Welcome to the latest installment in our Technician’s Log series. This blog series is geared with the technician in mind. We want to bring you all the latest and greatest gearhead news for your consumption. And today, we are going to touch on an often-overlooked topic: heavy-duty maintenance and repair and how to maintain shop productivity.
The question is, what do we classify as heavy-duty maintenance and repair? For the purposes of this blog, we are going to classify it as fleets containing Class 6 to Class 8 commercial motor vehicles. This category includes farm equipment, emergency vehicles, construction equipment, and other heavy machinery. Of course, this also includes Class 8 big rigs.
Still, this is a wide category of vehicles. And a lot goes into maintaining and repairing these vehicles. Still, having trucks in your shop is a fact of life. How do you maintain shop productivity and keep your heavy-duty vehicles running on time? You must take a holistic approach.
Set Shop Standards
First, don’t let confusing terms confuse you. Use a universal language to explain why a particular heavy-duty rig is in the shop. Every technician in the shop should be speaking the same language from the moment the maintenance is diagnosed through to the truck leaving the shop fully repaired. Have you set up Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards (VMRS)?
By using VMRS codes, technicians don’t have to spend time filling out forms or going through more manual processes. Instead, they can merely choose the codes that correspond to the problem the vehicle is having. Smart shop managers also link up VMRS-codes to repair timelines. This allow heavy-duty shop work to be scheduled in a more efficient and intuitive fashion.
The key to running an efficient shop is through time management. You’ve got to have a good idea of how long repair times are going to be. To properly estimate how many jobs are in the queue and how long it will take you to complete those jobs you’ve got to ensure work is flowing through the shop. Bottlenecks will become a major problem when dealing with heavy-duty repairs.
Tracking technician productivity will also ensure your shop runs like a well-oiled machine. Whether you use VMRS or standard repair times, the best way to compare technician efficiency and productivity is through proper time evaluation. Each technician working on your heavy-duty rigs must have their times tracked and evaluated against known repair times.
Certification and Training
You also want to make sure you stay on top of technician certification and training. Consider certifications by themselves. They are used to measure knowledge and generally they only have a 5-year shelf time. Heavy-duty shop technicians need to make sure they keep up with the latest technology, especially now with how quickly big rigs evolve.
You can also just look at the raw data. According to an ASE study, productivity rates of ASE certified technicians are higher than non-certified technicians by nearly 20%. Heavy-duty rigs worked on by certified technicians also had a lower return rate by almost half.
Fortunately, you should be able to rely on OEMs and other vendor partners to provide the required training. By falling back on your partners, you can diagnose trucks faster and complete in-house warranty work more efficiently. Today’s trucks are so different that you can’t rely on old knowledge to get you through.
When was the last time you updated your training programs to account for new technologies? Have you adopted new safety technologies that your truck drivers could use a primer on? These are appropriate questions that you need to ask as you evaluate your heavy-duty shop efficiency.
Organization and Scheduling
It is too easy to lapse into a sense of complacency when it comes to shop organization. When was the last time you took a look at how your shop was organized? The same should be true for your shop policies and procedures. As your operation changes and evolves with the times, you need to make sure your training documentation keeps up.
Take a hard look at optimizing workflow and don’t hesitate to rearrange your shop layout and policies if they are not working like they used to. Look at it from the point of your technicians and how many steps they must take to get a heavy-duty repair job completed. The less steps they need to take, the better in the long run and the more efficient they will be.
You may also want to look at optimizing your preventative maintenance (PM) checklist and workflow. As you add new vehicles to the fleet, your PM routine must account for these changes. If you are transitioning to more electric vehicles (EV), for example, they may require an entirely different routine. Make sure your truck drivers and shop technicians are aware of this.
Scheduling can be another pain point. Because honestly there is nothing more frustrating than a truck going into the bay for a repair, but no one has a good idea when it will emerge. Good communication between the fleet and the shop is key to making sure the work gets done expeditiously and everyone is happy.
Focus on Automation and Data
Getting your PM workflow in order represents the first step in truly optimizing your shop. Next, you want to have a look at how you can use automation to save yourself and other technicians in your shop more time. Eliminate paper forms and use fleet management software and RFID tags to pinpoint areas around your rig that need to be accounted for.
You should also use your vehicles themselves as data points. By helping your truckers get used to advanced telematics, you can get the data you need to plan repairs for your heavy-duty rigs while they are still out on the road. When the shop manager has an early warning of what to expect when the vehicle arrives, the repair can be completed in a far more expeditious manner.
You may also want to consider automating your work orders. When you can schedule workers through a fleet management system and automate the process based on the vehicle in question, you’ll save a lot of time and energy and the other technicians in your shop will thank you. Consider switching to a paperless system.
With a paperless work order system, you can enter inspection information into the computer and the work can then be pre-assigned. As technicians scan barcodes in, the system can sync up parts availability. Technicians can use their smartphones or tablet computers to access diagnostics information without leaving the bay.
You may also want to consider investing in truck lifts. Did you know that fewer than 10% of all service bay have heavy-duty lifts? The reason for this has been that traditionally, technicians have generally had enough space to get under the rigs and get the work done. But as technology and emissions regulations have changed, it is a lot harder to reach the systems and sub-systems required to complete repair jobs.
Using a shop lift also does more than offer a greater level of convenience to technicians working on the trucks, it also increases overall productivity. Time to complete something as simple as DPF filter maintenance can be drastically reduced simply from working with a lift.
Heavy-Duty Maintenance as a Fleet Asset
Consider the following data points: Maintenance accounts or nearly 15 cents per mile of a heavy-duty trucks overall operating costs. Only vehicle-based costs of fuel and equipment put together contributed more than maintenance on a per mile basis.
As trucks continue to become more sophisticated, the costs associated with maintaining them will surely rise even more. This makes the role of proper heavy-duty maintenance and repair even more important. To run a successful fleet, a finely tuned shop is necessary. Unproductive shop staff can truly cripple an organization.
Creative fleet management staff should be relied on to keep costs in check. After all, fleet maintenance managers do so much more than just direct heavy-duty rig maintenance. They are responsible for everything from efficiency and productivity to budgeting, regulations, hiring, and so much more.
In the end, working with heavy-duty commercial motor vehicles is not an easy task. But if you take a holistic view and evaluate all aspects of your operation, your heavy-duty rigs will be good to go and you’ll be running a lean and mean heavy-duty maintenance and repair operation.