Everyone makes mistakes now and then. That’s a fact of life. The most successful fleet maintenance managers capture insight from their experiences and learn from their actions. Time and experience can be excellent teachers when a person actually learns lessons from poor decisions.
Growing up in Maui, Hawaii, Martin Singh’s uncle had a family business where his brother was the technician and he was his helper. While learning on the job, mistakes were bound to happen, but thankfully feedback was never scarce, recalls Singh, vice president of maintenance for Interstate Distributor (www.intd.com). “A swift ‘kick in the seat’ and a discussion at the dinner table taught me to learn from my mistakes and improve quickly.”
Founded in 1933 in Tacoma, Wash., Interstate provides full truckload transportation services – including regional and trans-continental coverage, dedicated fleets, expedited teams, specialized and refrigerated equipment, intermodal and port dray services – throughout the continental U.S. and Alaska (se. It operates seven maintenance facilities from Florida to Washington. Interstate is positioned at 76 in the latest top 100 for-hire fleets ranking in America by the American Trucking Associations.
Over his career, Singh has learned from several well-established companies. He started his maintenance management career with U.S. Xpress, spending five years with the company. He then spent seven years with J.B. Hunt before a five-year stint at Gordon Trucking as director of maintenance. Then he made the move to take over the maintenance operation at Interstate.
Singh joined Interstate in January of 2013, coming onboard in a succession-planned role for Interstate’s senior vice president of maintenance, Lee Owens, who was retiring after 30 years with the company. Singh worked closely with Owens over the course of the next year, learning as much as he could about the company and from the trucking industry veteran.
Once settled into his new role, Singh started analyzing the operations to see what was working and where improvements could be made. Based upon his experiences, he knew facts would be his friend.
“With fresh eyes, you see things and you make a to-do list that’s a mile long,” he explains. “Not everything is bad; some things are good. But with fresh eyes, you can pinpoint what is working great or can be improved.”
DATA, METRICS AND EFFICIENT PROCESSES
The largest challenge facing Singh at Interstate was that things appeared to be working just fine. The people were content, turnover was low and the work was getting completed.
“Owens had been running things for 30 years and the operation was not broken,” says Singh. “There was a maintenance culture in place, plus they had above-average tenure for managers and exceptional tenure for the technician staff. But with that came some challenges. I had to pick and choose where we were going to improve our maintenance program and what parts of the culture needed to be maintained. I knew from the numbers that some things needed to be tightened up.”
Singh had grown comfortable with metrics and data to help him deliver results in his career. He knew that quality data, metrics and efficient processes would result in lower costs. Things were being completed at Interstate, but at a cost to the organization.
“Initially, I reviewed everything – from headcount by location, trucks by location and compliance,” Singh says. “I wanted to understand every detail down to shop capacity by the hour.”
The challenge he faced was a shifting business model, depressed economy and a requirement that the business could not lose any speed with an aged fleet being down in the shop. Knowing that the long-standing culture would need to change, Singh started keeping score to prove his case to the team.
SIX SIGMA PRINCIPLES
Singh has been leading continual development at Interstate for the past three years. He has established a clear plan of action to build the best maintenance organization. He quickly reached the conclusion that by leveraging Six Sigma principles he could strip out waste, cut costs and teach his teams to self-improve over time. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for process improvement.
“To me, Six Sigma’s value comes in continual improvement,” says Singh. “Once you have it implemented, you gain perpetual value from a cadence of revisiting your processes and measures every six to 12 months. Things change and it is good to see where you have come from.”
He started his improvements by reviewing all of the various preventive maintenance (PM) forms, PM time intervals, types of work performed and the consistency across locations.
REFINEMENT
Singh is constantly looking for ways to improve results and provide better service to Interstate’s drivers. “We have to learn from both the hard lessons and the simple mistakes,” he believes. “We have to build upon results and leverage our successes.
“Continuous improvements cover all facets of fleet maintenance and contribute to the fleet’s overall success. Our goal is to be safe above all else, to provide exceptional service and to have a low-cost position. By providing a safe and efficient work environment for our maintenance technicians, we retain great people and that helps build a culture of success.”
Maintenance managers developed a technician report card to measure safety compliance, attendance, standard job compliance and training compliance.
“That report card created a platform where managers could have a one-on-one with their technicians each month and talk about the business and results,” explains Singh. “The team loves to keep score and they appreciate knowing how they are doing and how to improve. The report card shows technicians where they stand on a regular basis, doing away with that being a guessing game since their performance is now based on metrics.”
All shops now use revised PM forms and have reorganized their PM areas for greater efficiencies. By adding structure to the routine steps of the PMs, the shops have been able to reduce steps, cut time and optimize actions – all in the name of getting better.
The results have been impressive. The average time for a PM has been reduced by nearly 30 percent from where they began.
With any and all changes, safety is at the forefront, Singh emphasizes. “Safety is priority number one at Interstate – for both drivers and technicians. In the maintenance department, which has more than 100 associates, the goal to have zero lost time and accidents. Year–to-date, we’ve only had one lost-time injury.”
Singh is using metrics to help figure out which shops are the safest, the most productive and, most importantly, why there is a difference. “If you can isolate the variance in production, you can turn that into an advantage or identify a shortcut that is being taken that could impact quality.”
Careful review and analysis of the information helps all shops improve and helps make sure safety is sustained.
DEFINE THE MIX
In his evaluations, Singh realized that for the most part, Interstate’s technicians – many of whom are master technicians – were doing major repair work and the basic maintenance and repair was being outsourced. After careful review in the metrics and the data, “we concluded that we could make a change and save money in the process. We flipped the model so that we now outsource the major repairs. In-house we created expertise around the PMs, brakes, clutches and so forth – all the work that a fleet shop should be doing.”
Interstate typically operates its tractors within a tightly defined year and mileage protocol. “We are not like other carriers in the industry that buy the bumper-to-bumper warranty,” he points out. “I did the math on what components fail and what the failure rates are, and those are the warranties we decide to purchase.” The majority of trailer maintenance is done in-house except for major damage.
Singh has set a time goal for completing a B Service for Interstate’s tractors. When Singh started, the results took 70 percent longer than his benchmarked target. He started looking at the processes for this service. By applying Six Sigma, tracking data and creating metrics, he has reduced the downtime for his B service by an impressive 58 percent on his way toward the target goal.
Scheduled and standardized vehicle inspections and maintenance are typically designated as A, B, C, etc. As the letters move down the alphabet, the PM service increases in complexity.
Another change that has been made is it that when a tractor is in for a B Service, any additional PM items or repairs that are required are made at that time as well. This helps avoid having to bring the truck into the shop multiple times between PM intervals.
More time savings and equipment uptime came about by reviewing and altering the processes for getting an “empty” tractor (parked when the driver left the company) back into service. “It used to take us an excessive amount of time to get a tractor inspected, PM’d, cleaned, washed, detailed and ready for a new driver,” he says. “Now, we have improved equipment availability by more than 50 percent, and that has resulted in additional revenue to the company.”
Another area of concentration for Singh has been direct (actual billed) shop time. “When we started measuring and tracking the data, the results hovered around 65 percent. The goal was to be have direct time be above 85 percent of a technician’s time. The maintenance department started working on this late last year and direct time is nearly at the targeted goal. These strides were made possible by further fine-tuning shop operations, which included adjusting its standard repair times and shop hours.
CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT
All of the changes have come from the maintenance team’s continuous improvement efforts, Singh points out. By looking at the data, reviewing the mix and listening to its technicians, Interstate has shifted its maintenance model and reduced costs. Singh links much of the cost reduction to standardization.
“We started by determining our top 10 standard jobs,” he explains. “We got good at them and then moved to the top 50. Now, we have 225 standard jobs created in our maintenance system. By doing so, we have standard compliance by shop and by technician.”
These changes have helped Interstate control labor costs and change shop times in concert with the needs of the company’s operations department. As jobs have become more routine, scoreboards are communicating success, safety results are being achieved and the team is more able to help with companywide priorities.
DRIVER CARE
To keep a trucking company like Interstate going, the equipment must work and drivers need to be happy. Singh feels his team has some of the best designed and equipped trucks in the industry. But keeping Interstate’s customer and its drivers satisfied was very important to Singh as well.
An initiative he began soon after he took over the maintenance operation at Interstate was the creation of a driver/maintenance scorecard. Anytime a truck receives a service, a survey is placed in the truck for the driver to provide feedback on the service.
“The surveys that have negative feedback are focused on first,” explains Singh. “A maintenance manager or I call the driver to discuss issues. We work through why the driver was unhappy with the service. After listening, we thank them for their input and extend an invitation to them to speak with their shop manager on their next time through.”
PRODUCT EVALUATIONS
Another benefit of having strong controls over production, metrics and data is that “you can focus on the fun side of the business as well,” Singh says. “If we did not have our day-to-day operations buttoned up, we could not take the time to test new technology.”
He is a big believer in testing new technology, components or equipment that can help improve vehicle operation, fuel economy and maintenance. He will soon be adding personnel just to manage these evaluations.
“I think that fleets that don’t do product testing are missing out,” he says. “A new or improved product for fuel economy could be the difference in one tenth of a mile, for example, and when you run a lot of miles, that can really add up.”
Interstate has been testing technology for several years now. The impacts to its business have been substantial. By testing safety technology, for example, it has significantly mitigated rear-end accidents.
Interstate has also implemented LNG fuel for tractors and that resulted in new business opportunities with environmentally conscious customers.
“The best part of testing technology is that my team gets excited and so do our drivers that get to ‘play’ with the new equipment,” he notes.
SCRUTINIZE
In summing things up, Singh says there are several key foundation elements to having a successful fleet maintenance operation. These include knowing what data and benchmarks to collect, measuring business improvement and analyzing the right information to suggest conclusions and support decision-making for a given situation or problem.
“It is also important to factor in your factual knowledge and the lessons learned from past experiences – both bad and good,” he adds.
“Our focus is on bringing down road calls costs, reducing our downtime, improving our uptime and increasing shop efficiencies. It’s all about equipment utilization.”
