The alarming number was 26. That was the average number of days a sample fleet’s trucks were down in Decisiv’s Discovery service priority monitor. The AVERAGE. Glancing at the box just above the big 26 was a rundown of the longest open service cases and your stomach dropped even lower when you saw the slew of 43-days of downtime for those trucks. To temper the truck service terror, this was a zoomed-in view of one fleet’s service data (completely anonymized of course). The service devil was in the individual asset details.
“The box providing the average [number of downtime days] was informational; the other three boxes are where fleets can interact with the platform and do something about it,” said Dick Hyatt, president and CEO at Decisiv. “Of the other three boxes, one is most expensive estimate, the second is cases waiting approval and the box on the right was length of time out by asset so that you can drill into it. You can actually see it–you can read the notes in the case, you can see whether it’s waiting on parts, you can see whether it’s waiting on approval. It allows the fleets to act.”
“The asset with the most expensive estimate might have been in an accident, which may be a perfectly reasonable reason that that vehicle is down for 43 days,” added Ralph Dimenna, chief revenue officer, Decisiv, referring to the rundown of data that Decisiv showed off in its Discovery example. “The other thing I will say is when a fleet uses the Discovery service priority monitor, they’re going to drive better performance in their service network because there could also be data in there that indicates that service providers are not closing the case properly or not communicating properly with the fleet.”
Clearly there’s more nuance to the truck service data than the initial gut-punch average downtime days state let on.
Decisiv leadership was hesitant to put a specific number to an overall industry trend of how long trucks are, on average, sitting around waiting for service, but one thing was clear: In the pandemic After, truck service dwell times are on the rise. What they weren’t hesitant about were the tools they’re bringing to the market to give fleets even more visibility into their service process. Check out the video below for a quick presentation from Dimenna and an overview of the Discovery platform.
