Truck Parts and Service | Heavy Duty Trucking, Aftermarket, Service Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/495301
14 Cover Story torpedo a lot of other productivity im- provements, says Delaney. "I think for us the challenge always has been and will remain speed. How fast can we get the truck through the bay?" he says. "One of the biggest ways to impact that is keeping the technician working." "It's a huge cost for us and our cus- tomer to have a truck sitting there [in a bay] and no one be working on it," says Sean Ryan, vice president at Point Spring & Driveshaft. Access to technology is another area that can't be overlooked, says Eric Lid- dell, director of product management and integration at Procede Software. Dedicating one bay to diagnostics does not mean others should be devoid of it. Technicians should have comput- ers and/or tablets with Internet access in their bay or immediately accessible, complete with login information for OE and supplier training sites. "It's really all about integration," says Liddell. "Business systems used to just be a way to get your business informa- tion on the books, but now it is so much more than that. "Now you can integrate systems and include data from all different areas in one place." Access to your shop management system should be available as well. Michael Riemer, vice president of products and channel marketing at De- cisiv, says there are multiple reasons for this. He says techs must be able to iden- tify, at any moment, what a customer has pre-authorized them to do. But he says techs also should be allowed to update a repair order while working. "We've found service providers lose time in little chunks and big chunks," he says. "The big chunks are when a tech can't work. When the service provider doesn't have approval from a fl eet to con- tinue so an entire repair shuts down." But Riemer says when a tech updates the status of a repair in Decisiv's online cloud-based software, a vehicle owner immediately becomes aware of what's next and can proactively approve future steps so the tech doesn't need to stop. "We give visibility to the vehicle owner so they know what's going on," he says. Riemer and Delaney also note aftermarket research indicates less than 20 percent of all vehicle downtime is attributable to actual service and repair. The remaining 80 percent comes from waiting for customer authorizations, parts, tools and process breakdowns. Minimize or remove those issues and downtime plummets. "We've been able to drive approval times for repairs from two days down to 10 minutes for some customers," Delaney says. 4 Assign a parts procurement person Keeping a tech at his workspace means he should never be tasked with fetching his own parts. Any kit that cannot be stored in his bay should be provided to him by a dedicated parts runner. "Our techs are most valuable when they're in their bay," says Ernst. "The in- stant they get up and start moving about the building looking for something — our productivity slows down." Parts runners are typically parts de- partment employees and should work in conjunction with your parts counter. T R U C K P A R T S & S E R V I C E | A p r i l 2 0 1 5 Storage units, such as the APEX Supply Chain Technologies units above, allow service providers to carefully display, organize and track tools and products in an effi cient and space-saving manner.