Waste haulers can quickly and effectively deal with unscheduled repairs, control costs, and gain insights into maintenance activities to prevent future problems.
Dave Walters
Waste haulers rely heavily on technology to control costs and improve asset use. In evaluating the opportunities to make new investments, they often start with their profit centers, like operations, where the daily planning, scheduling and billing take place.
Fleet maintenance is often perceived as a cost center and, as such, lags behind the investment curve. Some waste haulers, for instance, still use whiteboards in their maintenance bays to schedule repair work. Paper files and spreadsheets are also used to track warranties, parts inventory and record maintenance costs and activities.
Including a maintenance program in the daily routine is just as important to the financial well-being of a company as buying a new truck or efficient routing. An effective program will bring organization and information to fleet operators and open the inside lane for achieving their cost and use objectives.
The benefits of using the latest fleet maintenance management software includes analyzing and dissecting costs, maximizing vehicle run time, recovering warranty and high availability of parts with minimal inventory costs. Maintenance programs have also become vital for managing fleet safety and compliance.
Driving Down Cost
Without maintenance software, waste haulers tend to view maintenance costs like any other expense in the general ledger—as a total. Accounting systems lack the features necessary to measure and analyze maintenance costs and take systematic steps to reduce them.
Maintenance software comes with features for tracking and analyzing equipment costs on a per-vehicle basis. It also employs use ratios such as cost per mile and cost per hour. With detailed information, managers can make smart decisions on equipment purchases and disposals. The software also reveals repair trends and how vehicle operating costs change over time. These reports help managers fine-tune PM intervals and ensure that equipment is being used for the right applications. The analysis helps to provide feedback to drivers on ways to improve fuel economy and lower maintenance costs for the specific vehicles they operate.
To keep cost metrics current, waste haulers can use software modules that interface with third-party fuel management and telematics systems. The interfaces capture gallons and odometer readings. Fuel costs can be tracked daily on a per-mile, per-hour, per-ton or other defined measure for analysis. Other integrated fuel management features include fuel tax reports and tracking site fuel inventories and vendor fuel purchase histories.
Routine Scheduling
Scheduling preventive maintenance (PM) has always been the core function of fleet maintenance software systems. Effective scheduling results in fewer service interruptions, which lowers cost and increases use.
Like any vehicle engaged in a frequent stop-and-go operation, waste handling trucks pay the price in increased wear on brakes, tires, suspensions, hydraulics, cooling and electrical systems. The heavy, compacted cargo also contributes to maintenance issues on crucial components.
With such rough duty cycles, collecting detailed records on the work performed to each vehicle, over time, can be used for insightful analysis. Trends begin to appear in breakdowns and part failures. This information becomes critical for adjusting PM schedules. As schedules are fine-tuned, the majority of repairs become scheduled repairs, which frees up resources to go after the exceptions—the breakdowns and component failures—that drive up costs and drive down asset use.
Using the scheduling features to establish routine maintenance will pay for the entire software system in a very short time. For routine maintenance issues like oil, brake and tire changes, schedules can be created immediately based on time or mileage. Over the long term, maintenance issues like engine, transmission and drive train rebuilds can be scheduled in advance based on historical data.
Fleet-Wide Visibility
Visibility to maintenance schedules extends beyond the maintenance bay. Using a fleet’s own computer network or by using a maintenance system with online access, fleet managers can see inspections, PM services and schedules for trucks under their control from any location. This continuous visibility helps maintenance and operations departments coordinate schedules.
When used effectively, PM scheduling and repair history details are essential for identifying defects early and striking down the root causes. Managers can look at failures that occur between PM services and adjust schedules accordingly. Once schedules are set up, automated notifications let managers know when services are due. These notifications are triggered by mileages, hours and engine fault codes through integration with vehicle telemetry systems, fuel cards and other electronic sources.
Besides scheduling PM services, maintenance software can be used to create schedules for all inspection intervals required by state and federal agencies as well as for license renewals.
Warranty Recovery
In order to effectively manage parts inventory and maximize warranty recovery from repairs, technicians must operate within a tightly controlled system. Maintenance software provides such controls by immediately identifying parts covered by warranty and capturing all information needed to file claims quickly. The systems do this by tracking the warranty period of each item. If a part is replaced on a vehicle within the warranty period, the system flags the item and prompts technicians to initiate a claims process.
The software captures other details necessary to receive reimbursement like the time expended to make a warranty repair, the cost of replacement parts and all the associated costs to the warranty repair.
Parts Management
Besides using the technology to increase warranty recovery, fleets can maximize vehicle uptime by ensuring mechanics have parts needed to complete repairs. Chasing parts not only causes delays but leads to unpredictable pricing.
Keeping a healthy supply of spare parts on hand could be done without using software, but would likely lead to having excess parts in inventory. Waste haulers would rather have their capital earning a return. Using fleet maintenance software to optimize inventory can both save money and keep assets rolling. For every item in inventory, the software keeps track of where it came from, what it cost, where it is now and how many are left. To help ensure that inventory data is accurate and efficient, fleets can use barcodes and scanners to receive items into their shops and to attach items to repair orders as repair work is performed.
Software can automatically adjust min-max inventory levels by using historical parts usage data to forecast demand and optimize the settings. Fleets can also run reports to identify slow-moving items and return excess parts to suppliers in exchange for credits or faster-moving items. For parts that are purchased from more than one vendor, the software keeps a record of the price that was paid to each supplier to simplify future buying decisions. For efficiency, purchase orders can be sent directly from the software to vendors through e-mail, fax or electronic data interchange. The purchase order includes all part numbers, quantities and the last approved cost for each item.
By having a centralized parts management system, waste haulers with more than one location can have a corporate-level parts manager purchase parts for all of their companies’ facilities. The decision on what to buy is no longer in the hands of individual shops. The systems keep a detailed record of inventory at each location and a history of equipment repairs.
Software systems have various checks and balances to help fleets avoid stocking obsolete or mismatched parts. For example, fleets can apply cross-references to part numbers, equipment specs and vendors to ensure that their inventories stay current with changes to the fleet. For instance, if a purchasing manager needs to buy an alternator for a certain truck, he can quickly find the part number by searching the repair history of an identical truck in the fleet in which the alternator was replaced.
Resource Management
Once maintenance is scheduled and vehicles arrive in the shop, modern technology simplifies the data entry for technicians. A streamlined data entry process helps to ensure that important details are captured at the time the service takes place. This live data capture gives managers real-time visibility of their labor and capacity on the shop floor.
With a computer workstation and touchscreen monitor on the shop floor, technicians can see all the work that is scheduled for the day. As they go through the scheduled work, the system prompts them to document all activities in a repair order such as labor and parts used. The touchscreen simplifies the process with greater speed and fewer typing mistakes than standard keyboard entry.
Waste haulers can implement technology tools to evaluate how technicians and managers are spending their time and taking steps to optimize both cost and productivity. Standard repair times can be created for each type of repair order. Managers can evaluate the productivity of technicians against these standards. These reports are useful to identify areas where more training, technician development and better tooling might be needed.
Besides keeping labor and repair costs in line, maintenance software also helps match available shop capacity with demand throughout the workday. A shop foreman can use a planning module to see all open repair orders, technicians assigned to jobs and the estimated completion time of each repair.
Compliance
Besides using maintenance software to reduce costs and maximize equipment uptime, the technology has taken on the critical role of helping to improve safety and compliance. Under the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is paying much closer attention to fleet maintenance practices.
The CSA program categorizes the violations from roadside inspections into seven Behavior Analysis & Safety Improvement Categories(see Sidebar). Each month, the violations in each BASIC are scored by Safety Management System formulas to quantify carriers’ on-road safety performance; the higher the SMS score, the more likely trucks are pulled over for inspections.
The Vehicle Maintenance BASIC includes more than 200 violations that an officer can identify in a roadside inspection. Because of this added Vehicle Maintenance exposure, maintenance software can be one of the most effective safeguards from vehicle defects that harm SMS scores. For waste haulers, the CSA program puts a premium on inspecting vehicles regularly and getting defects promptly repaired. A successful preventive maintenance program will result in fewer roadside inspections and citations, which in turn will result in a better safety score.
PM programs are especially important in regard to tires, brakes, lighting and other obvious defects that might show up during a roadside inspection. Drivers can play an important role in this regard by sending in quality pre- and post-trip inspections.
Through integration with onboard computers and communications systems, maintenance software can create a closed-loop inspection and repair process. An electronic driver vehicle inspection report (DVIR) can be used to trigger an inspection ticket and repair order in the software system. Regardless of whether fleets use electronic or paper DVIRs, fleet maintenance software can provide documentation that driver-reported complaints are addressed in a proper and timely manner.
Filling a Void
Fleet maintenance management software fills a critical information void for waste haulers on many levels. From scheduling PM to tracking costs, repairs, vehicle histories and warranty recovery, these systems give managers the information they need, each day, to keep assets rolling at peak efficiency.
Dave Walters is the Solutions Engineer for TMW Systems (Beachwood, OH). He can be reached at [email protected].
Note
- http://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/Documents/FMC_CSA_12_009_BASICs_VehMaint.pdf.