Episode 031: Preventative Maintenance vs Corrective Maintenance

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.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today with Jeff Jenkins.

Hey.

And Steve Saltskimmer. Hey there, how's your day going?

Day's great for me.

Long.

I'll tell you what, the weather is absolutely beautiful out here.

I know, it makes it hard to work for sure.

Jeff was complaining it was getting too cold for him. It was 67.

Hold on, first of all, I didn't say it was getting too cold.

He had to put on a jacket.

I put on a, I put on a zip-up hoodie last night to go for a walk while my son was at basketball practice and it was 68 degrees. So I was bitching that I've already acclimated enough to the Arizona weather to where 68 is cold at night.

Happens I can't judge 'cause I would do the same thing. 68 is a little bit chilly.

All right.

But we have the windows open at night and that's just, it makes life amazing.

That was when I moved to Georgia years ago, take over that fleet out there at Coca-Cola. I laughed at everybody coming from Utah because it was 50 degrees and they all had hoodies on or they had what they call toboggans, which is really a beanie, right? And they had these big coats on. I'm out there in shorts and a tank top and going, what's wrong with these people? 2 years later.

You were that way.

Same way.

You had a toboggan.

Yep. Yeah. It took me for 2 or 3 years to figure out what a toboggan on my head was.

A toboggan to me is a sled.

That is a sled.

Not in Georgia.

All right. So today our fun topic is, this is a more fleet-related topic over in resource efficiency, a little bit of risk management, talking about the PM versus corrective metric. And how PMs and corrective maintenance correlate. And, you know, there's a kind of a golden ratio that we try to achieve and recommend for our fleets so that they're maintaining the right level of PM versus corrective repair.

Well, Josh, what does PM stand for?

Hey, I'm glad you asked. That wasn't scripted at all. Felt totally unnatural. So for PM versus corrective, you know, PM is— we look at is anything that happens you know, it's preventive maintenance is how we define PM. But we want it to be scheduled, that it came in on purpose to, you know, have some repairs done. It's going to be your inspections. It's going to be your lube, oil, filter changes.

Could be special campaigns.

You know, if you want to do recalls or do some—

Yeah, recalls, safety recalls, warranty campaigns, technical service bulletins.

Yep. Repainting the vehicles, you know, anything like that.

Any kind of refurb.

Essentially, it's scheduled versus corrective. You know, what's scheduled versus unscheduled repairs. And so the way that we try to track that is, you know, we use VMRS, and we recommend everybody use the VMRS system, which stands for Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards. And it's basically a standard set of codes and ways to track and identify one repair versus another. It's how we track brake jobs from tire jobs. And it's also one of the ways we track PM versus corrective repairs. Most FMISs have this capability. They should allow you to track the PMs versus non-PMs and then give you a report that will show you what your ratio is between PMs and non-PMs. And hopefully too, they're giving you things like the 3C notes, you know, so you can track the cause, complaint, correction so that way you can do some analysis and figure out, you know, where you can spend more time in your PM program and that kind of thing.

And that's exactly what you're trying to do here. I mean, there's, there's an element of analysis behind all this, you know, and your goal is to, to minimize breakdowns. So the more you can become more proactive, the more you can group that data. For example, if you're using the priority codes in a system, is it scheduled, unscheduled? Is it an emergency like a road call? And, you know, you want to make sure that the bulk of everything you're doing is obviously scheduled, because scheduled saves money and doesn't overcrowd the shop, doesn't make you run around with your hair on fire trying to find a bay if everything's breaking down at once.

Yeah.

You know, or extra help or outsourcing more. So the more you can really look at this data and put it in accurately, the better you can schedule and maintain your fleet.

I like to think of it as, you know, like if you're not doing a good job with your PMs, you probably feel like you're running around with your hair on fire.

Yep.

You know, it's just constant firefighting mode. Whereas if you have a lot more control of your fleet, it's a lot more scheduled, it's more orderly. You know when things are coming in and you have a lot more capacity for emergencies when they do happen.

When I was managing a fleet of 200+ shops, we implemented what we called PM leveling. Which a lot of people will go, what is that? Well, we knew that we had, say, a fleet of 100 vehicles and we knew that 20 of them were going to be due for a preventive maintenance inspection in a month. Well, 20 in 4 weeks, that's 5 PMs a week, right? And so when you level out your workload, you know, at the end of the week I got to at least have 5 done because if I only get 4 done, then I got 6 in another week and if I just keep going up, right? Then you get out of control. And so you need to look at that in advance. There's a lot of foreplanning that goes on here to take care of the, your PM schedules.

So Steve, I know you have an idea on what the right ratio is, like how much work should a shop have that's PM-driven versus reactive or corrective?

I think it depends a little bit by the industry, but somewhere between 60-75%. Should be preventive maintenance. The rest should be— obviously, it's the more you get higher to 80, the higher you get to 80, the better. But I remember a fleet that I did some consulting on. It was a private fleet and they were 80% corrective versus 20% PM, and their costs almost exactly reflected that. Their costs were 80% corrective and 20% PM, and it should always be the opposite of that. Your preventive maintenance cost should be one of your bigger cost buckets.

Right.

Right. That's because you're being proactive and you're taking care of things before something happens to that vehicle.

Yeah, I know Grandpa was always of the mindset that 50% of your repairs should be PM-driven repairs, and then you should be spending about 15% on the PM itself.

Right.

And I think a lot of people have that misnomer thinking that, wait a minute, you want me to spend 80% of my cost on doing a PM, and it's not so much doing the PM as it is finding things wrong during the PM.

Yes.

You know, the lube oil filter is like the last thing on your mind. It should be the last thing you think about when you do a PM, and what you're really there for is finding things wrong. You know, doing the inspection, checking the belts, checking the hoses, checking for leaks, checking for lubrication, and making sure that everything is where it's supposed to be. And working the way it's supposed to be.

You know, and on that note, I mean, I've always had this argument through the years is who should be doing the PMs?

Well, if you grab out of some of them, they'd get—

If you go to one of these shops, it's usually the, it's usually looked at the crap job, right? And you take the low man on the totem pole or the new guy.

Or better yet, they outsource it to Jiffy Lube.

Or somebody, right? Somebody that has no stake in it whatsoever. Yep. And I've always argued it should be your, probably your most experienced guy doing your preventative maintenance. Which they hate, obviously, but they're the ones that are capable of finding everything.

Right.

You know, so, yeah, one of your most thorough guys, not necessarily experienced.

True, true.

Yeah, I had a lot of experienced guys that sucked.

That's a good catch. Yeah, it's got to be the guy that sees all the misspelled words in the newspaper.

Yeah, attention to detail.

That's what we talk about, attentional culture. That might be a test. You see, like, hey, I wonder who'd be the best PM mechanic. Let's, let's throw this little thing in here.

I've always— I'm not the greatest speller in the world. For some reason, my brain sees misspelled words. Yeah, which is really weird.

But you're a closet grammar Nazi.

I am. So I hate that.

But the idea though is that you want to go out and put your, your best person on, your most thorough person, right, on the PM, because they are going to find the things that they know because experience has taught them to, to look for those things. Whereas you throw somebody that's very green they know how to do the low oil filter because that's the easiest part of the job. And sure, have those guys do the low oil filter, but make sure the inspection is done by somebody who knows what they're doing and has done so many of these repairs that they know what to check for to make sure that repair doesn't need to be— doesn't need to happen right now.

Well, the things that are important in the inspection, I mean, things that run along the frame rails where you're missing bushings, where you're missing shielding on cables and airlines and Things that, you know, could rub and cause a road call out on the road. And those are the things that people miss, right?

Because they're not obvious.

Yeah.

And you only have to look for them.

Yeah.

That you have to go look for.

Crack in your leaf spring or, you know, things that are— that you will be dinged with, especially if you have a heavy-duty truck.

Yeah.

By a road inspector.

So what are some other ways, you know, if they're looking at it and we're saying somewhere between 65% and 75% of your cost should be driven off of a PM, You know, and how do they go about— let's say they go and look at it and maybe they're at 40% because we've helped fleets in the past improve their scores. We've shown them how to do it. What are some pieces of advice, you know, Jeff, if you got anything on this that they can use to improve their PM ratio?

Well, first of all, do them on schedule. Let's start there. That's usually a big drawback is doing them on schedule, but you have to start with making sure that you have that thorough inspection and not just the lube and oil filter. I mean, we just talked about it, but most companies, most organizations, when they do a PM, that's all they think about. Because when you have your own personal vehicle, it's all you think about.

That's all anybody ever tells you to do.

Yeah.

Change your oil 3,000.

You don't go and you don't look at that other stuff. So you have to start, you have to get a, you have to schedule your PMs. You have to do it consistently. You have to do it on time. And then you have to go and go through that process. Make yourself a checklist, everything that needs to be checked when you go through and do a PM, and don't move on until you've got every one of those boxes marked off.

As a good baseline, checklist is always in the owner's manual.

Yep. And that's only a start.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people get stuck on, well, this is the OEM checklist. Well, that's good. This is why I have a thorough, experienced mechanic come in and take a look at it. Right. You know, and as the tech says, well, hey, but don't forget about these things, you know, don't— that's a living, breathing document.

That's a good point. That's really your baseline. Yep. And then you start building on to that.

The key to that, make sure that your FMIS has checklist capabilities, you know, that they have a way to handle defects and track them as PM defects. I know in our system that's something we really push is make sure you're coding it correctly because those repairs that you find during a PM, they count as part of that PM cost. You know, we're not expecting you to spend all of your time on the PM. Really, the 65% is made up of repairs found from the PM, so you need to make sure you're coding it correctly.

I would actually argue even further that your preventive maintenance should be only the inspection.

Yeah.

And every repair or potential repair that comes off of that should be an individual work order.

It should create— right, it should create another—

otherwise you'll have one of your mechanics doing a 10-hour inspection, another one doing a 2-hour inspection, right? Right. And then it doesn't get coded correctly in the, in the system where, you know, if you just threw a light bulb in there or something. Now that's where you start getting into a little bit— I mean, maybe there's some consumables that you— okay, it's okay, go ahead and do that there, like a wiper blade or a—

that's usually what I recommend, right, is, you know, charge your consumables to the line, and then for any substantial repairs, if you're going to have to spend more than 6 months.

If you found a cracked spring, you need to repair that, then that needs to get its own VMRS line. Be done with it. Yeah.

Well, here's the other thing is you have to make sure that you're managing whoever's doing these PMs. What I found is they were doing the bare minimum on the PMs because they didn't want to do the work afterwards. Or, well, no, seriously, like, hey, my job is I got to get done 5 PMs today, but if I find something a little bit more in-depth that needs to be repaired, what am I going to do? So two things happen, right? Either one, we didn't mark it down, we didn't go and repair it, or two, we don't have time, we can't repair today, send it back over the road. Well, shit, when's that truck gonna get back here from being over the road? Well, I don't know. I mean, you— why would you shoot yourself in the foot by letting something go after finding something that needs to be repaired?

Which is— that's actually another good reason to separate that repair. I worked at an operation, we had three shifts. The swing shift did the preventative checklist the graveyard did the repairs. Anything long-term repair went to day shift. So if we found something that couldn't be done to go out of the road the next day, then day shift took care of it. But that way they had a separation of duty that actually worked so they didn't have to get into that issue.

Yeah, well, I think that's where it's important to understand, you know, that everybody in the organization understands their role and their impact, right? We talk about stakeholder satisfaction. This is one of those moments. That the technician understands your job is not to do 5 PMs in a day. Your job is to make sure our vehicles are safe.

Yep.

And if you get 5 done in a day, that's awesome, but it's more important that they're done right, you know. And if you only get 3, at least those 3 were done well.

Well, and that all came from the manager measuring and grading his people by metrics, and he was nothing but metric focused. Okay, we've got to get 5 done, let's get them done.

I think it's okay to be metric focused, but make sure they're the right metrics.

They are the right metrics, right? But as far as, hey, I'm going for quantity, not quality, and that's the key, is you never—

quality, they actually have to have both.

We talk about quality versus quantity pairs, is that you have to have a quality offset to any quantity.

Yes.

I used to, I used to have a Q— what I used to call a QCI, a quality control inspection. So if someone was doing a preventive maintenance, I would go out there on— I'd take the form And I just randomly select 10 items and then I would walk out there randomly and look at a guy's work on the inspection and see if they caught those 10 items. Yep. If they didn't, if they caught 9 of them, then they got a 90% score. If they caught 7, they got a 70% score. And then I would coach the person and say, look, I found 3 defects that you missed. And then I'd put that in their file. And that's part of the one-on-one process as you're coaching, training. If they keep missing the same thing all the time, And that's a training opportunity, right? Or a discipline opportunity.

I was going to say, if it's all the time, it's a discipline opportunity.

One or the other, right?

But, uh, yeah, we've passed the training moment.

Yeah, for sure.

So, but it, you know, doing quality control checks is a very important step to making sure the PMs are thorough and you avoid the issue like you had where it was just, hey, pencil whip it, 5 out, 5 out, 5 out.

And you don't have to do a lot of those. I mean, I would never say 1-to-1 quality check per inspection.

Right.

You know, maybe every 10 or 15 or 20, you know, whatever you think the right ratio is.

And make sure you're not picking on the same tech.

Exactly.

Spreading the love.

Yeah.

In fact, the more disparate or the more random you make it sometimes is the better because they don't know when you're going to do it.

It's like Pavlov's dog.

Yeah, right.

So other ways to improve them. One of the things that, you know, Grandpa always says, like, just spend more time on the PM, you know, which kind of goes back to your thing about, you know, it's not 5 per. You know, instead of doing it in 60 minutes, take an extra 15 to 30 minutes for your PM and schedule more time for it so you can find more things wrong. You know, make sure your FMIS does have that capability of having a set checklist so they have to check them off and sign off on it. And I think that's a very key aspect is who did what, who did the inspection, and that they're putting their name behind that work. I think you get better quality when all of a sudden your name's attached to it.

Well, I mean, even legally you should do that. Yeah, because if something doesn't get fixed, you want to know who missed it, what happened. I mean, anytime you get in any kind of litigation, the first discovery that's coming your way is your maintenance.

Oh yeah, you know, the records. Yeah, bring out the records.

Yeah, well, why didn't the mechanic sign off on that, that he checked it? If he left his name off or a check mark or initial, the first thing they assume is it didn't get checked, which could be farther from the truth, but Yeah, you have no way to prove it at that point, right?

Right. Well, and that's one of the reasons too that you want to make sure you've got a good tool, right, that forces you to complete the checklist before you can close out the work order line.

Yep.

Um, you know, which hopefully most of the FMISs out there do that. Um, other ways that we can improve, I know one of us mentioned like DVIRs. It's a way to make it beyond just the technician's responsibility to find things wrong. Um, but things that are found during a, you know, DVIR would be considered as a preventative, or at least a scheduled maintenance. You know, if it can go out before the, you know, before it's on the road.

Well, that's another thing that if you're not doing and you get into an accident, they're going to come back at you and say, "Show me your daily vehicle inspection report." But specifically for trucking, specifically for trucking, for those who are, it's not required by law.

This is why it's a best practice that we recommend. Yeah, is because you get a lot more input from those drivers. There's a reason why it's required for big fleets and technically it probably should be required for any government fleet is because it does give you another element of safety and prevention if there's an issue before that vehicle goes out on the road.

You know, that's the whole company's issue, safety. It's not just the maintenance department, right? Drivers, everybody that even has association with that vehicle. But you brought up a good point. I mean, if you, if you're in a small government fleet and you require a DVIR every day and you get in some kind of a an accident or something and you can prove that you did that, I mean, that just gives you a better defense when you're going into court.

Yeah.

You know, hey, we go even the extra mile here.

It's not required, but this is something we do to make sure that our vehicles are safe. And it does make you look a lot better. Of course, then, you know, if you are doing it, you're responsible for the records. And so I know that there's a lot of sticky points.

There is a lot of good tools out there for doing daily vehicle inspection reports.

Our favorite's RT Inspect, but it's, it's one of those things, you know, but Whiparound's another good one. A lot of the Geotabs and, you know, the ELDs have DVIRs built into their platforms. I know Zonar and Geotab and GPS Insight all have them, you know, but that's like having just a good, decent tool that allows your drivers to communicate with the shop issues they find before driving the vehicle allows you to kind of prevent a bigger issue. And I think this is one of the key reasons why PMs are so important. Is this, this, you know, I call it the law of squares. This is something you've talked about for years, Steve.

Well, yeah, I, I came across this, I don't know, 20 years ago now probably. But, um, if you have a breakdown on the road, chances are, compared to like a breakdown that you find before it goes on the road, um, it potentially could be squared, right? So in other words, a $10, uh, axle bearing, you know, wheel bearing. If it costs you $10 to fix it proactively, but you didn't do it proactively and you let it go out on the road, it could cost 10 times 10. So in other words, $100 to fix it, 'cause by that time you've got a down driver sitting around, you've got a tow truck most likely you're gonna have to call, you probably gonna have to send a mechanic out there to figure out what's wrong. And then you get to that third energy state, if it was a $10 wheel bearing and it broke down on the road for $100, but it caused an accident, then it's 100 times 100, which is $10,000, right? And then it becomes even more complicated. Now you're in a liability, you've got a risk claim, you got another, you got property or an injured person. And so, yeah, I mean, your job is to avoid all of that. And that's where that thoroughness comes in that both of you guys are talking about.

Yeah. Well, and then the indirect cost that you mentioned, you know, from a city fleet, you know, yes, you've got a downed driver, Obviously, we look at stakeholder satisfaction. One of the impacts could be that, you know, that police officer wasn't able to get to a crime scene in a timely manner or wasn't able to report to an accident in, you know, enough time to save somebody. It could cost somebody a bigger thing.

Even, yeah.

On the trucking side, you know, downtime is a huge, huge cost.

Big revenue inhibitor.

Because if that truck's not moving, it's not earning money, and trucking thrives on the margins. And so anytime that you have a truck not earning revenue, that's another dollar that you've got to go find and scrap for later.

Right.

So this idea is that you want to try to find as much as possible because, and this is why the more you spend on your PM program, even though you're spending more money up front, you're actually reducing the backside by the square. Right. Yeah, so you spent $10—

And you're mitigating potential liability. Which is huge.

Could be huge.

Could be. It could— instead of $10,000, you could be looking at $10 million.

Yeah, I mean, the average accident I saw today was like $78,000 by the time you add in all the extraneous costs to that.

So, so, and definitely the another side of this too is that, you know, just the cost of if you do have a road call versus doing it in your own shop, um, you know, having, having another technician, you're paying shop, you know, outside shop rates versus paying your inside labor. That complicates things.

So one of the things— I missed a couple podcasts because I was in Washington, D.C. teaching a DOT class. And one of the things that I always stress in that class is use your roadside inspection information proactively, or I guess it's reactively because you get it after the fact. But a lot of people don't do anything with that. They allow their trucking company or, you know, to go out there and get inspected. And then unless there was some kind of correction that needed to happen, They never usually respond to that. Right. But you can go down, you can go in every day, every week and download all that information off the CSA site. You get a spreadsheet format and it tells you exactly what you missed on the roadside inspection, whether that's a leak, a light, a brake, and you'll start to see patterns. And all that stuff can be used to strengthen your PM program. Right. I mean, that's, that's really a, I mean, not many people do this, but that's a good tip. Use it. To your advantage.

Yeah, we did that when our costs were high and we had terrible CSA scores, especially when it came to vehicle maintenance. We would go in every single week. We would actually meet together as an executive team, safety executives, the whole nine yards, and we would talk about all of our roadside inspections. Who got what? How many points? Why? What can we do to change that going forward? And I tell you what, we did a huge turnaround on our vehicle maintenance score for CSA. Huge turnaround. I mean, we were way above the threshold and we dropped like 10 points behind it in the matter of like 6 months, all just by reviewing and discussing what you're talking about.

What you focus on and measure gets managed. It's just that simple.

And then adding that to the process and the checklist to make sure, hey, when this goes out—

and take it further, I mean, as you sit down with the team like you did, you can identify root causes. You know, I mean, the root cause could be a slacker driver that didn't write stuff down. Root cause could be a gap in your PM program. You know, it could be anything. You've got to be able to solve that.

Yeah, I think one of the last things too with regards to PMs is making sure that the— because it does impact your warranty, you know, as if you're not doing timely PMs, if you're not staying on top of the PMs, it does impact your warranty. One of the ways to help keep that ratio where it needs to be is we like to promote warranty PMs, where right before that warranty expires, you bring that vehicle in and you do a full-blown PM inspection, find anything wrong that you can before the warranty expires, and that helps keep the corrective cost down because now you have stuff that's going out and it's getting scheduled and it's, it's done under warranty, which lowers both costs. And so it just brings the overall cost of the vehicle down.

Yep.

But just, you know, something that we recommend, you know, if you've got a 3-year warranty on a vehicle, then at 2 years 6 months or 2 years 9 months, bring it in, do a full-blown inspection, send it out to the dealership, have them repair it. You know, if you want to do it by mileage, do it by mileage. But the idea is that shortly before that warranty expires or lapses, that you're, you're getting your hands on it and you're taking a look and making sure that this thing is pristine and ready to go for another 2 or 3 years depending on your replacement cycles. So with that, any last thoughts from the two of you?

I think we beat that one up pretty good, actually.

I would agree.

It's good.

Awesome.

Perfect. Well, just as a reminder to everybody, we're putting on our first Fleet Success Summit, talking all about these principles, these pillars of fleet success: stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management. And bringing together leaders and thought leaders from a bunch of different industries, you know, from fleet leadership, business, technology, and basically just fusing this whole thing together. It's going to be an awesome show out here in Phoenix, April 20th through 21st, 2 days.

And who wouldn't want to be in Phoenix in April?

You know, it's actually going to be very lovely out here in April. So come out, thaw out from your winter snowstorms that you've been having. Go to fleetsuccess.com to go get any more information on that. Just stay updated as we make speaker announcements and you can go look for Fleet Success Summit.

There you go.

Yeah, sorry.

You're welcome.

Yeah, you can go to fleetsuccess.com too. That'll take you to a fun, a fun website as well. But Fleet Success Summit is the one where you can go get all the information on the summit. So with that, we will see you next time and let your friends and colleagues know about the Fleet Success Podcast. Love to have them listening. If you have any feedback or things that you'd love to hear us discuss or just want to get us a shout out on the podcast, email us at podcast@rtfleet.com. And who knows, I might just give you a $10 Starbucks gift card if I see your name come across my desk.

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