Business Fleet, January/February 2018

WWW BUSINESSFLEET COM 10 BUSINESS FLEET January February 2018 Do you need to lessen your fleets downtime Have you looked back at a particular breakdown and thought you shouldve been able to prevent it Is your total fuel spend creeping out of control Your vehicles and drivers are generating mountains of data daily and if youre not properly collecting this data youre doing your operations a disservice For the small truck fleets that fly by the seat of their pants this article is for you This data capture does not need to involve enterprise operational changes such as installing telematics though a telematics system will automate the collection and analysis of this information Rather a simple spreadsheet reporting system should suffice Yes this will take time and most of us dont have enough of it You and your staff need to establish the doctrine of collecting maintaining and analyzing these sets of data and then using the metrics to sharpen both your operations and personnels behavior These fleet reports are merely ways to harbor and segment sets of data Your answers to the questions posed will tell you exactly where you need to be concentrating your efforts u DOWNTIME REPORT Do you have an adequate snapshot of what units are down and when you can expect each vehicle back in service A downtime report will bring your attention to vehicles that are past their useful lifecycle and help you plan for their replacements You may be saying But I only have 18 vehicles in three operating locations Why do I need this The answer to that question is found in more questions Are you visiting each of your operating locations every few days Can you identify that these units are out of service for other reasons for instance non compliance of regulations such as the ELD electronic logging device mandate Does your maintenance provider offer this information Does your maintenance provider advise you or your fleet supervisor when a repair will be delayed due to shop overloading or delayed parts Will your provider call you to tell you the wait time for the problem to be diagnosed much less repaired What if your maintenance provider is so overloaded that your broken down vehicle takes from three days to a week to get into the shop If the unit will not be available by a certain time can you slip seat rotate drivers for one of your operational units Do you have the personnel to do this Perhaps youll even need to be the slip seat driver in certain circumstances not an easy circumstance from which to operate your business I once reviewed a downtime report and ascertained that a truck was not scheduled to come back into service after a five day period of downtime When I investigated with our operational personnel I found out that this particular vehicle had not even entered the shop to be diagnosed When I called the shop the manager told me that the unit was 54th in line to be repaired What if one of your units is down for safety reasons but you are unaware that safety is the cause Many units have been returned to service because they are needed as requested by your fleet supervisor but that doesnt mean that the safety issue has been corrected For example if the drivers seat belt doesnt work or the four way flashers are inoperable do you only find out about this when its too late Your operations personnel and line management should be on top of these types of issues but in some cases they Do you have a firm grasp on your fleets downtime fuel spend unit damage rental bill and tire expense For the small truck fleets that fly by the seat of their pants this article is for you BY LES SMART OPERATIONS ISTOCKPHOTO COM JXFZSY Understanding Metrics WHAT IS YOUR FLEET TELLING YOU