Scheduling Municipal Fleet Work Around Coverage Instead of Cost

A private fleet asks what it costs. A municipal fleet asks how many units will be down and for how long.

Those are different questions and they produce different schedules. Getting that wrong is the most common reason a department has a bad experience with a body shop.

Coverage first

The first conversation on any municipal job is not about scope. It is about what has to stay in service.

A fire department cannot lose an engine and an ambulance in the same week. A public works department cannot lose half its sweepers before a storm season. A transit agency has route commitments. A police department needs a minimum number of marked units.

So we ask what the constraint is, and the batch size comes from the answer rather than from what would be convenient for us.

Practical consequence: on a six unit programme, working two at a time takes considerably longer in total elapsed time than working all six. It also never creates a coverage gap. For a public safety department that is obviously the right trade, and we would rather propose it than be talked into it.

Units return individually

This one is simple and it makes a real difference.

A unit that completes on day nine goes back on day nine. It does not sit in our yard waiting for its batch to finish.

That is administratively slightly more work for us, in that each unit gets its own release, documentation and invoice. It is also the difference between a department losing two units for four weeks and losing two units for a rolling average of eleven days.

Purchase orders and per unit invoicing

Each unit is assessed, estimated and invoiced separately, so it tracks against its own purchase order and cost centre.

That sounds like a formality and it is not. A bundled invoice for six vehicles has to be allocated by someone in the department afterwards, using information they do not have. A per unit invoice against a per unit PO does not.

Standard public procurement is routine here. Tell us the process and we work to it rather than asking you to accommodate ours.

Documentation that survives an audit

Three things, and departments tell us the first is the most useful.

Published rates. Our labor rates are on this website: $210 per hour body and paint, $260 per hour mechanical and electrical, $285 per hour diagnostics with a one hour minimum, $95 per hour detail. Parts markup 100 percent up to $100 and 35 percent above. Sales tax 7.75 percent on parts and materials only.

A repair spend defended against rates published publicly is a much shorter internal conversation than one defended against a quote nobody outside the transaction can verify. That is the single thing departments mention most.

Itemised scope. Operations and hours, not lump sums. Auditable line by line.

Written change notification. When scope changes, you get told what changed, why, and what it costs, before the work happens rather than on the invoice.

Upfit equipment is the other municipal difference

A municipal vehicle carries equipment a commercial truck does not: emergency lighting, sirens, partitions, prisoner transport fittings, accessibility lifts, specialist bodies. Frequently it is worth a large share of the vehicle value and it is safety critical.

All of it comes off for a body repair. On our jobs it is catalogued during removal and verified operational after reinstallation, rather than refitted and assumed.

Lighting and siren installation runs $400 to $3,500 at 2 to 14 labor hours. Reflective and DOT compliance marking $250 to $1,200. Full refinish and department livery $5,000 to $30,000 at 40 to 200 hours.

What we do not do is certify equipment. Reinstalled and verified operational is what we deliver. Certification is between the department and the relevant authority or the equipment supplier, and any shop telling you otherwise is overreaching.

What is outside our scope

Body, paint, structural and equipment installation only. No engine work, no drivetrain work, no DOT inspections. On apparatus we do not touch pumps, aerial devices or firefighting systems.

That is a genuine limit rather than a soft one, and it means a unit needing both mechanical and body work involves two suppliers. Departments would rather know that at the scoping meeting than discover it at week three, so we lead with it.

The seasonal reality nobody mentions

School districts want June to August. Catering and event fleets want winter. Snow operations want summer. Everybody in each category wants the same eight to twelve weeks.

Capacity in those windows fills months ahead. A district booking bus work in May gets what is left after the districts that booked in February. That is not a sales tactic, it is arithmetic on a fixed number of bays, and it is worth putting in a budget calendar.