Episode 012: Why All Fleets Should Adopt A DVIR Process

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show, joined by my co-hosts again. I'm Josh Turley. With me is Jeff Jenkins and Steve Saltskiver.

Hey, feeling successful?

Yep, good to be back.

Awesome. Hey, uh, so today we're doing a risk management topic. Today, uh, today we're talking about non-trucking DVIRs, right? And so we're kind of prefacing this one a little bit. A lot of people don't know, but, you know, DVIRs, they're primarily in trucking because it's mandated by, uh, you know, DOT, by FMCSA, or CDL.

Right.

It could be buses.

Yeah, true.

Right.

So pretty much anybody, motor coach, right? Um, and so as part of their operations, they're mandated to do DVIRs. Before we keep going, I want to at least get that definition out there. Some people don't know what a DVIR is. They haven't heard of it before. Steve, DVIR, how do you define it?

I define it— it's, well, I don't define it.

DOT, FMCSA, that defines it as a daily vehicle inspection Okay, so every day we're doing a vehicle inspection and here's the report of what we found during that inspection.

Right.

DOT, they have regulations on, you know, what needs to be inspected, how you have to go from one inspection to the other. You know, if you're doing a review, when you do an inspection, you have to review prior inspections and sign off on it, right? Like you basically got to sign your name that, yes, I am responsible for this vehicle. And I am taking responsibility, personal responsibility, to operate this unit. And that it's— you're basically certifying that it's safe to operate, right? That you didn't find anything wrong with it, essentially.

And DOT really, they kind of track in on 13 critical items.

Yeah.

You know, which are, you know, steering and brakes and tires, you know, just the critical list of safety things, lights, leaks, things like that, that you really should check to make sure your vehicle is sound to operate on a on a highway.

Right. And it makes sense, you know, for a truck because there's a lot of mass. And what, you know, if you guys remember from high school physics, force is mass times energy, right? So the more mass you have in there, you know, the more, the faster you're going, that's the, the stronger that impact is going to be if there's an accident, right? And so there's a lot of kinetic energy stored up in that vehicle because of that.

I know this is a non-trucking topic, But would you, if you had to guess at what percentage of actual trucking truck drivers do a, you know, your DVIR each morning, what would you say it is? Or each day?

Oh, as far as like being compliant?

Actually doing it. Yeah.

Well, you'd hope that it's 100%. We all know that's not true, right? If I was going to take a guess based on just my gut, I would probably say it's closer to 40%.

Okay. What do you think, Steve?

Mm, boy, I don't know. I had a CDL license and I always thought that was like a requirement.

So, well, you have to log it, right? That doesn't mean you do it, but you have to log it.

Okay.

All right.

Okay. Oh, that's the difference.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, logging it would probably be closer to 80 or 100%, but actually doing it probably about 20, maybe.

It's in between 20 and 30%, which is crazy.

Yeah.

That people just pencil whip them.

They just pencil whip them. They just, Because it takes about 15 minutes, right, to do a very good walk around. You're doing your vehicle inspection, and yeah, they'll just put 15 minutes, did it, started driving, didn't find anything wrong, sign off on it, the whole nine yards, right?

Well, that's nice, right, to know that we're just walking around. We're not even walking around the vehicle, we're just getting in. You know, we call it pencil whipping because it's literally you're just whipping it, right? Like, here's the pencil and you're just checking it off without actually doing the work.

Yeah. They actually get pulled over by the DOT and they've got bad lights or bad airlines or they need their brakes, you know, tires are too low. And you sit there and you ask them, well, didn't you do your, your daily vehicle inspection? Well, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, you didn't shave off 6/10 of a, of your tread driving the 200 miles you did today? Or 3 of your lights on the back of your trailer all of a sudden didn't just go out?

It's just magic.

Well, of course I didn't. No, you didn't, right? So it's, it's easy to find out. But we did a anonymous survey because we just wanted to find out how many people actually did it.

Yeah.

And so low. So, and I think a lot of them were bullshit and saying they were doing it even though they didn't do it.

So it might not even be a 20.

It might not even be that high, you know, because a lot of people, they just, you know, drivers get paid by driving and they want to get on the road and they want to get those miles because they're going to make their money off of doing that. And so they figure that wasted 15 minutes or however long it takes to do that walk around.

So it's interesting you talk about that. You know, we had released an electronic DVIR product, right? And one of the complaints that we got from the drivers who were having to fill it out is that it takes too long. And we're sitting here thinking like, how on earth is this taking too long? Right? And we realized it's because they couldn't pencil whip it, right? Like they had to literally click a button that said, pass this item, pass this item.

Yeah, right.

And they were having to go through and check each item off individually.

Right.

They couldn't just run a line through the paper or do anything like that. And so because of that, it took their process from what should have been 15 minutes and it was taking them 10 seconds to now all of a sudden they were spending like 3 minutes where they weren't having to do anything before. And now they're realizing, oh, maybe I should actually get out of the cab and do this, you know, and I have to record notes and make recordings of what the tread depth actually is. Or it was, uh, you know, that's like you were asking them, what was that managing a trucking company?

I, I actually had trained people you know, and doing the DVRs and I'd walk 'em through the whole process. And, and I think that's part of the problem, you know, and, and it's the same with the non-trucking is you have to kind of crawl around the vehicle. And I think a lot of people, especially if you're gonna check tires and brakes, right? Right. And I think people don't want to get dirty and they don't want to get, you know, their nose down in that tire wheel well where stuff can fall on their head, stuff like that. So, I think that's part of the problem. But the whole point of it is, is making sure, you know, it really benefits you as a driver, right? Making sure that you're not going to kill yourself or somebody else out there with an unsafe vehicle. So I mean, that's the whole point.

Or catching something before it needs to be repaired, right?

So you're not breaking down over the road and then having to have road service come out and being stuck there waiting, and then you can't deliver your load, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of times guys will walk around and they'll see something wrong. So, oh, this tire's got, you know, doesn't have enough tread on it, or my brakes, I've got to adjust them. And then they skip it and don't do it because they just want to get on the road and go, right?

Yeah, because they don't want to wait for maintenance, or they don't want to wait for, you know, another truck to get sent out to them. Or they're okay waiting, but they don't want the truck that they're going to get, right? Because it's the crap truck and it's a spare truck and nobody wants that.

And so, I mean, a lot of it though is it's, it's really dependent on management to enforce it. I mean, there's a cost one way or the other. You know, if you skip it up front, then you're going to have it on the back end somewhere else, whether that's in trucking, it sacrifices your score, and non-DVIR, non-trucking, then of course it's a risk issue that you got to deal with. You know, if you get in an accident, it's your fault.

Well, and what are some of the things that, you know, as you're going through and doing inspection, I mean, you mentioned some of the ones that DOT recommends, right? Or that they require, I should say. Um, what are some of the things that you guys have seen go wrong that you would have on your DVIRs? You know, would you have tires on there? Because I've seen tires come off, right? They weren't torqued correctly. All of a sudden you've got tire separation. You have a tire literally going down the highway without a truck attached to it.

I actually saw one take out the front door of a Marie Callender's restaurant one day. So yeah, that happens.

Like, your most common is going to be tires and lights. When it comes to your walk around, right? Is tires and lights is the main thing, and then you're going to get into brakes. I mean, and there'll be some other smaller things, um, you know, your fifth wheel's not greased or whatever else it may end up being. But yeah, you're number 2, lights, tires.

Yeah, I've always, uh, you know, when I'm looking at the DOT inspections, it's always leaks, lights, and brakes, always, you know.

So I mean, for CSA violations, yeah, almost always.

So same thing can really apply to non-DOT, the same thing as lights. And then lights are the hard, you know, lights aren't that easy to really check. I mean, how do you check your own brake lights? You know, things like that. So you've gotta come up with a way to do that. Sometimes it takes 2 people. Sometimes shops will put a mirror, you know, out there in the yard.

Put a mirror on the trailer or something.

Kinda look behind and see it.

Keep a brick with you.

Yeah, yeah, so.

Or keep a mirror in the cab, right? Yeah. Keep a mirror in the truck so you can get behind the. Set it up on a tripod or something.

First, with the new technology, you know, if you're doing a non-DVIR or non-trucking DVR, your, your car will tell you if you have a bad light.

Yeah, or brakes need changed or whatever.

Right on the dash. So you can be reasonably assured that you're probably okay as long as you don't have some type of a warning light on your dash, right? But you still should try and check it. You don't know if the lens is broken out or some of those things, right?

Yeah.

Well, and so Steve, when you were at Mercury, you recommended this all the time, but why would you recommend to, say, a city fleet or a corporate fleet that they should incorporate DVIRs into their operation? You know, if they're operating light fleets, you know, light-duty vehicles usually.

Obviously the safety benefits, but more important than the safety benefits, it's scheduling vehicle repairs. You know, you wander around, you see a lot of shops with their hair on fire running around doing a lot of this. Unscheduled maintenance. Well, I mean, if you're doing your DVIRs for a light-duty fleet that doesn't require it, you can proactively schedule some of those repairs because you know about them in advance, right? You know, I mean, I mean, that's really the key issue is a productivity issue for your shop.

Do you think that— would you become liable, you know, if you are doing DVIRs and you ignored a defect that a driver turned in even though you don't have to do DVIRs because now you have that information? Does that—

I think it depends on the degree, but I think yes, you would be liable if it was something like a tire where you're running a tire on, you know, less than 2/32 out on the road or less than the legal limit. And just like Jeff said earlier, you're not going to run that much tread off out on a daily run. Right.

Right. So you'd catch that way.

So, you know, any lawyer that's for the, you know, for the defense is going to figure that out and say, wait a minute, That tire was bald before you even hit my client, right?

Do you think that that liability creates kind of a head-in-the-sand approach where they're like, you know what, I would just rather not know, so we're just not going to do DVIRs because I'd rather not know and be responsible for it?

Uh, I, I, I would counsel against that. I mean, because ignorance is, uh, you know, it's only—

yeah, somebody at some point the bill comes due, right?

Yeah, at some point in time. Yeah, if you're held, you're going to be held accountable because Ignorance is not a defense.

It's not. And any lawyer that's worth their salt, they're going to go right through that, right? And say, well, why didn't you know? Why didn't you check? Well, and you don't have a defensible position because it's my equipment. I should know in the condition. I should know how it's getting taken out. So the fact that you say, well, we didn't do a walk around, we didn't do our DVIR, you don't have a fire alarm, right?

It all comes down to a reasonable standard, right? And if you've ever been involved in an accident, the first thing a lawyer does is comes in and asks for all your All your records. Yeah. On every vehicle. 'Cause they wanna establish whether you have a good standard or not.

Right. And it might not be that that vehicle had a problem.

Exactly.

But if you have problems with other vehicles in your fleet, they can paint a picture and that's all they need to do.

That's right. Yeah. Just for the jury.

Yep.

Look, they don't have a maintenance program.

Yeah.

You know?

And that's— They're not inspecting their vehicles before they go out on the road. And even if you just did weekly inspections, right? That would be a huge step from not doing them at all.

Yeah, they look for reasonability. That's what they look for. Are you doing a reasonable inspection program? Are you doing preventative maintenance? Do your drivers care about the vehicles? Are they checking the body damage, the brakes, the— make sure that vehicle's roadworthy before it goes out the gate.

So you talked about the drivers, right? Drivers and maintenance and how these two departments, because usually drivers are part of operations or they're part of dispatch, they're part of, you know, your drivers in the city would be, you know, like your police officers or sheriff's departments, right? So they have a whole nother job that they're doing outside of fleet. How do you make sure that drivers and maintenance, like, see this as a joint problem together? How do you get the drivers to buy off on, you know, what we see as kind of a maintenance problem?

Well, I can tell you what we did in one of the places I worked. We actually had a cooperative agreement with the dispatcher. Now these are heavy duty, but we actually had a template that fit on top of our, our DVIR. And every time the driver would hand one in, all the dispatcher had to do is just put the template down to show that he filled out the thing properly. Right. And so then we would come up with a compliance score and we would say, okay, our DVIRs are X percent compliant based on what the driver fills out, you know. And so, and then we also had a process behind the scenes where the dispatcher would give it back to the shop and And the shop would repair it and then it would go back to the dispatcher. So you have to have some kind of a process around it, essentially. And we did that to measure it so, you know, so that we could say, you know, our DVIR system is X% compliant. And if it didn't meet that standard, then we'd, you know, we'd have driver training and go through that process to make sure we maintain that high standard.

Gotcha. How would you, how do you get the drivers though? You know, you're not required to do this and now you're asking them to do their inspections. What are ideas you guys have on how do I get the drivers on board with us doing DVIRs when we don't have to?

Well, I'm old school in the manner that I've set it up as a policy and it's required and you've gotta do it or you don't have a job. I mean, to me, that's what you do, right? It's either you do it or you don't have a job. And it's not the easiest thing to manage too because it becomes very secondary when you think about it. I think, you know, you talked about how, you know, RTA's got their Inspect tool, which is the DVIR, and I would have loved in our DVR process if we would have had a button you had to hit every single time to go to make sure, because then it's electronic, so it's recordable. You can see who's done them every single day. You can see, you know, how long did it take them to do them. Well, exactly. It just makes it so much easier to manage. The paper ones are a lot harder to manage because you've got that extra clutter hanging around and you don't know if anybody's actually done something. Now, obviously with the electronics, you can just hit buttons and not ever do anything, But when there's a pattern of everything's perfect every single day, obviously you've got a problem.

And then all of a sudden there's a huge CSA violation, right?

Yeah, there's an issue.

Somebody along the line, and maybe several people, right? If you've got shared trucks or things like that.

Yeah. I mean, the whole point of doing a daily vehicle inspection is that it justifies and verifies your PM program, right? I mean, if you're finding all kinds of things that get missed on PMs, If you're finding things that are established in a pattern in your maintenance, it could be your process, it could be the mechanics that need training. So I mean, it really gives you kind of an open-ended, predictable model that you can use for your maintenance program.

I think one of the things that you kind of touched on this, you know, if I'm talking to the drivers, that's one of the things I'm bringing up to them is, hey, like, this is part of us as a company. This is how we win, right? Is you, by doing the DVIR, are helping keep us safe.

Yep.

Right.

Because you're doing it, you're documenting that the vehicle is safe to operate. If something were to happen, right, we would know that it's not the vehicle and you're going to protect the rest of the city. You're going to protect the rest of the company by doing that DVIR. The second thing is you're also protecting yourself, right? Is that you get in that vehicle, you're kind of saying that, yeah, I'm responsible for this thing and you want to get home safely, right? And if you're driving down the road and all of a sudden you've got a flat tire at 65 miles an hour, that's a scary experience, right? You'd rather not have that. And if you're looking at your tire and realizing, wow, okay, this thing, you know, was fine this morning and now I'm doing my post trip and I'm down 20 PSI, right? I can just see it. My TPMS is going off. You know, you report that and get it taken care of instead of going out on the road the next day and just, well, Well, try it again. Let's roll the dice and see what happens, right?

You know, especially with the new DVIRs, the electronic ones, I mean, the driver's always been the eyes and ears of the vehicle because they're running it. Now some of the new DVIRs, you can actually record noises, you know.

Yeah.

You can take pictures.

Take videos. Yeah. With our videos, pictures.

I mean, so, and the more information you can give to the mechanic to fix the problem, the less time he has to spend diagnosing the problem.

Right.

You know, so it's really a joint venture between the driver and the mechanic.

One of the things I really like about when we were trying to design ours was this idea of closing the loop. Right. And I think for anybody doing this process, if you're doing it with paper, if you're doing it with another system, like whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're closing the loop. And you talked about this communication between the driver and the mechanic and how do we communicate from the shop back to the driver, you know, and just making sure that you have systems and processes in place, you know, or a piece of technology that does it for you, that loops that back and allows that bidirectional communication between their tool and their process and the drivers and the mechanics and their work orders and everything else that they're doing. You know, when they've marked things as complete, that it comes back to the driver and they can sign off. Yeah, this looks like it's been done.

Right.

I know one of the requirements from the DOT on for any motor coach is that the driver has to review the prior inspection defects. Right. And they have to review any open items, essentially. And, you know, depending on your process, they don't necessarily have to sign off on those prior defects. But the spirit of the law is that they've looked at them and that they either acknowledge, yes, they're still an issue or no, they've been resolved.

And if it's still an issue and it's a safety issue, then they can't take it out.

Probably shouldn't, right? You know, if you value your life, you probably shouldn't drive this vehicle kind of thing, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So, all right. Well, anything else? Anything that you guys would see that you'd want to include or leave our listeners with? Parting thoughts?

You know, I just, you know, I've always just said it just makes good sense to do it. You know, I mean, even as individuals, we should do it on our own cars.

Before you get into your car for work today, did you look at your vehicle before you got in?

Yeah, you're hauling your family. In my case, children, grandchildren. You know, I mean, do you want to have that liability on? I mean, that could be devastating if something happened, right? The same thing goes for work. You know, I mean, you really should protect your company, protect the citizens around you. It's just the right thing to do.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And really, it should be required, not just for non-trucking as well, when it comes to fleets. Just because you're right, it does make everybody safer. It's, it's better to be safe than to have some mishap happen because you didn't make that daily inspection and it wasn't a priority, right? Yeah. And it was—

I hear that all the time. Yeah, you don't have a time problem, you've got a priority problem, right? That's really what this is. It's a priority. Are you making safety a priority in your organization?

Yeah, I mean, it just makes sense. It's good business to do it this way. You're protecting yourself, you're protecting your company and those you work with. If that company goes out of business because you're not doing it, guess what? You're out of a job.

Right.

And then you're trying to figure something else out, right?

Yeah.

That's, uh, those are all good thoughts. That's going to do it for us today. Again, uh, you know, recommend us, share us with your friends and family, right? Uh, tag us @FleetSuccessShow. and we will see you next week.

Sons in 4.

Have a good one.

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