Bring’er in

There was a time when the old-school wrench wielder didn’t exactly welcome new technology into the shop with a nod and a smile. But the fleet garage has come a long way in the last decade. Maintenance software systems, for example, are an effective tool for both fleet and shop managers–the latter can easily manage the day’s work orders, while the boss manages the shop staff’s on-the-job efficiency.

A good maintenance software package provides preventive maintenance (PM) scheduling, parts inventory management, component life history, returns tracking, and helps establish vehicle costing–which comes in handy come trade-in time. It also acts as a complete database of vehicles and components, with individual pages for every single piece of equipment.
Ask the pros and they’ll each have their favourite features.

Earl Coleman, maintenance manager of Steinbach, Man.-based Big Freight Systems, likes his Richer Enrich System’s warranty capture abilities. “It’s great for flagging potential warranty opportunities,” he says. “Say you install an alternator with a one-year warranty. If you have that set up in your system, when you put it on your truck and the truck comes in six months later and you have to replace the part, the system will flag you for a potential warranty situation. You take it off, put it in the warranty bin and collect your warranty.”

And Bob Dumond, maintenance coordinator for Manitoulin Transport in Gore Bay, Ont., likes the detailed costs analysis the system provides his staff. “Everything we do to every unit gets run through this system, so we have a detailed cost history on each piece of equipment that we own since the date of purchase. We use it for PM scheduling, and we use it for accounting purposes so we can determine what our costs are in-house versus third-party maintenance.”

In the PM

If a fleet has 50-plus power units and twice as many trailers, then government inspections on any given piece of equipment is going to be around the corner, so it helps to have a reliable PM system to check and repair units on a timely basis. Same goes for a company’s internal A and B inspections. Users can set up the software to prompt them to upcoming work on various components on a unit–say, routine oil changes or transmission work–or A and B unit safety inspections as a whole.

When the maintenance team arrives to work in the morning, the software will have a work list ready to be printed telling them everything they have to do in 14 days, 10 days, six days, three days, or past due. Staff can then schedule work accordingly.

Most software packages will have an automatic PM reporting feature that keeps tabs on what work has been completed and by whom. That feature, says Manitoulin Transport’s Dumond, comes in handy if government inspectors come around asking questions.
“We’ve had MTO audits where they’ve come in and looked at our system. Rather than us providing a paper trail, they’ve accepted a lot of the electronic stuff on the system, largely because of the real-time recording, electronic timekeeping,” he says.

“It’s largely for inspections on trucks, for example the brake thicknesses on every inspection. And it makes it easy for you to search work orders on each piece of equipment.”

Plus, says Ron Turley, a veteran fleet maintenance manager at UPS who now consults privately with Turley Transportation Consultants in the Caribbean, the software can provide management with a weekly compliance report. “It’s a window on how you’re operating. If you run several shops you can see how the other shops are doing and get on top of issues. It doesn’t replace the personal follow-up that should be done on a PM system–inspecting PMs, making sure they’re done adequately and completely–but it is very efficient.”

Have it Handy
Of course, when you’ve got something prompting you to do work every day,

it helps to have a well-stocked parts inventory. Another important feature is its inventory management capabilities. Like PM reporting, the software’s inventory management features will prompt users on what parts need to be replaced and prints out an automatic reorder that’s based on historical data on usage.

By the Numbers
Turley says there are multiple efficiencies to be wrung out of an effectively utilized software system, but the biggest money-saver–and most ignored attribute–is using it to maximize the efficiency of shop technicians.

“That’s actually a feature that’s not widely used by many companies,” says Turley, “but it should be.”

Turley says when he was head of maintenance for UPS back in the 1970s, he was able to save that company $100 million in productivity costs by studying the time it took to do 800 repetitive maintenance jobs and benchmarking each one. “It told us who needed to be trained. [Maintenance staff] would say, ‘I can’t do it that quickly,’ but we showed them that they could,” he says.

“The overall effect was that within five years, we were operating a substantially larger fleet with fewer technicians.”
Manitoulin Transport is one firm that uses the software to keep track of productivity, although Dumond admits they could be stricter about it. “Whenever a mechanic does work on anything, it gets logged on and a work order is created and it’s live because we use electronic time keeping,” he says. “It keeps track of our mechanic hours, and we use it for productivity reports on our garages. We do have time guidelines on various jobs, but we’re pretty easygoing about that.”

Such software can also paint a decent picture of your equipment’s efficiencies. It tracks breakdown and road calls by type and provides a window on areas where more PM training might be required. “We might see that we’re spending a lot of money on air conditioning or brakes and you can start to see trends and look for problems,” says Big Freight’s Coleman. “It doesn’t give you solutions but it points out problems you might have in your maintenance system.”

Best of all, your maintenance system can really shed light on the lemons in your fleet. “The technicians know what’s bad because they deal with the equipment on a daily basis, but the software really brings out the dogs,” says Turley. “I’ve done some consulting where they used the software to compare one brand against another. They were both comparable models and same age, but one was three times more expensive to operate and they were able to see that through the software.”

Coleman agrees, adding he too has squeezed a lemon or two out of his fleet. “It helps us with our replacement decisions, life-to-date costs, and year-to-date costs,” he says. “If we have a four- or five-year trade-in cycle, we can take a look at a block of trucks and quickly identify any units that have had excessive repairs and catch one or two that may have had some major repairs done in the last while that we might want to consider selling.”n TMC FleetPortal is an electronic information utility designed to support fleet parts and maintenance operations. TMC FleetPortal offers a simple and centralized interface for locating and viewing maintenance and repair data from multiple manufacturers and suppliers, including parts lists and schematics from virtually every supplier. It can accommodate information associated with any type of vehicle or equipment, including trucks, tractors, and trailers, or specific components. See www.fleetportal.com

n RTA Fleet Management System is a highly customizable , user friendly, intuitive system that is easy to implement and maintain, according to the company. The software can create a wide range of critical fleet reports on a wide range of maintenance areas, including: vehicle costs, work orders billing/history, parts inventory with bar coding, mechanic productivity, PM performance, vendor performance,
vehicle depreciation and more. See www.rtafleet.com, or call 800-279-0549

n Enrich Maintenance and Materials is a comprehensive maintenance management tool providing fleet managers total control over vehicle maintenance. Enrich can produce over 70 standard maintenance reports while tracking service intervals, processing inventory, tracking labour costs, producing warranty reports and more. See www.richer.ca, or call 800-491-7780

n Truck Tracker Software is a fleet management program that regulates fleet maintenance, repairs, tires, fuel, logs, licensing and tags, preventive maintenance scheduling, parts inventory with bar code support, and employee, vendor, and vehicle information. Its latest Truck Tracker 5 Report Manager feature allows users to generate any type of report needed all from one screen. See www.fleet-maintenance.com, or call 847-741-9980

n Fleet Assistant is a maintenance software solution for improving the economic performance of fleets. The software lowers maintenance cost through effective PM scheduling, improved staff productivity, reduced labour using wireless repair orders and parts physical inventory, reduced paper work, improved warranty capture, improved chronic repair capture, reduced parts cost, and improved reports. See www.cetaris.com, or call 416-679-9444