Episode 086: PMs – How Often Should You Do Them

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We are 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 again today by Jeff Jenkins. Hey y'all, my steady, steady co-host. Uh, today we want to talk about some really super fun, riveting topics. Anything going on in the news recently that we want to hit?

Um, we, we best, we best not answer that question just because of the political nature of everything that's in the news every day.

Everything, man, that's I'll tell you what. So let's not talk about politics. Let's talk fleet because that's what we do on this show.

Let's do it.

So today's fun topic, we're going to talk more about PMs. We had a topic a couple weeks ago. It might have been a month now.

I think 3 weeks ago. So there's been 2 other episodes since then.

Yeah, but we talked a lot about PM checklists and the importance of having a really good structured checklist and that it was inclusive and that, you know, it was kind of a comprehensive way to make sure that you were applying standards to your PM process. One of the next things that we usually look at when we're talking about a good PM program is, you know, how often we're doing them and are we doing them with enough frequency and enough thoroughness? Are we making sure that we're, you know, we're not over-PMing? I think, you know, Grandpa saw a lot of that in his career was, you know, people were over-PMing, they were doing them too often or under-PMing. And it seemed like it was difficult for fleet managers to really figure out like how to dial that in and get it right.

Well, you know, on our personal vehicles, used to have those stickers. You'd go in and then they'd put up there, you know, your 3,000 or 5,000 miles difference or the 3 months. So you'd have that gauge sitting up there and looking at it. Well, nowadays, like, I don't even touch mine until my light flashes that said you need an oil change.

Yeah, well, and, you know, cars are getting smarter.

Yep.

Um, which, you know, that's something we're going to talk a little bit about is, you know, should you go off of like the oil life remaining percentage in the truck, you know, because I know all the Fords these days have that.

Yep.

A lot of them do that. We even get that through Geotab. It comes into our system as a, as a PM meter, so you can actually, you know, flag your PMs based off of oil life remaining and things like that. Um, you know, and how reliable is that as a meter? You know, I'll tell you a quick story on my truck, uh, also a Ford F-150. Yep. And same thing, I kept looking at that, right? And, you know, the The OEM will come out and tell you, like, I've seen some say 5,000, some say 10,000.

Yeah, right.

And I'm like, 10,000 between an oil change? That's crazy.

That's awesome.

That's incredible, right? Uh, the retail shops would obviously tell you, oh no, we got to do 3,000 or 90 days, right? Like, we need to get you in at least 4 times a year.

We need you.

That's how they generate income, right? So there's a bit of a conflict of interest there. But if you're doing it in a fleet, you take that conflict of interest off the table. So how often should you do them? So my personal vehicle, I'm doing, you know, I'm looking at the oil life remaining. You know, I just had the oil changed, right? It gets up to 100%, it just kind of works its way down. And at the time, I want to say that I was probably at 8,000 or 9,000 miles since your last oil change. Since my last oil change, right? And I was, I kept looking at it, I'm like, it's got to be coming up due soon, right? And it's like, no, oil life remaining was still, I want to say, at about 35 or 40%. Damn, like, I was like, okay, like, I got some time on this. Well, all of a sudden, uh, because it's only telling me the oil life remaining, but it's not checking my dumb dipstick for me, right?

Yeah.

And so here I am not realizing that I actually had a consumption problem. Somewhere in the process, I'm burning oil. Oh, um, didn't know it though. And so the way it manifests on an EcoBoost, if you're burning oil and you get suddenly low on oil, is that the turbos stop working. Which is kind of an issue. And so all of a sudden you start getting underboost and you start getting, um, you know, issues with the, the turbo system. I was worried maybe I was getting some blowback through the intercooler and through the blow-off valve. Uh, no, it was just straight up I was low on oil. Huh. And so, you know, I took it in, you know, they looked at it. My, my first guy, like, he's like, well, I don't really know how to fix this because he's, you know, he's like, the codes are throwing me all kinds of weird things. He's like, but maybe you're getting some oil leakage and the turbos are bad, but they're under warranty, so take it into the dealership. I'm like, ah, not the dealership. Damn. Like, it's not even the cost of the dealership anymore, man. Those guys just can't staff anybody.

No.

Um, you know, in our particular Ford, you know, I love Peoria Ford, they're amazing, but, uh, they just— it takes them— if I drop off my truck with them, A, they don't have a loaner program, and B, you're pretty much just without a vehicle for 2 weeks. Right? Because you can't take your vehicle and like wait for an appointment. It's like, no, no, it's first come, first serve, and you have to leave your truck with us. And so like the last couple times I've had to drop it off there, it's been a week, maybe 2 weeks that it's sat down there at the shop, and I've just had to figure out how to get around without a, without a second vehicle in the house.

That's crazy.

So driving the 12-passenger van everywhere. So, but that was something that, you know, was news to me because I asked him like, well, wait a minute, because the sensors have all been telling me that, you know, I had 35-40% left on the oil life and I should have been able to go another couple thousand miles. He says, yeah, don't ever go off the sensors, especially out here in Arizona. I'm like, what's different about Arizona? I mean, yeah, it gets hot in the summer, but the whole engine runs, you know, anywhere from 50 to 60 degrees hotter than our hottest day. Yeah, right. They're usually running about 200 degrees, uh, but not our hottest day, 115. Right? Um, and so, you know, he's like, oh no, we never go off of those, right? So every 5,000 you need to come in. And he's like, but I still don't know where your oil consumption problem's coming from, so you need to come back in at 1,000 miles and we'll check it. You know, that's totally fine at 1,000 miles. So there was something else going on, who knows.

But interesting.

Um, but yeah, that was what the dealership told me was don't use the oil life remaining percentage, which I thought was— doesn't that kind of defeat the whole system?

You know, you wonder if that's their way of generating extra income, though, by telling you no, no, no, 5,000 miles, be in here.

It's a service department, right? So just like any others, there could be a conflict of interest there. But I would love to hear from our listeners. You know, if you're having success using the, you know, the life remaining, how many of you, if you're using our system or another system that integrates with your telematics, are you using that as a driver for PMs? Just, you know, shoot us an email over podcast@rtafleet.com. I'd love to hear from you on that. But that was, you know, my example of, yeah, maybe the percentage isn't the right way to go. Yeah. I think it, you know, it sounds like the right way, you know, you want to use the analytics, let the machine figure out when it needs an oil change. But there's definitely some gaps. If it didn't know I was, you know, a quart and a half low, and actually it might have been even more. I think he told me I was like almost 2 quarts low, and that thing doesn't take very much.

So, no. You were bone dry.

Yeah, like it was definitely leaking out. So checking my, you know, checking the dipstick is now something that I do on my own, you know, and I do it more frequently than I used to because I know I can't trust the truck, you know, like I can't trust it to like tell me that something's going on that it should know on its own. So as we're looking at that though, you know, I started asking them, well, what are the OEM guidelines, right? I think that's probably the first thing I would start off. If I'm looking at how frequently should I be doing a PM on this vehicle, what does the OEM say? Especially if you've got new vehicles, because the OEM is gonna look at your maintenance records if there's a warranty issue.

Yes.

Right? And so that's a great way to violate your warranty is to not maintain it according to OEM recommendations. Because it's very easy for them to say, well, this was a maintenance problem and you could have prevented it, so we're not going to cover this really expensive repair that you now have. So just even as an insurance policy or as a warranty policy, following the OEM guidelines at least is a great first step. Now, if you've got vehicles that are out of warranty, you know, that kind of takes it off the table. You still have to ask the question, as you know, how often should you do them? But there's times I think even when the OEM guidelines, you know, like I saw one that was, you don't have to change it for 10,000 miles, maybe, right? And this really, it depends on how you're using the vehicle. 'Cause I've seen some trucks that, you know, like, yeah, they're really glorified sedans. They don't tow anything, they don't do anything, they just drive from point to point. They might have, you know, a quick little 15-minute drive here and a 15-minute drive there, but they're not really doing anything. So very light-duty usage. And then other trucks, same 15-minute drive, but they're, you know, they're towing a 10,000-pound trailer behind them. Very different usage, right? And so the mileage isn't necessarily the best. Indicator on how heavy you're running that vehicle, right?

And you know, your environment makes a big difference too, not just whether you're towing or not towing, but yeah, you know, what are you driving on? What kind of roads are you driving?

Are you driving dusty gravel roads? Is it nice pavement?

What's the temperature like where you're going?

Is it stop and go?

Yeah. Do you have precipitation right? Either snow or rain. Yeah, right. All that can affect—

well, snow's a good one. We don't deal with this down here in Phoenix, right? Um, but what do they do when it snows? They salt the roads. What happens when they salt the roads and you get salt and water on your metal? It rusts, rusts everywhere, right? And rust, you know, like your PM schedule for, uh, you know, a vehicle down here in Phoenix is going to be very different, and you're going to look at different things than you would if it was up in Maine. Right, um, just because of the, the weather and the humidity and things like that. So if you're running a nationwide fleet, you have to take that into consideration.

Yeah, every, every shop will have a different guide. Yeah.

And I remember Steve actually told us a story about this, uh, when he was running CNG trucks for a garbage company, and all of a sudden, like, all the CNG trucks stopped working up in the Northeast.

Yes, I do remember that, right? Yep.

And he told the story about, like, they couldn't figure out what was going on, and he finally pulled them out of service. Um, come to find out is because it was cold weather, right? They didn't have a fix from Cummins on that particular type of unit, uh, and so they had to pull them out of service until they could get the cold weather working for these units. Down here in Phoenix, no problem at all, right? And that's where the headquarters of the company is. And so like, they just didn't comprehend that different locations are going to have different use cycles. And so you have to PM them. You can't just say, well, these are all Peterbilt you know, roll-off trucks, we're gonna PM them all the same nationwide. That doesn't work. You know, like, you've got to look at the different operating factors that they're going to be running in. Yeah, you know, a lot of local government fleets, like, you're not going to run into that problem. Uh, you know, you're running in the same areas, right? But if you're a nationwide fleet, you're definitely going to need to look at that. Um, the, the interesting thing I mentioned that, like, the towing You know, there's— if you've got any vehicles that have PTO, you know, they've got the power takeoff units on them, that engine's running and they're not accruing any miles, right? Right. So you could look at engine hours, but the one I really liked, and this is one Grandpa, he pushed so hard— now it's less utilized, but that's using your fuel consumption as a PM guide. And so, you know, thinking about like how far should you be able to go on this many gallons of gasoline. And if you've got a heavy-duty cycle vehicle, well, guess what? That's actually gonna get— it's gonna get lower fuel mileage by using the gallons consumed. If a vehicle's sitting there idling or if a vehicle's, you know, using the PTO, the gallons consumed will trigger a PM, whereas the mileage wouldn't have. If a vehicle's running hard, let's say, you know, like if you're running— you've got a trucking company, right? You guys used to haul like wood chips. Yep. Well, hauling wood chips versus hauling, you know, that same length of trailer, uh, you know, because what you guys would load out probably before you'd weigh out in that case.

Yes.

Right.

And so we'd be way overweight and—

yeah, yeah, right. And so the, you know, the issue would be one truck might be loaded out, which means it's got a full trailer, but it's really not pulling a lot of weight, right? The best example I have is like potato chips.

Yeah, dry— it's dry wood chips.

Dry wood chips, right? And so like, it's just you're gonna, you're gonna fill up that trailer before you're— before you'll hit weight. Yeah, well, that truck's not going to be working as hard as the same truck and trailer, you know, pulling a 53-foot trailer, uh, that's full of Pepsi. Correct. Because it's just— you're going to weigh out before you load out, and so you're going to hit— it's just going to have a lot more weight to it. And looking at those use cases too, what are you hauling? What's the weight it's under? Well, the fuel consumption is going to tell you the difference between those two.

So fuel consumption is an interesting one. So I have never before coming here and hearing that, I've never heard anybody— yeah, any of the maintenance conversation shops I've been around, no one's ever talked about fuel consumption. It's always miles.

Yeah, but no miles equal, you know. But the fuel consumption, you think about it, if you're at a different elevation, it's going to change fuel consumption.

Are you pulling up hills? Not uphill.

Right. Are you coasting? Are you doing all that? Like, how much, how much, you know, gasoline or diesel is running through those pistons? You know, if you're running at 5,000 RPM going up a hill, like, it's gonna consume the same amount of fuel no matter what, right? Like, 5,000 RPM, the fuel injectors are shooting the same amount of fuel. You've got the wide open throttle. Yeah, right. Like, that's— it's just gonna consume more fuel. So it's an indicator that the engine's running heavier or harder per mile than anything else.

And so this is more— it's not really for sedans. This is more for when you're doing more heavy-duty type.

Yep. Garbage trucks, construction equipment, trucking companies would, you know, benefit from doing mileage fire apparatus is probably one of the best to use gallons consumed, you know. So if you've got anybody running fire apparatus, those sit at fire scenes or at emergency scenes and they just sit there and idle.

Yeah, they'll idle for hours.

Or they run the, the water pumps, right? And, you know, when they're, when they're doing pumping, like, that's all coming off the PTO.

Yep.

And so those are load-bearing hours on the engine, but you're not going to see that unless you're tracking hours, you know, engine hours on the vehicle. And even then, an engine hour at idle is very different than an engine hour running a PTO.

Correct.

And so that's where you go back to fuel consumption and say, hey, you know, like, that's going to be the ultimate, you know, equalizer when you're trying to compare different meters to each other. I think more people should be using gallons consumed as a meter, but you can look at that and just see, well, how many gallons consumed does this go through between each mile? And you can turn it over and convert it. And then go through and you set your PM schedules based on that. And then if you have a month that you're using more fuel, then it's going to come in sooner. If you're running light, maybe it sits more this month. You know, maybe you've got snowplows or something like that. They're just not going to consume a lot of fuel. You still set things like alternates. We always recommend having an alternate of like a day PM meter, you know, so it hits 90 days or 120 days. You bring it in anyway.

It's your default. Yep.

Right? Because even if a vehicle sits, and we know this in Arizona, if a vehicle sits, like, the tires can still dry rot. There's things that can happen to the vehicle even just sitting under the sun, right? Weather, rain, snow, precipitation, you know, but like there's just things that happen even when the engine's not running. Because there is more to PMing a vehicle than just lubricating the engine, you know.

It's the whole— you gotta inspect it.

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's greasing all the joints. It's, you know, it's checking for things like, uh, you know, steering wheel wobble. It's checking the interior and making sure the door locks work correctly.

Tires, brakes, no trucking, you're doing airlines, you're doing your fifth wheel.

I mean, yes, and the engine has nothing to do with any of those components, right?

And so, but they all can cause problems down the road.

Yeah, so you always want to make sure you at least have a calendar-based element for those things, but then the, the engine hours or the engine gallons consumed would drive kind of your consumption-based, your utilization-based PM schedules. Yeah. So that's a good recommendation on that one. The other one I see a lot is, you know, people— you see them all the time, you know, salespeople coming in and trying to push, hey, you know, send us your oil, oil sample, we'll tell you if you need to do your PM. What's your experience been with doing oil sampling and predicting a failure?

Yeah, so just a couple times. It hasn't been very often because the couple times that we did oil sampling, we didn't really get any conclusive results based off of it.

Okay.

Right. Because it's kind of— so it's the things that we've already talked about, right? It's the terrain you're in. It's how much weight you're pulling. Like, it's hard. You don't know in trucking, at least you don't know what the weight is that you're going to be hauling, right? You don't know and can't predict whether you're going to go through the hills of Tennessee or the plains of Kansas. Yep. Right. You just don't know that. And the driver impact, just how a driver actually operates the vehicle. Can take a toll on that. So it wasn't very effective just because there was no consistency in routes, there was no consistency in weight, there was no consistency in— I mean, sometimes, you know, a lot of drivers stay in the same vehicle, the same truck, so that would stay the same. But the other factors just seemed to skew it. So you couldn't get a, hey, based on the oil sampling, this is when we think how often you should be doing your PMs.

Yeah. Well, and I've even seen people go to the total extreme, which is we oil sample every vehicle and we send them all out. And they tell us like vehicle by vehicle. At some point that's going to become cost competitive. And I think that's almost what I've heard is that, you know, whatever the cost is for oil sampling, if we're doing it for all the vehicles, it's actually more efficient for us just to change the oil.

Yes.

Like the vehicle's already in the shop, like it's just change the oil and oil's cheap enough that we just, we don't need to sample it.

I mean, time and labor, right? Think about that. If it's a wash on cost, why are you even worrying about it? Yeah.

So that's something if you're looking at oil sampling, compare the cost versus the cost of just doing a regular PM. You might not be saving any money doing oil sampling. And then again, you know, if you've got a really great deal and they're giving you good results, you know, then, then you can use some of that very much the same way that like the, you know, the onboard computers are doing engine oil life remaining. They can look at that and tell you, hey, you know, you've got metal flakes in it, or, you know, like you've got some major water issues in your oil. You know, give you more of a heads up of things that could be going wrong versus just is it time to change your, your oil again? Yeah. You mentioned something though, like about the driver and how the driver can really influence your usage on a vehicle. And I think in a case like you mentioned where the drivers are assigned to the vehicle, one of the things that I think is helpful is not just looking at a truck and saying, okay, well, here's our cost per maintenance mile on the truck. But then taking that driver data and saying, you know, this driver, their overall cost for maintenance compared to another driver in the same exact situation, you know, and you can actually use that as a coaching tool for the drivers, or maybe a way to incentivize it, gamify it, something. But like a corrective tool for the drivers to help. Hey, you know, like, your lead foot is really costing the company a lot of money. Yeah, you know, like, your truck alone, your CPM's 3 or 4 cents higher than the average for our fleet. And, you know, you're driving 80,000 miles a year. So you do the math on that.

Yeah. And it's funny because like a lot of trucking companies will do the fuel consumption, right? They'll judge a driver by that, which how much are you idling versus, you know, what's your miles per gallon. But the cost per maintenance is interesting because a lot of them have gotten away from standards, right? 16-speeds. They've gone straight to automatics, which has actually helped a lot of the maintenance cost improve because some of that cost was associated with just, you know, whether you were double clutching or, you know what I'm saying, like you're, you're downshifting or you're doing something that is just going to put so much more strain on the engine that an automatic helps eliminate some of that. Yeah. Um, but I bet you if a trucking company were to take that factor and look in, hey, what's my maintenance cost per driver, it would be eye-opening. Yeah. Like if you've got a small fleet, you know which drivers are always in the shop. It's easy to know. However, if you have thousands of vehicles and trucks out on the road, you just don't know, right, what that cost is going to be. It would be very, very enlightening, I think, to some people on how often their drivers are in the shop for the same thing.

Yeah, for the same issues. Or like, how often are they changing brakes versus another truck of the same year, make, model?

Tires is a big one.

Tires, brakes, and fuel, right? Like those three expenses for an operating cost. If you've got an aggressive driver, that's where you're going to see it. Oh yeah, those three categories. Yeah.

And if they're not driving enough to make up for that Yeah, you might want to find a new driver, right? Give them a new route, do something, right?

Just— or, you know, it's time to start. Hey, you got to make up the difference. You know, you're costing the company an extra $5,000 a year, $10,000 a year. You know, you're not making that much money, man. No, it just eaten into your— into the, you know, how profitable are you as a driver, right, for the company.

Yeah.

Um, and profits everything for, you know, for trucking just to stay alive. And so Um, the other thing that I like looking at if I'm trying to figure out, are we doing a good job with our PMs, right? Are we doing them enough and are we spending enough time on them? Um, and this was a big one that Grandpa pushed a lot. Steve talks a lot about this one. It's your PM versus corrective ratio. How many repairs are we doing, uh, that we planned for, that were, you know, we found them during the PM process versus, you know, like we— it was a driver report later, you know, between PM cycles, or it was a like a breakdown or a road call on the road. Um, and, you know, coding that in your FMIS and making sure you understand the difference. How many PMs are you doing? How many PM repairs are you doing? You know, those are repairs you find on a PM.

Yep.

Um, and we mentioned this, I think, in the last, uh, in the last time we talked about PMs with checklist, is like the whole point of a PM is to find things wrong. Yes, to prevent, to prevent, right? And then your goal is to find things that are going to go wrong or that are wrong already So you can fix it while it's in the shop now instead of having a breakdown later, right? The whole goal is prevent the breakdown. And so if you're looking at like the PM versus corrective ratio, Grandpa was always a big stickler that that should be at least 50% of your repairs should come from a PM job. And what he meant by that was, you know, about 15% of your time should be spent, you know, your labor hours should be spent doing the PM and doing the inspection. And another 50% should be spent doing repairs that you found from the PM.

Yeah.

So overall, like, 65% of your labor should be coming and be tied directly to a PM line or a PM work order.

Yeah, I mean, ideally that road call breakdown should be zero. Yeah, because you're catching everything and fixing it in the PM. Yeah, right. But you can minimize it for sure because, you know, stuff happens, right?

Yeah, stuff that you didn't find, random, you know, accidents, random whatevers are going to happen. You ran over a tire in the middle, you know, a nail in the middle of the road whatever. There's going to be stuff that's not preventable. But if you're running, you know, and Steve would have a really good number on this, but I would say if you're— if your road calls and breakdowns are anywhere near 5%, your PM program is broken.

Agreed, right?

Like, 5% is really high, you know, for the number of things that you're doing. And so look at your ratios. How much and how many things are you finding during a PM? How much time are you spending on those repairs? And if you're not hitting that at least 65%, Steve would argue 80, that 80% of your repairs should be scheduled versus unscheduled. If you're not hitting those kinds of numbers, you need to be doing either— you need to spend more time on your PMs, you need to train your technicians on finding things wrong versus just doing a lube oil filter, or the third one is you need to step up the frequency. You know, like you're not doing them frequently enough.

Yeah, we, we, we had an issue to where some of our techs were finding issues and saying, oh well, that can wait till the next PM, so we're just going to push it out the door and defer it.

Right, right.

We're totally, you know, because it's not catastrophic at this point in time, it can last, it probably lasts. You know how often you get a breakdown off that same thing when you go ahead and you do the, the, you know, defer, right, to your next PM? All the time.

And now the cost is, you know, you follow the— what do they call this— the inverse square rule, you know, where basically every time that you have a— like, we didn't do it in the shop, it would have cost us $25 to replace that wheel bearing, and we're like, ah, we can go another 5,000 miles. Yeah. And it goes out, and then you have, you know, the wheel bearing, you know, breaks, right? Or you've got a ball joint that pops, and, and now you've got a broken down truck. So you missed the load delivery deadline, you had to send out a tow truck, or maybe you just sent out a mechanic and they're going to fix it on the side of the road. But now that mechanic's got to drive, so you got to pay for the drive time. And so for that $25, you know, for a ball joint, now you're, you're spending, uh, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, possibly $1,000, maybe $1,000 bucks, right? So like, it's, it squares. And so they did the math, and it's like, you know, that $25 part then cost you $225, you know, because 25 times 25. And then if that like breaks down when the middle of their driving and they lose control of the vehicle, uh, maybe it causes an accident, or, you know, like you've got And that's going to be an issue because you now have a documented issue with your asset that you have neglected to fix, especially on something like, you know, like a ball joint. It's probably a really bad example because it's a safety issue. But the issue they run into is that it starts really adding up and you go from, you know, maybe $1,000 to $10,000, and then from $10,000 to $1 million. Yeah. And then from $1 million up to $10 million for negligence and, you know, gross negligence. Yeah.

And it's, it's not just technicians saying we're going to defer to later. The driver's antsy to get back on the road. They need to make money, you know, they've deliver coming up, or, you know, someone's worried about what their downtime performance is and their compliance, you know. So there's all these outside factors too. That's just not technicians saying we'll defer. It's like, you know, they're feeling the pressure.

I see a lot of cities do that. Like, it's like, hey, we've got downtime, we got to get that vehicle on the road. Yep. Police officer, you know, like they're sitting in the waiting room and that officer's on duty and can't answer any calls because their vehicle's in the shop and they don't want to take the loaner.

No one wants to take a loaner. Nobody wants to take the loaner.

And so, you know, like, it just turns into this, this deal of, you know, we're not spending enough time and doing the job when it needs to be done, you know, and deferring. Um, so, you know, like, look at those miles between, look at how often, you know, so we said the, you know, your how much, what your percentage of labor hours is on corrective maintenance versus your PMs. But then also just look at the miles between road calls and breakdowns. Right. How often do you go? And hopefully you're codifying your breakdowns and road calls in your work order system. What's the miles between that? You know, like, what's the difference between the odometers? You know, and measure that across your fleet. And if you've got vehicles that are coming in way too often or they're having breakdowns, up the PM frequency.

Yeah.

You know, bring them in more often. You know, that's a really key metric. I think a lot of people ignore that one. Right, is miles between breakdowns, miles between road calls. But it's a good insight into, you know, if your PM program is really as effective as you think it is. So the other thing that you can do, you know, if you want to spread out the life of your PMs, maybe you only want to bring it in every 10,000 miles.

Great.

Don't be like me and not check your dipstick, right? Have your mechanic or your— not your technicians, your drivers— have them be a part of the PM process. You know, their DVIRs should be a key part of your PMs.

Yes.

So that way, you know, if they do find anything during a DVIR, it's not necessarily a PM at that point, but you're preventing a breakdown still, right? They can— you can go address it before it becomes a really big issue. If they're not doing their DVIRs or they're pencil whipping them or they're not being thorough, that rule of squares comes in and all of a sudden you've got a really expensive repair instead of a cheap one because you're not going to catch everything during a PM, but If you have your drivers doing DVIRs, that's a backstop, right? It's a safety net for the PM program.

Yeah, it's funny because something that's so simple— yeah, takes 10-15 minutes— most people don't even touch it.

No, and it could save you, you know, tens of millions of dollars in some cases. But it's one of those things that, you know, in cybersecurity we talk about security by layers, right? And it's the same thing with PMs, right? It's just security by layers, you know, it's preventative by layers. And the more layers you can add in there, the less likely you are to have a catastrophic incident.

Yes.

So any last thoughts?

I don't. That was actually pretty comprehensive.

Yeah. So hopefully you guys got something out of that. You know, PMs are obviously a big topic around here. We focus a lot on maintenance. It's honestly, it's one of the best ways to reduce your costs and increase your bottom line. You know, just taking care of the equipment. Scheduling and doing repairs while you have the vehicle down already. You know, as much as you can make that, that's a huge efficiency gain.

Yeah. And make sure you've got your own goal for what your compliance is on your PMs.

Yeah.

That you're holding yourself accountable. I mean, if your compliance is in the low teens or under 50% or under 80%, you got some work to do.

Your PM versus corrective.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm assuming your costs are going to be out of control. Like, this is the easiest way to reduce costs in a fleet. Yep.

I think, uh, what did Grandpa say? For every, for every 1 hour of PM, uh, you can save anywhere from 3 to 8 hours of, of corrective labor down the road. That sounds about right. It's just crazy statistic to me. I mean, 3 to 8 is obviously a big range. I think he was hedging his bet a little bit with that one.

Well, but you, you got to count the time that someone's going to come help you, right?

Exactly.

That's added in there.

So you've got a couple hours down, drive time, and then if there's a tow cost or any of that, right? I think that's— it can definitely save a lot of money if you just add a little bit of time to your PMs and do a little bit more thorough of a job and make those checklists. You know, like we talked about the checklist, have that reflect and reinforce your PM program. Yep. So that it's as thorough as it needs to be. So that's going to do it for us today on PMs and how often you should do them. Hopefully you got something out of that. We've got the Fleet Success Summit coming up. We're going to hear from people like Don Osterberg talking about safety. Talking about, you know, preventing and risk management. This is a huge part of that. We've got Tim Ammon, who we just heard from last week. We've got some just awesome people coming in to talk to us about these types of things.

And we had some great conversations so far with these guys on the podcast. Yeah. So if you like what you've heard from them, you know, come to the Fleet Success Summit.

It's just a teaser.

It's a taste.

Yeah.

This is—

that's just—

we're talking to them for 15 minutes where you're going to be able to get an hour of just knowledge dropped on you in ways that you can improve.

Yep. So head out to fleetsuccesssummit.com. They've got the dates, the location. If you want to register for the hotel, register for the event. We'd love to see you there. Again, that's fleetsuccesssummit.com. Otherwise, any comments, questions, we'd love to hear from you. podcast@rtafleet.com. And that's going to do it for us. Until next time.

See you guys.

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.