Sometimes even the basics of maintaining a fleet can be quite complex. This was the case for Quality Transport, a fleet of under 20 trucks that ran across tough times in the rugged Arizona northland. As the company’s senior vice president, Amanda Schuier, tells it, one of their Freightliner Cascadias went down in Flagstaff due to a busted Cummins water pump.
The estimated time to receive a new pump: three weeks. The safety and maintenance coordinator, Hector Pena, said he looked everywhere he could, from dealer portals to Amazon.
“Things are getting worse for parts,” Pena wrote to me in an email. “Availability is limited, and some of the places that have the parts are charging a premium price.”
To get the truck out of Flagstaff, Pena had to settle on a marked-up pump on eBay of all places.
It’s a growing problem. Waiting on fuel tanks and other issues that force downtime are rampant at Quality Transport.
“We’ve been warned for a while we’re going to have parts issues,” Schuier told me. “It’s starting to impact us hard, especially as a small fleet with older trucks.”
The dealer assured Schuier these trucks were marked “truck down, driver waiting” to indicate the severity and need for a prompt resolution, but for a small fleet with a skeleton crew of a maintenance team, there’s only so much they can do. Pena has two younger maintenance technicians working with him; most of the maintenance is outsourced.
Schuier noted as a smaller fleet, they don’t have as strong of a parts network as large carriers to leverage favors. The only recourse the fleet has is renting trucks, an unsustainable strategy due to added expense, scarcity of supply, and the detrimental impact on drivers.
One driver forced into a rental had trouble connecting his CPAP machine to the inverter, which is frustrating on two levels: the driver’s sleep apnea hurts his chances for getting enough REM cycles to recharge, while the potential for fatigue presents a safety issue. Frustration can build into contemplating a fleet with more reliable uptime, and that is something Quality Transport, or any fleet big or small, can’t afford right now.
“We’re definitely hurting from the driver shortage,” Schuier said. “And these truck-down situations that further delay us are just exacerbating the issue.”
The good news for this fleet—and the likely hundreds to thousands of other maintenance shops facing the same dilemma—is that there is help if you know where to look.
The first place is one of the myriad of ecommerce sites out there. Since 2020, nearly every supplier has been launching them.
At the end of July, Cummins launched a new dealer portal to provide those facilities sales, with service, parts, training, and marketing resources, while offering “personalized views, while displaying a specific range of products and services relevant to each dealer based on their individual profile, market segment, and region.”
That was about when the water pump issue happened, so not in time to help Quality Transport then, but maybe for a future issue.
And parts ecommerce sites are becoming far more user friendly, in the vein of Amazon or eBay. Kim Wolf, Meritor’s manager of innovation and technology, recalled her Meritor Parts Xpress group setting up a user ID for a 92-year-old man still plugging away at a distributor. The site offers images, technical details, and quantities to help users find what they need fast, and it locates who near a specific ZIP code has the part.
Meritor also has an Uptime Services Group to triage supply issues with an experienced parts expert. And that’s the real thing to know: Parts problems require human solutions. And that might end with a direct call to the manufacturer, but it should start by building a better relationship with your dealers and suppliers.
“From a best practice standpoint, it’s obviously about having that open line of communication with whoever your distributor partner is,” Wolf said. “Sharing the information of what they have in their fleet—the makes, the models, the years—letting that distributor partner know what’s sitting in their lot in need of repair in the future, that’s going to be the key for fleets to even know that their distributor partner can have it on the shelf.”
And how to foster those relationships requires a human touch, something sorely lacking in the industry, and society in general, since early 2020. An easy suggestion is taking your parts distributor out to lunch, getting to know them on a personal level, what their business challenges are, and how you can work better together. It’s the kind of thing that 92-year-old probably did quite a bit in his career, and as technology improves, it’s something we should make sure not to lose.
