The installation of any new system will affect your budgeted expenditures. You will have extra labor until people get used to the new systems and extra parts as you bring your fleet up to maintainability. In this pre-planning step, you will prepare a budget that includes the costs of the new system.

Procedure for Preparing a Budget:

• Copy several years' budgets.
• If the information is available note hours, parts, dollars, and number of units in your fleet.
• Estimate (if the information is not available) emergency hours, scheduled hours, repair incidents, and any major shifts in fleet make up.
• Add the effects of your new maintenance systems (higher PM costs, effect on breakdowns, etc.). This is a completely informal process at this point.

This is your economic impact statement. You can keep it private for now and refer to it quarterly to see how well your predictive powers have been. This information will be used later as a component of a more formal budget process.

Tip excerpted from Basics of Fleet Maintenance by Joel Levitt