Episode 081: PM Program Essentials: Checklists

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All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, along with Jeff Jenkins. Hey, hey, hey, it's good to be back together again. Last week I flew solo, and man, that was a little bit rough.

Well, in the week before that I flew solo. Well, actually I had Jan with me, but—

well, okay, at least you got a crutch, right?

I did have a crutch. I could lean on someone.

Yeah, and Jan's always good to have on the call. Uh, so today we had a suggestion from a reader, which we always appreciate. If you ever have a topic you'd love us to address You can send that to podcast@rtafleet.com. So we had a suggested topic from a reader and actually kicked off like a whole thought train of like different topics we could cover. So Mr. Boring, thank you very much. We appreciate the suggestion.

And I hope you're enjoying your book.

Absolutely. So today we want to talk about the— as we're setting up PM programs, like one of the key components of any good PM program is a checklist. Yeah, this is like one of the most important parts of having a good PM program is a checklist. And before we dive into, as we talk about PMs, you know, the reason why checklists end up being so critical is because you think about the overall purpose of what, what a PM is designed for, like what it's supposed to do. Why we even do preventive maintenance, right, is we're trying to prevent the breakdown. But a lot of people, they get stuck in that loop of, well, it's just lube oil filter. Let's roll the vehicle in and like we'll just change the oil, change the filter, send it on its way again, right? And that'll prevent the breakdown.

Yeah, some people actually run their shop that that is the entirety of their PM.

Yeah, well, and they'll put their least experienced techs in the lube bay.

Yeah, the new guys, it's how you learn, right?

And, you know, the reason that's such a big oversight is because that's the time like the vehicle's in your shop and it's— you already have it down. That's the time to find the things wrong that are gonna break in the future. Right, like you're preventing the breakdown, not, well, let's just, you know, lube it and hopefully it, you know, that lubrication is all it needs to keep running forever. And so a lot of people make that mistake is by throwing their, their most junior guy on the tech. And so in our experience, you create a good checklist and it helps reinforce like, hey, these are the things that you need to look at and the things that you need to use and kind of a template. But the whole point is to find things wrong.

Right. And if you put your new guy on it, having a comprehensive checklist will help make sure they don't miss a step. Every time I go to the grocery store that I don't have a checklist, I get home and guess what?

You forgot something.

I forgot something.

Yep.

Same concept.

And I think too, with a really good checklist, it, it not only teaches them like, oh yeah, don't forget to check this and this and this, but how to check it.

Yeah.

What's within tolerance, what's not in tolerance. It almost becomes a training program by itself when you have a good one. Setup.

Agreed.

My recommendation is still to throw your senior guys on the PM bay, right? And some of them, it's boring work, sure, but at the same time, like, that's where you're going to have the biggest cost savings impact on your fleet is by having a good PM program. You know, we're not talking about PM versus corrective maintenance here, but, you know, Grandpa's rule of thumb was always like, you should have 65% of your labor cost should be from PMs and PM repairs, you know. And if you don't have that, then you need to up your PM quality, right?

Not necessarily the frequency, but how deep you're diving in and looking at things.

You need to look harder, yep, right? There's always something you can find wrong with a vehicle. You need to look harder, right? Uh, and the checklist is kind of a way too that as you find things wrong with a vehicle, you know, I always remember there was a city locally who they had a bunch of hydraulic seals start going out right around 75,000 miles. And what did they do after they started seeing the pattern? They added it to their checklist.

Perfect, right?

You add it to the checklist and now you've got that knowledge is now captured and it's, it's something that you can now prevent in the future as you start inspecting those seals. So if the purpose of a PM then is to find things wrong, You know, like, that's— we then take that, we put it into a checklist, and you want to make sure that your checklist is thorough, right? Like, I've seen a lot of checklists that are just very— they're either generic, uh, it'll say something like, hey, check the lube oil filter, check your hoses, check your belts, um, you know, check your brake pads, right? But it's like, there's not— okay, check them.

Check your brake pads for what? Check your hoses for what? Check it. Like, what part of it are we checking?

You know, you see, you want to make sure it's thorough. You want to make sure that it's well explained. You know, like you're checking your hoses. Are you checking them for, you know, are they loose? Are they wobbly? Do they collapse really easily so they're, you know, you can tell they're getting worn and aged? If you're checking your belt, are you looking for cracks? Some cracking is okay. What kind of cracking is good? What kind of cracking is bad? Same thing with tires, you know, like tires start going bad. How do I know what a good tire looks like, bad tire looks like? And some of this is obviously like, it's table stakes, right? Like, you're a technician, you should know.

Yeah, it's like 101.

But we know what's happening in the labor market right now is that you don't necessarily get the cream of the crop. Checklists are a way to kind of compensate for that. And as you explain, or you say like, this is what we're looking for, this is what's in tolerance, what's out of tolerance, um, you know, if you're doing a battery inspection, you know, like, what should that cold cranking amp come out? What should the, you know, the voltage drop look like when you're doing that? And, you know, when is the time to replace that battery? Now, instead of, oh, guess what? We're starting, we're doing rollout and we don't have enough buses because I've got 3 dead batteries all of a sudden. That's a very common problem in transit.

When you're on the cusp of something, right on that checklist. So you set your tolerance. If you're on the cusp, change it.

Just do it.

Just do it. Just do the work. Just fix it. There's too many times we say, oh, I don't have the time or, oh, it's in tolerance.

And then I can extend this.

Yeah. And then you end up shooting yourself in the foot because you're going to lose out on productivity or whatever the job may end up being because now you're going to have a vehicle down.

Yeah. And so the idea is that you want to make sure your checklist is thorough enough that somebody can come in and look at it and understand what they need to check, what they should be inspecting. You know, and for example, belts, like you might have multiple belts. Which one did they check? I've seen vehicles with multiple alternators. Which ones did they check? Um, you know, making sure that your, your checklist is thorough and, and really specific for that vehicle. And again, that's another thing that I usually see when I'm looking at checklists, uh, is I had one waste company, they created a checklist, one checklist for their entire company.

For how many different types of equipment?

You're talking about roll-offs, you're talking about side loaders, you're talking about front load, you're talking about like all these different types of compactors. And yeah, and, and so like, let's just talk about those three you know, you front loads and side loads. We have two totally different hydraulic systems. Some of them have side load arms, right? And that has all of its componentry. And what they would have is these techs would have to basically— yeah, nope, this doesn't apply to this vehicle. And so they N/A it or they skip it. And that might make it nice from like an administrative perspective, but it means that you end up with like this huge 300-item checklist, but only 150 items really matter. and then you have to be able to make the decision, does this apply to this vehicle or not? And so the tech has to make that judgment call. And then when you're editing or auditing the checklist, you have to make that judgment call. Did they get everything that was supposed to be on this vehicle? Did they miss anything?

Most likely you're missing something because you're going through a cadence, right? Especially if you have 90% one type, 10% another type. So you, you're basically going off of memory a lot of times on the 90% versus the 10%.

Yeah, and, and so every vehicle type should have its own checklist. And even if you've got, you know, let's say you've got 5 sedans, uh, you know, 5 different makes and models of a sedan, they're gonna have a lot of commonality, but there's gonna be unique things about, you know, your Ford Crown Vic versus the, you know, the Chevy, um, Capri. Like, what's, what's the Caprice?

Is it the Caprice? I think so.

The Impala.

The Impala was the other one. Yeah.

You know, but there's gonna be nuance and difference between those, the things you need to inspect. And what will really make the biggest difference, and I think this is the one that a lot of people mess on, is sequence, right?

Yes.

And we talk about sequence a lot. You know, Steve's mentioned it a lot with, you know, like the spaghetti diagram and tracing the steps that a tech takes around a vehicle and all that. But your checklist really drives, it should drive, the sequencing of that PM. You know, so that we're checking things in the order we encounter them. And a lot of people, if you're doing a generic checklist, your sequence automatically is going to suffer because of that.

Yeah, you've got, you know, front driver tire, rear passenger tire, front passenger, you know, so you're like kind of going around, or this brake and that brake, and then maybe this hose. And so yeah, you're wasting how much time by not following a sequence?

When we see that, like if you're using a generic form, you know, and I won't say their names, but it rhymes with Helen Keller. Right. You'll see a generic form and, you know, like it's nice, but it's usually grouped by system. And so you'll see all your engine stuff together, right? The tires will be unique and they'll be off by themselves. The brakes will be in a different section. And like you mentioned, like you might go from left tire to right tire, right? Driver's side, passenger side, front to back. And then guess what? When you do the brakes, same thing. You got to do the same walking path again. And so you have that like major sequential issue, right? Is that you should sequence your checklist by location, not by system. First mistake that I see a lot of people make. And then the second one is because you're using a generic form for all the vehicles of one type, you know, like let's say, for example, you pop the hood on a vehicle. Well, in some vehicles, the battery is like buried beneath the windshield wiper fluid and a bunch of other stuff. And so you're not going to be able to get to that right away, or it's on the left-hand side of the vehicle instead of the right-hand side of the vehicle. And, you know, like, your sequence is going to matter in that case. And so you want to make sure that your, your PM forms are specific to the vehicles you're inspecting so the sequence matches what that vehicle actually does and where things are laid out. Otherwise, you're going to end up making a lot of trips around the vehicle and you're just going to, you know, an hour-long PM It's going to take you an hour and a half, you know, because you had to go around the vehicle multiple times.

Correct.

So, so make sure you've got good sequencing. The other side of this too, and we kind of mentioned that some of this is baked into just having a checklist form, is training.

Dun dun dun.

We always talk about training. A lot of people overlook it, but you have to teach people what a good PM looks like. You know, you got to go through and show them, okay, like, here's our step-by-step. And you might tell yourself, like, they should just know this already, right? But we had a really awesome quote last week. It talked about, you know, what you inspect is what you expect.

Yep.

Right? And if you're not showing them how to inspect things, you're just kind of like, well, whatever you decide, right? You've basically given away control to the technician and they get to set the standard for how thorough they are in their PM work.

And I know if you're a master technician or a technician listening, you're rolling your eyes thinking about, "I don't need training on a PM." Right. Guess what? There's nothing wrong with refreshing what's going on and how to do something, especially when you're trying to get everybody on the same page. How I would look at it is that training, even though you feel you don't need it, other people do need it.

Right.

And you set the example of being a part of that, and if you have a positive attitude going through it, they take it more seriously. The end result there is work gets done faster. There's less pressure on you to, you know, get your hustle on and to try and do more work than you're actually capable of because everybody's pulling their weight.

Yep. Well, and then you're gonna have fewer breakdowns. Yep. You do a more thorough inspection. And if you, and maybe you know all the answers, right? Then you should be helping train the other guys when they're going through and doing their own PMs. And that ultimately will lead to a better performing shop. You can focus on the real big problems instead of dealing with the constant fires that come out. Because somebody forgot to inspect a hose on a vehicle and it went out. Yeah, right. And so constant training, constantly reminding people, and that really becomes your job, right, is reminding them of the standard, reminding them of what a good PM looks like, you know, what the purpose of this checklist item is. Can't tell you how many times that happens, right? You've got a checklist item and it's been perpetuated for years and somebody else said, why do we inspect that?

Well, I don't know. It's been— it's on the list, right?

Training sometimes will help you actually streamline the checklist and say, yeah, this doesn't apply anymore, right? Like, we don't need to inspect the carb. This vehicle doesn't have a carb anymore. Wait, what?

You imagine that, like, one of those new technicians— this car doesn't have a— there's no carb in it. What's going on here, right? How is this thing functioning?

So, you know, but you take that off and you say, yeah, that doesn't apply anymore. But there's other things too where somebody say, well, I don't understand the point of this. Why do we inspect this? And you might have somebody that's like, well, let me tell you a story, right? Like, here's why we inspect that. You remember that time we had all these garbage trucks that were out and they all failed because of this hydraulic seal, right? And that you're wondering, why do we do that at 75,000? Why don't we do that at 65 or at 50? Why don't we do that at 100? And the training kind of helps reinforce some of those. We'll call them checklist norms. Okay, why is it that we do them, right? Like, just reestablish those again. Um, but when you go through and you have the, you know, you do the training, the follow-up to that, and it really is like kind of a hand in hand, it's another form of training, which is QA, right? Like, doing a QA on a checklist, you're going through the checklist with somebody, they've already signed off on it.

Yep.

And now you're going to go through it and say, okay, like, did you check this? And you don't have to do the whole inspection with them, but spot check it. You know, pick 10 items on the checklist and just walk through it with them and make sure that they inspected it to the standard you're expecting.

I got a story on this one. Okay. On why QA is important.

Yep.

All right, so had a technician who was replacing a tire. He replaced a tire, put it back on, and just lightly put the lugs, right, just in there. He's going to tighten them all at the same time. I'm just going to do it. Got called away.

Whoops.

Yep, got called away. There was a phone call or there's something that happened, so he pulled away from that job, was gone for about 20 minutes, comes back, forgot that he didn't tighten the lugs. There was no QA process. So what happened 5 miles down the road?

How many tires came off?

Just one. Okay, it was only one, right? But the problem was it was a steer tire.

That's a big deal. Yeah, that's—

yeah, it wasn't a trailer tire where you got duals, right? It was a steer tire and it came off, and obviously that was a huge deal. And really, that driver should have felt that when he left the yard anyway. It's pulling a little bit, what's wrong, right? But yeah, that tire came off because there was no secondary check.

You're putting a lot of faith in drivers.

All right, boy, you want to get some stories. We could fill episodes with driver stories, right?

I think as a technician, like, we can always talk about the drivers, right?

Yeah.

But in this case, right, that happens. Yeah, technician gets— and that happens a lot, right? They get pulled off to another job and just distracted.

Yep.

And that QA process, you know, and you don't QA every PM, so this could still happen, but if you teach them to QA their own PMs too, of like, all right, like, here's a final checklist of things I need to do before I put this out on the road. And that probably should be any time that you pull a tire off, right? Like, before you get in and drive it, I want to double-check that tire again.

Yes. Right?

Because we've seen that happen where it's like, oh yeah, I did the work on that vehicle, but then I got distracted or something.

Yeah, I didn't put the cap back in, I didn't tighten up the, the lugs, the hose wasn't reconnected, right?

You know, but just doing a quick visual of like, okay, here's everything I did. Review your checklist and make sure as you look at each item again, right, you don't have to do the inspection again, but you do need to kind of do another run through it just to make sure you got everything. Yep, double check doesn't hurt, um, especially when it comes to tires and re-torquing lugs and things like that.

Yeah. And so in Texas, I went to Grease Monkey when I got my truck serviced all the time. And you could, you just, you know, you sit in the bay, they do the service real quick, and you can sit, you can see it. The guy will go and do the work, and then they will actually together, him and one other person, go around and check. And there's a reason they do that. It's probably because they've had issues, they got sued and whatever else. It should be no different in your shop, right?

You should be operating at that, at least better than a consumer-grade shop, right? Because your customers, your drivers, they are your consumers in this case, correct? And, you know, so even though you're not— maybe you're not a, you know, fully retail shop, you should act like you're a retail shop in some cases. In some cases, I would say like you actually need to go above and beyond a retail shop. You know, like Steve will tell you all kinds of bad stories about Jiffy Lube, right? Like those guys don't care about the vehicles. Doing a PM checklist is one of the big differences between sending it to a Jiffy Lube or doing your own in-house. But there are cases where treating it more like a retail shop could end up helping you a lot, especially when you think about liability.

Yes.

Things of that nature. One of the other big things, and this is kind of a, you know, not necessarily a plug for RTA, but it's, you know, I know a lot of the tools out there have this. And so you do want to make sure that, you know, just having a paper checklist is good, but like in a spirit of good, better, best, you really want to find a system that can make these inspections electronic. So that A, you can always go back and look at the inspections, right? But B, like, you know, one of the things we like to do is close the defect loop. So if I found something wrong on the vehicle during a PM inspection, that's great. Then what happened, right? Did I do the repair now? Did I defer it to a later date? Did I think about doing the repair and then not do it? When did I do it, right? Which work order was that on? Was it on the same work order? Did it get put onto another work order?

Yep.

So when you have a system like that, you know, good systems will, you know, as you find defects, they'll let you mark the defect and then they'll, you know, hopefully they'll put them back on the work order automatically so you don't have to recreate the line. And then when you close them, they should go back to the inspection and mark that, okay, here a defect was found, here's where we fixed it, and here's who fixed it. Right? Like it closes the defect loop and you should be able to see that from your inspection form.

It's just efficiency. It's another, it's another check and balance.

But then that way too, like, if you ever have a DOT audit and they're looking at your DOT inspections, if you're in California, if you're doing BIT inspections, things like that, you want to have that closed loop so that you can show that, yeah, we had a problem and we fixed it and we have it all documented. Yep. And I'll tell you, like, if you ever get sued or if you ever had a, you know, NHTSA coming in or NTSB, coming in to like look at your, your stuff to make sure that you're compliant, or heavens to bet, you know, if you're doing a like a discovery process and lawyers are now looking at your PM maintenance records, you really want to have your ducks in a row.

Yeah, well, and paper is not going to get your ducks in a row. No, they get mislabeled, misfiled, you know, you have to take how many hours trying to find it, like just the, just the air of lack of organization that they already think that you're in an efficient place, right?

But if the other hand is, hey, you know, I want to see all of your PM records, I want to know, you know, how thorough you were, and you can just run a report and it shows all this stuff, like, it pretty much is like, okay, they know what they're doing. There's not— you're not going to have the negligent damages, right, where all of a sudden you've got punitive— what's the, what's the word, um, when you're grossly negligent? Like, there's a, there's a word they say in legal parlance that You're basically— you're getting the book thrown at you, right? Like, we're gonna make an example of you. You're not just getting a little slap on the wrist.

That's a 6-letter word that starts with F as far as I'm concerned.

So you want to make sure that you do this electronically. There's tons of things out there that can do this electronically. If you've got a good FMIS, they will have this in their system and it will close that loop for you automatically. So you get some efficiency gains with it as well. Is being able to track all the, you know, like we mentioned that 65 ratio, how much of your work is PM and PM repair versus, you know, corrective maintenance or, you know, like recall campaign kind of stuff.

Yep.

And the last thing that we like to do is make sure that you can track who inspected the item. Right. So if you've got a paper form, they're initialing the item that they inspected. It's not just a simple check.

Yep.

If you've got an electronic system, it should be logging who did it, what time they did it, like date timestamp, whoever was signing on to it.

Yep.

Doing the job when they, when they checked it off. And then who ultimately signed off on the overall inspection, you know, as being able to capture that. With a DVIR, like, you have to sign off on the DVIR. Like, there's got to be a signature capture, right, for the DOT compliance. Um, mechanic inspections, you know, like your PM inspections, are a little bit looser. There is still some, like, state DOT— some of the state DOTs will require you to have the tech sign off on them. Others just want to know who did it, like the name of the tech who did it. Um, and so you do need to like kind of be aware of that too, your own state and local regulations. But, you know, be sure that you can go back and if you ever have a problem, you can look and say, oh well, you know, Jim did this inspection and he did it on October 26th at 8 AM. Here's all the things that they found wrong. Here's their notes, right? You want to be able to prove and have that audit trail. And be able to go back to Jim because now you've got their name and their initials on the, on the inspection.

Well, especially if something was missed. Yeah, that's another good reason why you want them to initial and sign off on it. You want to, you want to use it as coaching experiences as well, right?

And it— there's something too about, hey, your name's on this, right? There's like a sense of ownership.

Absolutely.

And credibility, like, oh, my credibility is on the line, I want to make sure I'm doing a good job. Um, you know, not just Well, they don't know who did it, but I'll just pencil whip it and get through it. So look at that. We have sound effects on the podcast now too.

That's amazing. That machine is fantastic. Right?

All right. Well, I think that's going to do it for us for this episode. As always, if you want to learn more about stuff like this, you can go check out the Fleet Success Playbook at fleetsuccessplaybook.com. And then we have the Fleet Success Summit coming up in March.

Yes, we're in Las Vegas, and we've got— I think we're just waiting on one speaker confirmation is all.

Yep.

And everything else is locked down.

I'm really pushing that. I hope we get her.

And so, yep.

Um, but with that, like, you're gonna start hearing on the podcast, we're gonna try to get a few of the speakers in and kind of talk to, talk to our listeners.

Yeah, the— hopefully the first one will be the first— actually, one or two, I'm hoping to have in November still.

Yeah. So maybe a couple of weeks and then, uh, you give you a little sneak peek of what to expect at this year's summit because we've got some, some awesome power hitters.

So it's going to be great.

Uh, as always, you know, hopefully, hopefully better hitters than, than, uh, Houston was the other night, I guess. Yeah. But as always, we'll, uh, we'll see you next time. Bye.

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