Service Bay
Tony Mastrolembo,
a service technician
for Penn Power Group
in the WheelTime
network, uses a
computer to help
log and track
service work.
Today's aftermarket business software gives service providers a wealth of educational information and
data that can be used to improve vehicle maintenance.
Why
offering
analysis
is a must
for today's
service
facilities
customers are providing and ultimately
benefit both sides.
To fleets, there is no more vulgar
word than "downtime." Having a truck
and driver sidelined due to a breakdown
limits the amount of freight that can be
hauled, and money that can be made.
W W W . T R U C K PA R T S A N D S E R V I C E . C O M
Decisiv's service management platform uses an
easy-to-navigate interface to provide techs with
a cache of service information.
Preventive maintenance helps minimize that downtime.
The services offered in most PM stops
today are standard, but how they are
recorded and monitored are not. Service
providers that offer high-quality PM
tracking and evaluation have a significant
selling point in the marketplace.
Any service facility can do an oil
change. It's the shop that also provides
analysis on how that oil performed and
maintenance advice from that analysis
that ultimately wins an outsourcing
fleet's business.
And thanks to advanced management
software programs, service data — once
used just to document past work — can
now be analyzed to uncover performance
trends, potential failure risks and future
service needs.
The days of reactive-based
maintenance are over, says Adam Madsen, lead product owner at Karmak.
"The really large fleets have identified
the PM is the best way to save money
on maintenance," he says. "They've
identified that when you save money on
maintenance you really make money, and
that keeping a truck breakdown free is
the only way to do that."
A value-added PM offering has multiple selling points for service providers,
says Madsen, who recently co-authored a
white paper with Karmak Service Product Owner Jason Goby on how data collection and analysis can benefit a service
provider's operation.
According to the duo, some key benefits include allowing service providers
to help customers develop more accurate
PM intervals, identify possible component failure risks and bundle services to
minimize downtime.
"If you can reduce a customer's downtime through PMs, even if they are more
expensive at the time, the actual bottomline profitability for the fleet goes up,"
says Michael Riemer, vice president
of products and channel marketing at
Decisiv.
Service shop management and diagnostic software are now built with the
N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | T R U C K PA R T S & S E R V I C E
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