It’s time to buy new trucks. You’ve narrowed the choice between two brands you’ve owned in the past. At this point, should you go for the lowest price?

Absolutely not, says fleet maintenance consultant Pete Paquette. “You should really buy trucks on the basis of total performance,” he insists. How do you determine that? With a computerized system to track, extract, and help analyze maintenance costs. If you’re shopping for off-the-shelf software, look for a product based on VMRS or, better yet, the new VMRS 2000.

Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards, developed by The Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations, is a coding system used to describe parts, systems, and jobs in the shop. It’s designed to put vehicle maintenance and performance in a common language.

Paquette helped develop VMRS in the 1970s and was instrumental in the newly updated VMRS 2000. His company, High Point, N.C.-based NAMDX, now researches and assigns new codes as needed.

To show what VMRS 2000 can do, Paquette compared two tractor makes operating in the same fleet. Cost per mile is the logical starting point, and that’s not hard to calculate: total costs divided by total miles. In our example, the low-cost tractor is Brand A at 4.3 cents versus Brand B’s 4.9 cents.

But VMRS compares maintenance in a variety of ways. Looking at parts costs, for instance, 3.5 cents per mile versus 2.2 cents again makes B the higher-cost truck. By isolating miles per repair order, we also found that Brand B is in the shop more frequently than Brand A. While not included in this analysis, VMRS has codes to indicate reason for repair (preventive maintenance, breakdown or driver complaint, for instance), which would allow the user to delve deeper into Brand B’s lower mileage between repair orders.

But look at labor costs per mile: Brand A’s 2.2 cents versus 1.5 cents for Brand B. Maintenance and repairs required for A are more labor-intensive than for B.

“When you have labor you have downtime,” notes Paquette. More downtime could mean lower productivity and even added costs for replacements. Again, good maintenance-cost tracking should allow users to take a closer look at those labor-intensive repairs.

If you’re not buying new trucks, but trying to decide if you should, maintenance data can help. For instance, the records might show your new trucks get 3000 miles for every man-hour in the shop. Your older trucks only get 1000 miles. Is it time to trade or should you hire more mechanics?

Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Thorough analysis can measure shop and mechanic productivity and effectiveness. It can be used to compare durability and reliability of various parts.

“About 90% of the parts used today cost less than $20,” notes Paquette. “If a $10 item fails, it may cost the fleet $90 in labor to fix it and I lose a truck for a day. I want to know why that truck failed.”