” Liggett said. “So we have a lot of, this program is really robust as far as allowing us to make changes where a police vehicle, even though it might not have a lot of miles, it's still high usage if it sits and idles a lot because that's really not good for.” 

The program has all 44 pieces of city-owned equipment in the database. City staff members can add or take away from the list as needed, and all vehicles have data points connected with them. The city tags each one, then enters mileage, hours, replacement rating, purchase date and price, and other information. They also input all maintenance and repairs, like oil changes, new tires, spark plugs, etc. It also tracks fuel input and purchases along with mileage, so that they know how much gas they are using and how efficient each vehicle is. The program can also give reminders for maintenance or upkeep, which the city doesn’t use too much because most of their fleets are seasonal, either summer or winter. 

Once a vehicle reaches a certain score, the program will alert them to consider a replacement. The city can watch the scores and plan ahead for when one of its vehicles is going to meet that mark. This allows for better budgeting and keeps them more aware of the vehicle market so they can take advantage of any good deals should they come up near the time of replacement.