GE industry experts answer questions

Ask the Expert question: With the new HOS rules, I'm concerned about driver productivity and my ability to get the most revenue per driver hour possible. I am curious how I can use trailer maintenance as a driver productivity tool?

GE Senior Marketing Leader, Jeff Ballew, answers: The one sure thing about the new hours of service rules is that few companies know the exact impact HOS will have on their business. Many of our customers see maximizing their trailer capacity as an inexpensive way to maximize driver productivity and revenue under the new rules.

So, how can you use maintenance as a lever to maximize your trailer fleet productivity? A few ways you can do this are to repair any idle trailers, inspect rolling trailers regularly, develop maintenance capabilities where your trailers have down-time, and periodically analyze your maintenance data to see if there are changes you can make to keep trailers in revenue service.

Many of our customers schedule quarterly preventative maintenance inspections for their trailers to ensure that they are in good running order, but more importantly to guarantee that the downtime is scheduled, thereby avoiding breakdowns. When we look at maintenance data with our customers who do frequent preventative maintenance inspections, we see that one of the major expenses is the inspections themselves. This is good news since it indicates that the running gear is kept in good condition. Secondly, scheduled inspections also allow us to make minor repairs and adjustments to components before they fail and cause breakdowns.

Some questions you should be asking yourself when evaluating your maintenance needs with regards to the new HOS rules are:
          • What % of your trailer fleet is currently operational?
          • What % of your trailer fleet will need to be at operational condition to meet HOS demand?
          • Do you see trailer downtime, or trailer maintenance in general, as a significant contributor to driver delays?
          • Are you taking any steps to upgrade your maintenance capabilities or improve maintenance strategies
            to reduce trailer downtime?

One of the major pitfalls companies can make is to separate their maintenance expense analysis from the business costs of breakdowns. When a unit breaks down, not only do repair costs increase, but the loading dock personnel, and drivers are losing valuable productivity. Now with the new HOS rules, breakdowns will be even more costly.

In addition to regular preventative maintenance, we see our customers enabling maintenance capacity in their customer locations. For example, we send our mobile van to one manufacturing plant and repair several different customers' trailers at that one location. Often, even if a company handles their own maintenance, their shops are only in their major distribution centers that are often over-capacity and far from their customer locations.

We can help manage maintenance overflow and with our mobile service vans, schedule visits to your customer locations and work on units while they are already off the road.

All of these factors have led people to use our Maintenance Management Services.