Episode 042: Tracking More Than Just Vehicles In Your FMIS

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 to another edition of the Fleet Success Show. I'm going to be your host today, Jeff Jenkins. I got with me Steve Saltskiver. Steve.

Hey there.

How you doing?

Doing great today.

So this is probably the episode. If you want to turn it off, go ahead and turn it off. Our fearless leader isn't here to go ahead and run this thing, and he does a much better job than us, but he's on a well-deserved vacation. He took his family to Cancún, so he's enjoying a little bit of sun, weather, all-you-can-eat and drink. So we're happy for him. Although I will say Josh has 8 kids, so I'm not sure taking 8 kids to Cancún sounds like fun to me.

Although he's in Cancún and we're here with the podcast.

We are. That is very true. Now, I'm sure they have like childcare and whatever else, but when I think about 8 kids anywhere, let alone vacation, I start to like sweat and get a little overwhelmed. But that's okay. So today's topic is an interesting one and it kind of came about by accident. So we're going to talk about tracking more than just vehicles for your fleet operation. I'm going to start it off by telling a little bit of story. So last week I was at the World of Concrete with one of our account executives, and she was talking to this gentleman and asked him, hey, how many vehicles do you have in your fleet? And he was a concrete guy. He, you know, they owned a concrete mixing and grinding facility. And he said, oh, well, we've only got 11. And 11 is really not something that you would use frequently to track. Just because it's not a lot, most, most of the times you don't do that maintenance in-house.

Well, and you could do that on a spreadsheet, probably.

Yeah. And it's simple, right? Why spend the extra cost for so few vehicles? So, you know, he just kind of said, you know, so— and we said, okay, well, that's kind of small, not track it. And he turns around to walk away and I stopped him and I said, hey, sir, just one second. How, how about your other equipment? What else do you have as far as things that need maintenance on them or that you want to track? And he goes, oh my gosh, we've got 600 pieces of equipment. He goes, we have generators and Bobcats and tractors and concrete grinding machinery, and we've got the trucks with the mixers. And so he like starts listing all these things that are included in this $600,000. And I'm like, whoa, come back, boy, come back. We're going to have us a conversation. But it kind of dawned on me when that happened that, you know, when we talk about fleet and fleet operations, we specifically usually go straight to vehicles.

Yeah.

And Steve, as someone who is no stranger to running fleet operations, you know there's all kinds of things you can put into an FMIS for tracking, maintenance, whatever else. So like from your experience, kind of, I guess, talk about some of the things in the past that you've used an FMIS for.

Well, I mean, the core of any fleet management system is an asset tracker. Yes. It's— that's basically what they are. That's what they are derived from. You know, I mean, so it could be anything. And I was just telling you earlier before we started that public safety was tracking all their weapons, you know, and everything they had in their trunk. You know, if you've ever been in a police car, the trunk is full of equipment.

Of course I've been in a police car.

If you've ever been in a—

usually the back seat though.

Yeah, you've only been in the back seat. All right. And fire trucks are the same way. They're just full of equipment, you know. That's a good way to track the equipment. I mean, you can track everything in Fleet. You could even track your mechanics' tools that you have in the shop if you're buying tools from them, right? Or you're supplying tools in a tool crib. You know, all that stuff can be tracked. And of course, the benefit of tracking anything is keeping track of it, right?

Right.

So it doesn't walk off or it doesn't get lost. Somebody's accountable for it.

It's amazing how often things walk off. And a lot of times it's smaller things. So from a trucking perspective, load locks, straps, you know, binders, chains, those sort of things. When it comes to either flatbed or even dry van reefer hauling, you have this equipment and a lot of companies don't track that. It's like a driver needs load locks. Okay, well, we'll go to the warehouse and get 6 load locks for your next load. Well, they go, they get the load locks. And then what happens? Well, it's a trailer that they drop at the customer's facility. So now what happens to those load locks? Well, the customer either keeps them or they leave them in the trailer or someone comes in and steals them. And so now you've got those load locks, which you just spent $50 a pop for and you gave out 6. So now that's $300 that you have no tracking for. You know, that adds up to a lot.

I mean, you think about it. I mean, You could, you can inventory fire extinguishers, safety kits, triangles, flares.

Yeah.

You know, all the stuff that has to be on a vehicle. I mean, even, even fuses if you had to, right?

Yeah.

I mean, so.

Well, absolutely. It's funny because when, when drivers get pulled over, truck drivers would get pulled over, one of the most frequent things that they would get written up for is fire extinguisher. Yep. Either not having a fire extinguisher or not having it— yes, it's expired, not having it serviced. So can the FMIS track services?

It can. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it's—

it says it would be no different than tracking PMs on due dates, right?

Well, exactly. So when you talk about the different things that you can track, pretty much that's an infinite list, right? You were talking earlier how in some systems you can even track facilities.

Yes. And facility components like HVACs and things that you maintain, change filters on.

Yeah, and that's a great example. How often are people, you know, getting their HVAC serviced or changing their filters? I mean, an FMIS, when it comes to your building, your facilities, your fleet, you can enter all that in there so you actually have something telling you, hey, guess what, it's time to update your filters, it's time to go and add some more Freon to your HVAC system. I mean, whatever the case may be, Yeah, it's an asset. Yeah, if it's an asset, it can be tracked. So a lot of times when we talk on this, we— it may seem a little closed-minded because we are very focused on vehicles, because a lot of times that actually is the most expensive part to someone's fleet. Now, if you're dealing with heavy machinery, obviously that cost goes up, but a lot of it has to do with just the actual vehicles. But how many people have generators, if for no other reason but just backup power? Right, and do we always remember to service those when it's got to be serviced? I mean, an emergency may hit and you haven't serviced your generator for a couple years, and then you're up shit creek without a paddle.

Yep.

Because it doesn't work.

I mean, you got stationary generators, you got tow-behind generators, you got personal generators that fit in the bed of a truck, you got air compressors.

Yeah, it's, it's a lot, right? It's a lot. Um, what about— so We talked about this before we started recording too. I mean, fire departments, let's talk about some of the things fire departments track.

Yeah, I mean, and like SCBA units, right? I mean, every one of the firemen have one. Yep.

For those who don't know, that's the oxygen tanks.

Yep. Yep.

And you can track when it's been filled with air, how much air is left in it. I mean, there's so many things you can do. And think about that. If you are a firefighter in a fire department or you're in charge of safety for a fire department, how important it is, that oxygen.

Yep.

And tracking that oxygen, I mean, it's life-saving.

They also have, you know, extraction tools and cutting saws and all kinds of things that they, you know, they work on emergency calls, they have to open up cars.

And yeah, how much do you think one of those jaws of life costs?

Oh gosh, thousands.

I mean, probably tens of thousands.

Yeah, they're a lot of money.

Yeah. And how often are they used? A few times a week, maybe.

Yeah, maybe 1 or 2 times, maybe.

So it's, it's probably not something a lot of people are sitting there thinking about. Hey, guess what? We have to service our jaws of life to make sure it works.

But if you bought one, chances are there's a manual to it and there's probably a maintenance schedule with it.

Yes, there is.

Yep.

And, and this is exactly something that it could be used for. So it's, it's, it's a good thing to talk about a holistic view of what you got. Right. So Steve, for example, when you're setting up different pieces of equipment, what are the things after you put it in the system that you would use the system to make sure that the maintenance is done or that, you know, you're keeping track of it?

Well, the first thing you do, I mean, obviously the first thing in a fleet manager, you do what we call create a birth certificate. So you put the asset name or number or whatever the moniker is that you want to identify that asset. Could be alpha, could be numeric, could be both. Then you set up a location, you know, where is it located at? And then you set up a maintenance schedule. Trying to think if I'm missing anything imperative. I mean, at least those three things are the most important thing. You probably want to set up a replacement date. If you have a certification point on it, you'd want to set that up, that date. So if it's something that's recurring, right?

What about, what about depreciation?

Yeah, I mean, if it's big enough, especially like the jaws of life, it's thousands of dollars, you certainly want to depreciate it. Typically that threshold is, you know, between $2,000 and $5,000 or more. Depends on your operation and how you capitalize assets. But certainly you'd want to do that so you could create some kind of a long-term replacement schedule.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and what's the— so I'm going to give an example for me, but I want you to think about it. Like, what's the most expensive piece of equipment you've ever bought that has gone bad or whatever from neglect or not tracking it? So for me, for example, um, we had some trailers that were walking floor trailers. So not everyone knows what a walking floor trailer is. So basically what a walking floor trailer is, is the wood panel slats on the bottom of a trailer, they move back and forth on hydraulics. And what that does is that pushes all the product forward so it doesn't have to be on pallets or skids and that sort of thing. So it's very common in agriculture. So you use this for corn or wood chips or debris or just something that lays on the floor that you're not going to put on a pallet. But we had these walking floor trailers and they're not cheap. They're, you know, $60,000-$70,000. So very, very expensive. Well, we didn't track anything to do with the maintenance of the hydraulic system on those walking floor trailers. Now the actual tires, brakes, I mean the things that are typical DOT inspections, those we were pretty good at. We would get that done. But for some reason, we just wouldn't ever do anything with the walking floor. So do you want to guess how hard it is to fix a hydraulic walking floor trailer that's loaded with 45,000 pounds of wood chips?

I was just thinking, as you said that, in my mind, I'm thinking it's like a garbage truck full and it won't— you can't get it out of the hopper, right?

Exactly.

We had one when I was in Stamford, Connecticut, that sat there for a year. Because it was garbage, of course. Once it sits there for a week, nobody wants to touch it.

No.

You know, and so that was the whole issue is because the hydraulics would not open the rear door. That was the whole problem. So we couldn't basically empty the hopper out, which was ironic 'cause the transfer station was right across the street from the Fleet Shop.

Right.

All we had to do was tow it over there and somebody prop it open manually, but nobody's gonna touch that.

So that wasted equipment for a year.

A year. Yep.

How much revenue?

And it was a brand new garbage truck too.

How much revenue would that thing generate over a year?

Oh gosh. They, I bet $20 an hour for something like that.

Ooh. Yeah. Okay. So it's, it's costly. So for us, we had to like have a couple mechanics get shovels and start shoveling out 45,000 pounds of wood chips. And we shoveled 'em onto our yard. You know, we just had a spot for it. So now we've got these huge piles of wood chips that are extremely flammable. right, that we had to do out just so we could fix the hydraulic system. I mean, the labor alone that we spent getting that, because it wasn't just a one-day deal. I mean, that was a several-day, hey, let's shovel this out. And obviously those guys were pretty pissed off.

I was thinking as you're doing that, I took a tour once at Frito-Lay, uh-huh, where they actually make the potato chips and the, the trailer, they have barn door trailers and they actually back up to the dock and then the guy on the dock gets a big fire hose shoots it in the trailer and all those potatoes float out. I was thinking that would have been a perfect example, rather than shoveling that. Yeah, that's all they do.

Awesome.

Goes onto a conveyor belt, goes down, goes through a cutter, cuts the chips, goes through a baker. Yeah, it was a pretty seamless operation. It was pretty awesome.

That's pretty cool. So I've never seen that, but I've like, you know, you've seen it where they've been tipped up, they're inverted and everything just falls out the back. Yeah, that's common, like wood chips and corn for feed and that kind of thing. So But I've never seen the fire hose. That's an interesting way to do it.

I thought that was pretty creative.

That is pretty creative.

But I was thinking you could have cleaned those wood chips out pretty quick with that.

Well, we probably could have, although once, like most wood chips, when they're put in a trailer, they're still a little wet, so they stick together. Yeah. And that makes it a lot more difficult to actually move them and get them out.

So you're going to get them wetter, I guess.

You are going to get them a lot wetter, so they're probably going to, you know, stick a little bit harder. But anyway, we digress. But that whole situation, it probably cost us, I mean, between the loss of load and everything else, we probably lost close to $22,000, you know, just at when all said and done. And that was because we didn't have a maintenance, regular maintenance schedule. If we would've had a regular maintenance schedule on that walking floor trailer, it would've been very easy for us to see that the hydraulics were going out, but we didn't do it.

Well, I mean, the same thing goes with anything you're tracking in there. I mean, look how much time you lose if you can't find it. I mean, that's people are wandering around trying to find a tool or a fire extinguisher or something, or going back to check, you know, their records in a file drawer. When was the last time we serviced that? You know, that's a lot of time lost where you could just push a button, get a query, and be done with it, right?

Well, especially if you can see who it's assigned to.

Yep.

And then all you got to do is go ask that person, hey, what happened to X?

Exactly.

Oh yeah, I left it over here. There wasn't room where I picked it up from, so I left it over here.

You know, that's another thing too. A lot of people, I know when I was in retail at Coca-Cola, I mean, we had trailers everywhere, you know, 'cause we'd just drop 'em off at a Walmart or, you know, and trying to find those after you did that, we actually ended up putting GPS on 'em because we had 'em dropped everywhere and we couldn't find our trailers, right?

Steve, that is the eternal trucking problem is tracking your trailers. Yeah. There are never enough trailers in the trucking world.

Oh, we already, we had a 3-to-1 ratio. We still couldn't find trailers.

Well, yeah, and a lot of that is data integrity, people not putting the right information in, but also like trailer tracking on GPS, it's not as accurate as you'd hope it'd be either because there are dead spots.

Yep.

Right, batteries die. A lot of people have done solar now, so that like helps charge as it goes, but if it's sitting in the same spot in the shade for a while, that's not going to happen.

Yep.

Right, so it's a very good point. I mean, being able to track that equipment, I mean, you got to think just a regular dry van trailer, it's about $28,000 a pop.

We did a— when I was a consultant, we did a project for a big construction company out east, and they would actually expense their off-road equipment like dozers, um, you know, loaders, things like that into the project because after they were done, they just abandoned them. Yeah, they actually had them stick stuck out in the field somewhere. They never— I mean, think about how you use it. I mean, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. You know, but the reason they abandoned them is because they didn't have a tracking system, basically.

Really? Yeah.

Or somebody will steal one and they'll move it, you know, and they just, they just basically wipe their hands of it. Yeah, exactly. Well, we charged the, the client in the project itself. They did project charging.

Yeah.

Or expensing. They were done with it. So for the next project, they just bought a new bulldozer, be done with it.

That's an expensive— it was crazy.

Yeah, it was crazy.

I couldn't imagine that someone gives me a proposal. Oh yeah, but you're going to buy this bulldozer, we're going to leave somewhere after we're done. Uh, yeah, next bid please. The U.S. government in a foreign country?

We asked them that. They said that was actually pretty common, surprisingly.

That is weird. I've never heard that before.

We did a project in Bogotá, Colombia, where the federal government was trying to get rid of assets they couldn't find, right? Yeah. So I mean, it's, it's incredible, the people, things that people don't track.

I would agree 100%. And think of the cost savings when talk about actually tracking and holding on to what you have.

Exactly.

All right, well, good. I, I really don't have much else on that topic, do you?

No, no, just, uh, I just say keep in mind anything you've got that's tangible you can actually track, you know, and even anything that's chattel. I mean, like a building facility, you know, the buildings have all kinds of equipment in them, you know, elevators, all kinds of things that you could track and maintain.

Yeah, absolutely. So wise to use your FMIS for more than just vehicles.

Yep.

That's the moral of today's story.

You know, and if you're in a government or even in a fleet and you can get more people to use that FMIS, you can defray those costs to other agencies, right?

Yeah.

So it's not really taxing your fleet as much per asset.

Yeah, you could. You could. I mean, you could totally just segregate out where the costs actually go.

Maybe it could become a charging center for you.

Yeah. Hey, how about that, guys? Make your fleet a profit center. There you go.

Exactly.

Just don't get your budgets cut. Well, awesome. Well, before we sign off, I just want to remind everybody about the Fleet Success Summit. Listen, we are stoked about the lineup we've got coming for the summit. The summit is going to be completely badass. We've got some great names you guys are going to see on social. You're going to see just like you can go to fleetsuccesssummit.com and you can see who we got. I mean, we got Kristin Hadid, Michael Broadband, Paul Lauria, Patty Early, Facundo Tessara, Ed Smith, Mark Rogers. Josh Turley is going to speak at it. Steve Saltskiver is going to speak at it.

Michael Broadband, if you've seen his podcast, a lot of people.

Yeah, he'd be awesome. Yeah, he teaches a Trucking 101 on YouTube and it's fantastic if you haven't seen it. So there's going to be a lot of really good thought leaders talking about how to bring your fleet to be extremely successful. And, you know, that's kind of what our passion has become lately is actually helping others be successful in their fleets because, you know, we've all got the same common goal and purpose. So don't miss out on it. You go online right now and register, get your tickets. It's in Mesa, Arizona, April 20th and 21st. It's going to be a really good time.

And who wouldn't want to be in Mesa in April? Perfect time.

Honestly, I can't think of anybody.

Exactly.

Maybe an ex-wife lives in Mesa, so they don't want to go. But outside of that, there's no reason not to want to.

That's right.

Right. So perfect. Well, thanks for listening. Tell your friends, tell your coworkers, tag us on social media @fleet_success. Subscribe to the Fleet Success Show wherever you listen to podcasts. And additionally, if you got any questions or if there are any good topics that you want to hear from us, Send us an email. We're more than happy to go ahead and talk about those specific topics that you guys submit to us. Some weeks we sit there and we sit here and we're talking about, hey, what should we talk about? What should we talk about? So a little inspiration from the outside doesn't help. podcast@rtafleet.com.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So with that, final words, Steve?

No final words. I'm out, I guess.

All right. Peace out. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.