Tag Archives: Maintenance management

Understanding your customers is a critical first step toward operating a successful business. In fact, until you’ve walked (or driven) a mile in their shoes, gaining key insight into the daily challenges faced by fleet maintenance or breakdown managers is only guesswork. If you haven’t obtained this firsthand perspective it is important that you take the time as soon as possible to get a better grasp of the challenges and pressures these managers often confront. Having a better appreciation for the reasonable demands of the customer will completely change your perspective and any incorrect assumptions you may have had regarding… Read More »

Imagine the next time you pull into the fast food drive-through to place an order and learn you can only purchase a hamburger. If you are craving French Fries with that juicy burger, you’ll need to visit a restaurant down the street. To top off the meal, you’ll have to stop at a third location to obtain the carbonated beverage of your choice. Sounds like a ridiculous situation, doesn’t it? Ironically, many fleets, and dealer and independent service locations within our industry face a similar scenario on a daily basis. Warranty, build, parts, labor, repair instructions and comprehensive information including… Read More »

Maintenance management for trucking fleets today is often a cumbersome and difficult proposition but fortunately a number of positive changes are coming in the years ahead thanks to advances in technology. The concept of simply printing internal shop repair orders will end as internal service business systems must be more user-friendly and offer real-time capabilities. The current in-house business systems need to integrate the demands of a modern day carrier. For instance, the use of GPS and preplanning information from a number of different silos of information including operations databases of current pre-loaded information coupled with information downloaded from a… Read More »

Technology is great when it works, isn’t it?  The reality is we’ve all experienced moments of technology hell. Sometimes it’s the check engine light that lights up on the drive to an important meeting, or a cable outage during the last two minutes of the big race, the inability to complete a phone call or send a critical message on a busy (or patchy!) cellular network.  Stress?  Frustration? Desire to hurl said technology out the window at 65 mph? Yes, yes and yes!  Such moments no doubt make us forget about why we employed the technology in the first place… Read More »