Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/553565
16 l FIRST CLASSCLASS Technological edge CEI's tight resale cycle has an added benefit of keeping his fleet equipped with the latest techno- logical advances, and he says his customers take notice. "The way we buy trucks, we're bringing new technology into the fleet every year," he says. "Some of our competitors bring new equip- ment in every seven years. They're not exposing their customers to the benefits of new technologies like we can." Among those technological advances are satellite tracking, flow- through billing and a tire monitor- ing system. "People say, 'A tire monitoring system? Why? You're in landfills.' "But uptime is at a premium in our business, and we have to maximize it. Say our tire monitoring system sends an email to our dis- patch guy that says a tire is going low. We can notify the driver, call a service guy to meet him at an exact time and do a NASCAR-style pit stop. We've turned a 3-hour reactive repair into a 45-minute proactive repair. "All kinds of little things like that separate us from our competitors. The guy with the most data always wins." The performance and reliability of the Model 579 also play well into CEI's uptime equation. "It's not the cost of a repair that hurts, it's the cost of downtime. We need that truck on the road, five days a week. You miss one day because the truck's in the shop and that's 20 percent of that week's rev- enue. How are you going to make that up? That truck has 630 min- utes a day to catch all the cash it can. Anything that takes away from that 630 minutes, we can't recoup." "We see equipment purely as a cost-to-own consideration, not cost-to-buy, and Peterbilt's cost of ownership truly makes our business model work." — Troy Baird