Every vehicle in your fleet is a revenue-producing asset. Whether you’re branding vehicles for the first time or rolling out a rebrand, you want them off the road for as short a period as possible.
That’s the real question behind any fleet graphic installation: not whether the work gets done, but how to finish it without disrupting the vehicles that earn money every day they’re on the road. Downtime comes from more than the install itself. It comes from every step between approved artwork and a finished vehicle, including printing, materials, and scheduling.
Here’s how to keep it short.
Three Ways to Keep Vehicles Earning
Brand vehicles before they enter service. For large fleets that buy vehicles through a dealership or a fleet management company (FMC), there’s a stretch when the vehicle hasn’t started service yet and, for many, is already in the upfit process. Upfitting is the work of fitting a vehicle for its job. Shelving, racking, and tracking equipment all get installed before the vehicle hits a route. Graphics belong in that same stage. The vehicle hasn’t started earning yet, and adding the wrap to that sequence means the unit shows up to its first day of service already branded, with no separate install appointment. For fleets that add vehicles regularly through a dealership or an FMC, this is the lowest-downtime path, because there’s no service time to interrupt.
Install in the windows your fleet already has. Many rebrands and fleet refreshes involve trucks that are already running routes. That’s where scheduling and coordination make the difference in reducing downtime. Fleets operating on typical business hours, like 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., leave vehicles parked every night and through the weekend. Those windows already exist in your schedule. A crew travels to your location, and AV also has physical installation locations, including Cincinnati, so the work happens on a day or during hours when the vehicle isn’t planned to be in service. The key to minimizing downtime for your revenue-producing vehicles is matching the fleet graphic installation to the windows your fleet has available.
Fleets on rotating shifts have different gaps. A vehicle that runs the morning route sits idle in the afternoon, and a night-shift vehicle sits idle during the day. The install schedule gets shaped around how your fleet actually operates, not the other way around.
Build the timeline in advance. One of the most common causes of unnecessary downtime isn’t the install itself. It’s poor coordination. Vinyl that hasn’t arrived. A vehicle pulled off its route too early. A truck sitting in a garage for two weeks waiting on materials that were never confirmed before the unit was scheduled.
Fleet managers often deal with those delays, and they come from everything around the install: printing, material orders, and scheduling. Project management solves them. When the timeline is set far enough ahead, materials are ordered and confirmed before the vehicle comes off its route. That’s how a truck avoids sitting idle waiting for vinyl, and how a unit stays on its route until the crew and materials are ready.
With that planning in place, many fleet graphic installation turnarounds run 24 to 48 hours, depending on the type of wrap. Getting there depends on three things: materials that are ready, crews that are scheduled, and a vehicle that is available on the planned date. When all three line up, the vehicle is back on its route within that window.
Who Coordinates It All
Many fleet graphics providers handle a single-location install. The harder job is coordinating the full program (printing, materials, crews, and scheduling) across dozens of sites, multiple vehicle types, and different schedules, without creating the delays fleet managers are trying to avoid. When several local vendors each handle one piece, the fleet manager ends up as the coordinator. Advertising Vehicles is a single-source vendor for design, print, and installation, with removal and rebrand management on top. A dedicated Cincinnati-based account manager acts as your single point of contact, and one team owns the full timeline across every location you operate in. If you have a large fleet that needs to be rebranded, talk to Advertising Vehicles about building your fleet graphic installation schedule around your vehicles’ operating requirements. Your vehicles earn every day they’re on the road, and the schedule should protect that.
