Regular maintenance can prevent costly repairs but keeping on top of it can be a headache

While Lynyrd Skynyrd might have sung about it in his ode to the southern states, keeping big wheels turning is actually a full-time job for many fleet managers. Staying on top of routine maintenance is a critical element of keeping their trucks on the road and earning money. Sticking to the maintenance schedule is also a vital way to avoid expensive repairs that are triggered by poor or absent vehicle servicing.

Knowing how challenging it can be keeping up-to-date with servicing the family sedan, you can imagine what a potential nightmare it could be having to stay on top of maintaining hundreds, or even thousands, of trucks, vans, forklifts, diggers and other fleet vehicles.

The old way – time-consuming and unreliable

In the past tedious paper-based systems were labor-intensive requiring drivers or fleet managers to manually check each vehicle for odometer or maintenance clock readings and update log books. Even then preventative services were often missed or ignored because it was too much like hard work to maintain. Irregular or non-existent maintenance often meant costly repairs farther down the track and expensive downtime as the vehicle was off the road for days and sometimes weeks.

Poor maintenance is also a huge safety risk for drivers who rely on their vehicles to cope with the punishing workloads they are often put through, traveling thousands of miles and working long hours in conditions not friendly to machines – dust, dirt, heat, wet, freezing cold or aggressive driving all takes its toll.

So is there a way to streamline the process of keeping on top of fleet maintenance?

The smart way – GPS maintenance tracking

Instead of manually checking every single fleet vehicle every day and logging hour or mileage information to keep service records up-to-date, you can just let GPS tracking automatically store this information and simply alert you when a service is coming up.

Sounds easy, but how does it work?

The video below shows a maintenance schedule being added to a vehicle that is part of the fleet tracked with GPS devices. Within Telogis Fleet, vehicles are easily setup and added to the system, easily categorized and sorted according to teams and truck attributes.

Once the vehicle is added a new schedule can easily be linked to it, using any predefined services that have been setup and customizing it for the vehicle. For example, a service type may be replacing an oil filter. When scheduling this service type for a specific vehicle, the maintenance requirements might dictate that the filter be replaced every 10,000 miles or it may be based on engine hours.

After the schedule has been added against the vehicle, the GPS tracking device and Telogis Fleet take care of the rest, monitoring the number of miles covered and engine hours (if the vehicle’s hardware has been setup to record engine on time).

When the vehicle gets to the predefined alert point added when the maintenance schedule was first entered, it posts a message to the Telogis Fleet message box and alerts the designated supervisor by email advising that a service will shortly be required for this vehicle. After the service has been performed, the vehicle’s service log in Telogis Fleet can be updated and the service tracking resets until the next maintenance is needed.

There are plenty of reasons why fleet owners really can’t afford to not have an effective maintenance schedule in place. Here are a few:

• Reduce fleet downtime – Vehicles off the road are costing the business lost revenue.
• Lower staff costs – By automating maintenance scheduling your staff can be engaged in more profitable work.
• Longer life of fleet vehicles and machinery – By keeping up with a good schedule of preventative maintenance your vehicles last longer and incur fewer problems.
• Central point for all maintenance information – Fleet owners and supervisors have easy, online access to all maintenance and servicing information for the entire fleet at the click of a button. This not only saves time chasing up service records but can also maximize investment in equipment warranties and provide more accurate inventory tracking.

If it sounds good but you just need to know how it will work for your fleet, and what sort of return on investment you can expect, just get in touch with Telogis – they have plenty of hands-on experience in making fleet maintenance headaches disappear!

Don’t despair! Just because the job market is competitive, doesn’t mean employment is out of reach. You’re just a couple of strategic moves away from landing your ideal trucking job.

Firstly, if you haven’t already, sign up to www.truckingboards.com. This active online trucking community has more than 24,000 members and is the ideal place to network and grow your contacts in the industry. You’ll find everything from tax and financial advice to truck driver politics – right through to how to avoid hitting a deer when you’re on the road.

Next, do some research. The best place to start is online. Begin with the website of the companies you’d most like to work for, and be sure to google their names so you can view any recent press releases or news articles. If you research a carrier and discover that they recently laid off 50 staff in your area, for instance, you’ll know not waste your time and energy applying with them. It pays to be fully informed!

If you’re competing for jobs against other truck drivers who have similar skills and experience as you, you need to do whatever you can to stand out – in a positive way.

This means, at a minimum, that you need to fill out your application using correct grammar and spelling. It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised by how many resumes and job applications are riddled with spelling mistakes and sloppy errors. Keep in mind that the word “shift” is just one letter from being a common curse word…

Finally, make sure you submit an email address that is simple and professional, such as RickJones@aol.com. An address such as BigRigRick69@ could give employers a negative perception of you, while a busy address like RickNJones_0871@ is easy to mis-transcribe.

These are simple things that job seekers often overlook, but they can make the difference between a great job and the unemployment line!

Top sites for jobseekers:

www.truckinfo.net
As well as matching truckers with jobs, TruckInfo.net has a trucking parts directory, listings of truck and trailers for sale, a fuel economy calculator and a freight rates bidding forum – plus much more!

www.everytruckjob.com
A free service dedicated to helping professional class-A truck drivers find work, the site currently lists more than 10,000 jobs from 2,500 trucking companies.

www.bigrigjobs.com
With a database of more than 20,000 trucking companies through the United States, BigRigJobs allows you to search jobs for free by state or driver type to find the best match.

www.classadrivers.com
Class A Drivers.com aims to match all truck drivers – from owner operators, company drivers and recent truck driving schools graduates – to their ideal job.

www.all-trucking-jobs.com
After you fill in a brief online application, this site will match company drivers and owner-operators to carriers that are currently hiring nationwide.

“The big carriers are going to get bigger and fewer,” confirms Duff Swain, president of consulting firm Trincon Group, “while the smaller carriers need to get smarter and more niche-driven.”

Swain delivered this news at a recent conference, where he pointed out what most of us already know: the global economic downturn has not only forced us to rethink the way we do business today, but it’s also forced us to re-evaluate how we’ll operate in the future.

According to American Trucking Association (ATA) President Bill Graves, the main concern carriers face today is the increasing influence of the federal Government.

“The policy and regulatory reach of federal government into your businesses will surely increase over the next 5 to 10 years,” Graves said at the ATA’s Annual Management Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas in October.

“The list of government agencies that now have a role in regulating your business reads like alphabet soup.”

To survive and thrive in the challenging and evolving freight market, he recommends that carriers initiate a strategic overhaul of their operating procedures – pronto.

“Whether you were running one truck or 10,000 trucks, figuring out how to manage almost $5 [per gallon] fuel was the difference between staying in or going out of business. Now that prices have subsided and are holding reasonably steady, the application of those lessons learned should continue to produce tangible financial benefits,” he explains.

For instance, carriers should consider investing in specialized software such as Telogis GPS Fleet Management Software, which assists with fuel management. The average OnTrack (now Telogis Fleet) customer reports a 10-15% reduction of their annual fuel bill, as well as savings and higher efficiency across areas such as insurance, safety compliance, risk management and customer service.

Truckers also need to figure out how to cope with rising costs across critical areas such as equipment and technology, by working out a way to run fewer vehicles in a more productive and profitable way.

“Change is difficult at any moment, but it will be especially challenging for this industry in this transformational time,” Graves says.

“The question is not whether you’re able to adapt to this ever-more-complicated, increasingly intrusive operating environment. Your failure to do so simply means you cease to exist as a transportation enterprise.

“The question is how you’re able to deal with these myriad government mandates – and still find some enjoyment in running your business, provide quality service to your customers and, heaven forbid, make enough profit to make it worth your while.”

There has been some resistance to the Australian government’s push of the Intelligent Access Program (IAP),  for trucks using Higher Mass Limits which plans to enable better road usage for trucks adopting the program.

“The program gives heavy vehicles access to 14,000 kilometres of the state road network,” says Michael Daley, NSW Roads Minister

“There are also significant economic benefits by allowing transport operators to safely carry heavier loads on approved routes.”

Companies have until June 30 (or six weeks after for Queensland) to install GPS monitoring technology in heavy vehicle cabs or risk losing access to more than 10,000 kilometres of road across NSW.

Despite the obvious reluctance of many companies to take on the new tracking systems, the benefits of a good implemented system will far outway the costs.

Integrated Solutions Magazine in the U.S. recently published an article on how a GPS tracking system by Telogis is helping save Namasco Corp $500,000 per year in fuel costs alone (read full article). This is but one of many success stories of a well integrated system and how it’s helping to see companies through the current financial instability.

Read more on the IAP here.

Iowa – Oct 5th, 2006. A truck company representative who declined to give his or the driver’s names said, the driver “didn’t see the low-bridge signs.” (Photo courtesy: Matt Ryerson/The Daily Iowan)

Davenport, Iowa – Nov 18th, 2008. This truck had it’s top literally ‘peeled off’ after making it completely through a railroad overpass before realizing that the truck was too tall. (Photo courtesy: Larry Fisher/Quad-City Times)

Greensboro, Carolina – Oct 1st, 2007. The driver of a tractor trailer used her best judgment to drive under this railway bridge but misjudged by 18 inches. (Photo courtesy: Amy Dominello / News & Record)

Kansas – Feb 15th, 2006. On Interstate 70 just west of Hays, a semi-tractor trailer, hauling a track hoe excavator, hit a bridge causing the boom to crash right through the bridge. (Photo courtesy: Steven Hausler/AP Photo)

The amazing part about these accidents is that it’s really not uncommon. You only have to misjudge a bridge height by an inch and you’ll peel the top like a sardine tin. These days though, truck drivers don’t have much excuse because industry leading Fleet and Truck GPS systems now include truck attributes for every road.

Truck Attributes?

There are all sorts of road restrictions throughout the US (and they vary in every state), specifying what types of vehicles are allowed in certain streets, bridges and tunnels and so on. The obvious ones are the ones that clearly (as seen above) just don’t fit. The not so obvious ones may be whether the size of your trailer length can handle a turn from this street to that street without knocking down people’s fences. Or whether the load you are moving is legally allowed on this road at this time of day and/or season.

It’s a good thing that there is now software to handle and process this information for you. To utilise this data a truck driver simply needs to enter the weight, height, width and some other attributes about their load into the system and the software will route to your destination on the safest and most fuel efficient route.