More vehicles than one
A fleet is not one job repeated.
Fleet seat reupholstery for transit, coach and shuttle operators in NYC. The vehicles in a roster do not wear at the same rate, so the useful question is not what a bus costs. It is how many of yours need which kind of work.
Why one number is the wrong number
The fleet is mixed. The quote should be too.
A roster bought together does not age together. The vehicles on the longest routes carry the most passengers and the most hours; the spares barely move. Ask for one figure per vehicle and you get an average, which means recover money spent on a bus that needed a seam, and a patch on an interior that has reached the end.
Same specification, same age, different lives. What is worth having is a count against each kind of work rather than one rate across the roster, and that is answerable from a sample.
How the sorting works
Four answers, and the seat tells you which.
Every vehicle resolves to one of four kinds of work. Most rosters contain all four at once, which is exactly why a single blanket answer costs more than sorting does.
A split seam, a slash or one torn cushion, with the rest of the cover still sound.
The vinyl is original and intact, but the colour has gone chalky and flat.
The cover is fine. The seat has gone hard and sits low.
The cover is cracking across panels, or has been patched as far as it will go.
School buses sort the same way, but the seat and the rules around it are their own subject, which is school bus seat reupholstery. Runs of vehicles are quoted as bulk projects.
What order the roster goes in
The order you do them in is a decision, not a detail.
Once the fleet is sorted the work still has to be sequenced, and the instinct to start with the oldest vehicles is usually the wrong one.
Worst first puts the biggest visible change in front of passengers earliest, and takes the vehicles most likely to fail out of the roster. Oldest first spends the budget on interiors that may leave the fleet before they earn it back.
Where stages fall far enough apart that materials can move, the specification is recorded at the first vehicle so the last comes back matching rather than close. That, and how a vehicle goes through the shop, is set out on the recover page. Rosters already on a maintenance programme are sequenced against visits that are happening anyway.
Before you commit the roster
What comes up once the number gets big.
How many vehicles make it a fleet job?
There is no threshold. It becomes a fleet job when the vehicles stop being quoted one at a time, and the specification, the sequence and the rates are set once and then applied across the roster instead of being renegotiated per bus. That happens with a handful of vehicles as readily as with a whole depot, and it is the reason a programme prices differently from the same work ordered as separate jobs.
Do you have to see every vehicle to quote?
No, and it is usually the wrong way round. A sample taken across the range tells us how the fleet is distributed: the newest, the oldest, and a couple from the middle of the route roster. We quote each kind of work and the count against it, then confirm the counts as the vehicles come in. Photographs of the worst seat on each sampled bus are enough to start.
What if more vehicles need recovering than the sample suggested?
The counts move and the rates hold. That is the point of quoting kinds of work rather than one fleet figure: a vehicle that turns out to need a recover instead of a repair is re-categorised at a rate already agreed, not re-quoted from scratch. You find out the total has changed before that vehicle is started, rather than at the invoice.
Can part of the fleet be done now and the rest next budget year?
Yes, and it is the common case rather than the exception. Splitting a roster across budget years changes nothing about how each vehicle is worked on. What it changes is the risk that the material specified at the start is harder to get by the end, which is what the recorded specification exists to protect, and why a staged fleet is worth setting up as one programme rather than as a series of unrelated orders.
Send the range, not the average
Send the best one and the worst one.
Photograph the worst seat on the vehicle you would least like to show a passenger, and the same seat on the one you are happiest with. The spread between those two is what gets priced. Tell us roughly how many vehicles sit between them, or call (347) 310-7483.
