The world moves fast.

Many businesses have figured out that their path to the highest profit is to be constantly moving—providing quick shipping, getting products where they need to go and constantly generating revenue. That’s certainly what trucking fleets are looking for—so for them, every second spent in a shop waiting for repairs is not just time lost, but money lost.

The same, naturally, goes for truck service locations—the faster you can identify and fix problems with the trucks that come in, the more appreciative customers will be and the more likely they’ll be to come back. This is why many shops have started triage programs—dedicated to identifying the cause of a problem as quickly as possible, getting easy fixes through the shop and putting the truck on the road as quickly as possible.

Triage programs are focused on the basics, and on what happens immediately when a truck comes into the shop. A successful triage program needs to very quickly complete these steps:

1. Get a technician to look at the truck as soon as possible;
2. Determine the root cause and severity of the problem;
3. Determine what parts you need and whether they are in the shop or need to be ordered; and
4. Determine how long it will take to fix, and prioritize it accordingly.

Let’s not forget: communication with the customer is key. They need to know what to expect, not just in cause and cost, but in time.

The details of triage

Some shops that run triage programs elect to have dedicated bays for quick repairs, while others keep the program but don’t dedicate a specific number of bays. Which you choose depends in part on your shop—the size and the volume of repairs you get in.

Brad Muth, service manager with Truck Country of Iowa and Wisconsin, a Daimler Trucks network of dealers, says that his shops don’t dedicate specific technicians or even bays to Express Assessments (which is the Daimler dealer network’s term for triage work).

“I think having dedicated technicians or bays handcuffs you in a way because if you have six dedicated express assessment [EA] techs and bays, what happens when that seventh and eighth and ninth truck comes in?” he asks. “I think that’s where a lot of shops fail. We don’t run it that way, because oftentimes I’ll have 40 or 50 trucks that come in on a weekday, so you have to be open to most of your staff doing EAs at a time. That’s usually not the way it works out, but it’s not uncommon for us to have 10 or 12 EAs running simultaneously. We don’t handcuff ourselves to a certain amount of EA techs or bays because with the volume we get, we just can’t afford to.”

Measuring success

One of the keys to a successful triage program is recording data on what you’re doing, measuring it against your goals as a shop and using it to improve in areas where you might be lacking.

“Whether it’s express assessment, whether it’s first technician punch, customer communication, throughput, having parts—we measure those on a daily basis, and we share those metrics with our entire company and we do comparisons between locations,” says Steve Spihlman, director of service operations for Truck Centers, Inc., a Daimler Trucks dealership. “Without the metrics, there’s no way to know whether you’re getting better at throughput or if you’re going the wrong way.”

Spihlman says that according to their metrics, between 45% and 55% of jobs done in his dealerships that perform Express Assessment are being done in four hours or less.

“Having dedicated technicians or bays handcuffs you in a way because if you have six dedicated express assessment [EA] techs and bays, what happens when that seventh and eighth and ninth truck comes in?”
— Brad Muth, Truck Country of Iowa and Wisconsin

Many service shops, including Spihlman’s Truck Centers Inc. and the aforementioned Truck Country, are members of OEM dealership programs—in the case of the two DTNA dealerships it’s DTNA’s Elite Support program—that set a stringent series of criteria for shops to meet and continue to track metrics to see if the standards are still being met.

Kenworth’s program is known as PremierCare Gold, and 150 of the OEM’s 400 dealers now meet the criteria.

“Thousands of customers have enjoyed Kenworth’s highest standard of dealer support since we launched Kenworth’s PremierCare Gold Certified program several years ago,” said Kurt Swihart, Kenworth’s marketing director. “Our stringent Gold Certified requirements help to maximize uptime for truck fleets and operators.”

In addition, third-party software systems can help fleet shops track the metrics they need to improve how things work.
Rob Bradenham, senior vice president of commercial vehicles for Decisiv, highlights Decisiv’s Service Relationship Management (SRM) software platform, which was developed with the goal of streamlining all of a fleet’s necessary data into one source to the improve decision-making process and the fleet’s bottom line.

The platform accesses data including current event status, asset service history, preventive maintenance schedules, inspection reports, pending operations and more to allow the fleet to reduce downtime and eliminate unnecessary service events. It is set up to aggregate data across platforms, unifying all service events for any asset type and from any manufacturer, according to Decisiv.

“Decisiv SRM gives fleets start-to-finish insight into the progress of every service event,” Bradenham says. “By giving both in-house/fleet service facilities and external service providers visibility into up-to-date information, SRM helps fleets get better estimated repair times and updates—without multiple inefficient phone discussions. When individual service events are aggregated, fleets ultimately see more accurate reports about how long common repairs take to perform.”

Customer response

If you’re a dealer service location, know that fleet customers are appreciative of the chance to have repairs done as quickly as possible, as more time on the road is more money in the bank for them.

“Most customers will tell you it’s not even really price or anything else, it’s uptime that they’re looking at when evaluating a service provider—that’s how their business runs,” Muth says. “That’s really how we’ve been able to grow—we’ve grown our size just in our local market by more than double in the last two years just based on our throughput.”

“Without the metrics, there’s no way to know whether you’re getting better at throughput or if you’re going the wrong way.”
— Steve Spihlman, Truck Centers Inc.

And if you’re a fleet service location, any dealership will tell you that implementing a successful triage program is easier said than done. The culture of the shop is just as important, as doing this right takes the buy-in of everyone who works there.

“This is not something that can happen overnight,” Spihlman says. “Even if you have all the right answers of how this process is going to work, it takes time to develop that culture of people to work together, for them all to identify and understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, and to work together as a team. That’s probably the most challenging piece—every human being is different, and we need to try to get them aligned in order for any type of program to be successful. It’s a lot of hard work, and it takes practice. It’s not easy to do, but it can be really successful and rewarding once you get it correct.”