Episode 156: Your Fleet’s Dashboard Shouldn’t Look Like a NASA Control Room: Managing Data Overload

This is the Fleet Success Show dedicated to helping you and your fleet succeed using the experience of fleet professionals and Hall of Fame fleet legends. The show that explores how the pillars of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management all combine to lead your fleet to success. We're glad you're here. Now let's get into the show. Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show with your regular hosts, Josh Turley, Mark Canton.

Hey, Josh.

How are you doing today?

Good, thanks.

Good. Quick little intros. I'm the CEO over at RTA Fleet. I've been in fleet for over 20 years now, officially I can say that, working on a fleet management software company. Mark, you've been in fleet for more than that.

Yeah, approaching 30 years now.

You know, you've been a consultant, been a fleet manager at a, you know, at a leading university, and you've seen it all, right? You've definitely gotten your hands dirty in the sausage with the data analytics and really understanding what makes fleets tick.

I'd like to, like to think so.

Yeah. Speaking of data, as we've been talking to fleet managers, we've been out on the road, we've been going to the trade show circuit, talking to the editors of magazines, right? We really like to understand and keep our pulse on the industry. Right. Obviously the biggest things people are struggling with are the same things they've been struggling with for years.

Couple years now. Yeah.

Which has been, you know, technician recruiting and retention, which, you know, we've got episodes on that. We're gonna probably drop another one on the recruiting aspect of that.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

EV transition, which I know we have beat that EV horse to death. Next has gotta be solutioning. How do we get around that?

Right.

You know, and you kind of get over the, how impossible the situation is. Now let's figure out what we do in light of that.

Right.

But you know, EV is definitely still gonna be a hot topic and will be for many years.

Yeah.

That's not going away. But another one that really came up and it kind of surprised me, but it didn't surprise me, because I understand what fleets are in the middle of. Um, and it's this concept of data overload. There's just too much data for fleet managers to sift through, be responsible for, to really know how to make a difference, to know what to focus on. 'Cause there's a million different metrics you could track, uh, a million different ways that you can go diagnose issues, or different people have different opinions on what the right metrics are. Um, and it kind of, what do I do? Right. Telematics was supposed to be this huge savior. Instead, it's become just a massive burden. Yeah. we go through and in this age of AI and machine learning, data's supposed to be, you know, giving us all these insights, but without us to feed it, it doesn't tell us anything. And so there's absolutely this sense in the industry of I am overwhelmed by the amount of data and what do I do about the data?

Right.

So I know, you know, like we've talked about this from a high-level kind of concept and I wanted to share some of the things that you've presented, Tron, data management. How do you figure out what matters the most? Yeah. And just kind of go from there. So first thing that you've talked about to get out from under the data mountain, right? To get out from the overwhelming feeling that you have with data, right? Is what?

Well, you need a data management plan, right? Like with everything else, failing to plan is planning to fail kind of a thing, right? And I know that sounds kind of obvious and cliché, but it, It's, it's, it's just true. So, you know, to get yourself out from that, that mountain is okay. Well, from under that mountain is okay. Well, what is it that I'm trying to accomplish? Right. So, uh, by having that plan, not only is that going to cover, you know, how am I collecting data and, and, and, you know, processes and so forth and so on. But so you start with what are my key objectives? What is it that I'm trying to accomplish or work on or improve or discover? Right. And whatever the answer is to that, that tells you the metrics that you need, right? So for example, let's say I suspect that, uh, my technicians are not producing as much as they could. Or let's say I suspect that I need more technicians than I have, right? You have an objective somewhere around, you know, getting a sense of how much productivity is reasonable for you to expect from your shop, right? And so that is then going to lead to, and just in this example, a metric like, you know, technician productivity. How many hours are they spending billing to work order, turning wrenches actually on an asset versus all the other things that a technician might have to do? Sweeping the floor, depending on, you know, some government shops, it's sad, but they'll have them delivering mail and things like that, right? But, you know, so that's my metric. Okay, now I have my metric. It's productivity. How many hours billed to work order? Well, that then tells you a little bit about the data you need to accomplish that objective, right? I need to collect how many hours are going on work orders, how many hours are not, uh, how many hours are we paying them for? Correct. Right. Yeah. Okay. And that, and so that feeds you, uh, that, that kind of concept, you know, essentially brings you to where you're focused in on the pieces that you need most, right? We always talk a lot about, and Steve Saltzgiver as well, right? Um, You know, focus on the critical few, right? You're not going to reasonably tackle in a true comprehensive way 35 metrics, and in the same way you can't tackle 35 objectives. People sort of know that intuitively, right? Like when you make your strategic plan for the year, you usually have 1 to 3 goals maybe that this is what I'm trying to hit a home run on, right? And so the same thing would work here, right? What am I trying to hit a home run on? Those are my objectives, right? And then what are the metrics that tell me the most about that objective, right? And then again, and then from there you start to figure out, well, what data do I need to calculate those metrics? And you can get help on that. Once you zone in on, hey, I need these few, right? Because people will come to us all the time and they'll say, well, Mark, what are the most important metrics? Well, I can give you an answer and we have a little bit, right? In general, this is the answer, but, but If you tell me what's going on in your shop, I can give you a lot better answer. Right. So again, have those objectives. And now when you go out into the industry and you're looking for help on how do I measure this, how to improve it, you're going to get a lot more of a specific answer.

Right.

On exactly how to do that.

Because you've hit the nail, which is what's important to you.

Right.

Right. I can give you 500 metrics, but what's important to you? And then I'll tell you what you need to track from that.

Right.

I'm always reminded of, you know, from Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. Yeah. Down the rabbit hole. You know, and Alice comes up to the fork in the road, says, well, which way should I go? And the Cheshire Cat's like, well, where do you want to be? If you don't know, then it doesn't matter.

Great example.

Yeah. You know, and I think that's a great— when we think about objectives and metrics, you can ask for, how do I focus on, you know, I'm overwhelmed by data. How do I make sure I'm focused on the right data? Well, what's the right data? Where do you want to be? Where do you want to go? What's your problems? And that will dictate what's the right data. Otherwise you're Alice sitting at the fork in the road and it really doesn't matter.

Right.

Pick something.

Exactly.

You know, you've got to figure out what's important to you.

Exactly.

And that starts with a data management plan.

Exactly. The plan is going to dictate to you, you know, it's going to start there. And then from there, okay, now I know the metric, the, so I got the objectives, I got the metrics, I got the data. Okay. Now I can think about how am I going to capture that data? What are my rules around the capturing that data? What are my policies, my procedures, et cetera, et cetera. Right. To make sure that I'm getting that data and it's good, clean data and it's, you you know, it's not garbage in so that I'm not getting garbage out, right? But there's a clear logical flow there. Uh, and then people say, well, but you know, I don't want to only do 3 metrics, right? I want to grow in my sophistication and that's fine. Kudos to you, right? But where are you today? Right? Get the 3 done and then add another 3 next year. Or if maybe you find that, hey, I hit a home run, we got this nailed. Maybe it's in 6 months then, right? Whatever it is. You can keep adding and keep adding. And in no time you'll find that there are 15, 20 metrics, you know, sort of in your toolbox that you can turn to at any time. But you probably don't even need to be looking at all of those every day. Right. But they're there for you kind of thing.

Right. The way I think about those ones, you know, we call them like our operating metrics. If you come in into RTA, you look up on our dashboards, we have probably 12 to 15 different metrics that are on there. There's 2 or 3 that get big squares. Right. And they get the eyeballs and they get the attention. But then there's a lot of supporting metrics. The idea being is that you've picked out, you focused on, and then as you build that muscle over time, okay, well now this has kind of just taken care of itself. It's on autopilot. It doesn't go away. You want to keep measuring it because otherwise you'll forget about it.

Right.

But what you want to do is you're going to decrease the frequency you're looking at that data, right? Maybe you're not looking at it daily. Now you're looking at it weekly. Right. And then you have a bucket of stuff that goes from weekly to monthly and then stuff that goes from monthly to every quarter. We just check on this just to make sure it's not gotten out of control.

Exactly.

Cause what you don't want to have happen, that's like putting out a fire. You don't want a hotspot to all of a sudden flare up and now you got to go deal with the problem that you already fixed. Yes.

Right.

And that will happen if you're focused on the wrong things or you start ignoring things that you've already dealt with.

Right.

And so the idea is just to decrease the frequency, but don't let it go away. Still have that muscle of measuring and reporting that data.

Right.

So we really like having a dashboard that has those metrics, but then it allows you to prioritize and focus on the vital few.

Right.

We have a saying, which is, uh, if everything's important, then nothing's important. Right, exactly. So you really do have to get clear about what's most important. What's your objective? What are the key metrics that are going to support or show evidence of success? It's another way I like to phrase it, uh, that we're achieving the objective. And then what are the data points that we need to feed that?

Right.

I think the other piece that's really critical on the data management plan is what do you do with all the data that doesn't support those metrics?

Right.

But I think this is a piece a lot of people forget about and maybe this is where they get stuck because we don't want to just throw that data away, right? You want to stay and keep focused on that data, not keep focused on it, but you want to capture that data still, right? There's still value in that data.

It could—

you don't want to look at it, right? So make sure the data management plan talks about here's what we're focused on, here's what we're measuring, here's the data points we need for it. Anything that's not those data points, we're going to capture and store over here. But we're not worried about them.

Right.

Right. We'll look at them. We need them because when you start doing analysis for what do I need to focus on next, right?

Maybe you want that, right?

You're going to need some of those other data points. Yeah. But don't sit there and stress about, well, how do I measure this metric and this metric and this metric if they're not in your top 3? Build out your first top 3, then your next top 3, then your next top 3.

Right.

And if you're missing a piece of data, well, then part of the objective is get good data surrounding that metric.

Right.

Exactly. So you kind of pivot on that.

Yeah. And to your point, like, cause there's this sense, you use the word overload, which is exactly it. It's like, what do I do with all this? You know, Paul Lauria used to talk about, you know, cause I used to get all excited. We'd go into a gig and I'd be like, oh, they need, they need telematics. They could do so much. They could do that and they could save on fuel and they can, and I, you know, like a kid, I'd be all the things we're going to do for them and solve all their problems for them. Right. And he'd say, Mark, their mechanics are getting 1,100 hours of productivity a year. And they don't know that. You have to tell them, you know, they're not ready for telematics, right? And I didn't appreciate his point at first, but boy, do I appreciate his point today, right? It's, you know, this is how folks create the overload. They go out, and I'm not trying to pick on telematics because you can pick a whole slew of other technologies out there, right? But you go out and they think the telematics is somehow the solution for their data problems. And it's like, no, no, it's only going to compound it. If you're not using the data you already have in the best way you can, then adding more data to it is just going to create that feeling of overload even, even stronger, right? So the warning here is in that data management plan, spell out the technology that you're going to use to do that, right? And that's your need to capture that. That's a, that's a key point. And again, I'm not trying to, I'm a telematics fan. I love what this stuff does. You know, I love all the new technologies with tire pressures and, you know, like give it all to me, right? Yeah. But you got to understand, you got to be honest with yourself. Where are we in our organization on that growth chart of sophistication and leveraging data? And if you're in your infancy, man, you don't need 15 different technologies. You got your FMIS and you're golden, right? And if you're somewhere in the middle or somewhere super sophisticated, great. You know, I mean, we know we have clients who have us and then they have a telematics provider and a fuel provider and a and a remote tire pressure and a remote temperature gauge for their food. And like, it's amazing, right? Great. But they're capable of that and they have the resources for that. Right. So I just want to call that out. I think that's a key point.

Yeah. Well, and I think understanding is that you don't have to do it all today.

Right.

As we talk about, like, they're not ready for this. I think about, there's a video going around and you see lots of these on LinkedIn, Facebook, or whatever, about, you know, like these fitness gurus coming out. And how to do a pull-up, right? And they don't start with a pull-up and they're like, you start with 10 scapular rows. You can do that.

Right.

Then move on to this exercise. Right. And it's like 5 or 6 exercises that you have to do 10 of before you're ready to do your first pull-up. Right. Right. And sometimes we do that. We get this sophistication bias. I just need telematics. That, that data is going to solve all my problems. And we run out, we get the thing, and then we're not sure how to handle the data because we haven't done all the prep work. Correct. To get that discipline in place.

Correct.

So I think for a lot of our listeners, like we say, hey, start with the simple things, start with the basics and then work your way out. And as you develop that muscle, right? Like you're not going to go out and sprint in the 400 medley relay. You have to build up and start doing the hundreds, just get out walking if you're not walking, right? Like you have to build those muscles in order to go faster and do more.

Right.

So start with the basics and kind of work your way out there.

Yeah. I'll give some real quick, real-world examples of the kind of thing we're talking about, right? Like, People say, Mark, I gotta get telematics because my leadership want me to do rightsizing. They want me to study utilization, all that. And hey, I'm here to tell you, you can do a rightsizing study, okay, without telematics. If you're using your FMIS properly, right, or halfway decently, you can get a lot out of that. And you can absolutely do a legitimate utilization analysis and rightsizing. Don't get me wrong, telematics makes you, enables you to do some even cooler, more sophisticated things with it. Yeah, all for it, but you don't need it today, right? And the same is true of you. Oh, I want to look at, you know, potential fuel idling savings. Same thing. Telematics is an awesome tool for that. You can hit a grand slam very quickly once you implement it and you have a good data management plan. But I can tell you a lot about idling from just the data that we collect in our FMIS. So again, the tech solution isn't always sort of the end-all be-all. It's really your ability to manage the data. And then the tech solution complements that. Once you have that sophistication, Well, now you can do cooler and cooler and cooler stuff, right?

It's the big sexy thing, right? Whereas the basics is the fundamentals, right? How do you lose weight? It's the fundamentals. Diet, eat a little less and then exercise, right? You can sit there and you can't outwork a bad diet, right? So it's the— I know a lot of things, but you got to do the simple things and then work on the advanced stuff.

Right.

And then that'll be the thing. But we always want the sexy thing. We always want the quick fix. We always want the, you know, the super pill.

Yeah.

And telematics a lot of times ends up being, you know, it's a super pill that does a lot of not good because it just gives you more data and you aren't good at managing your data in the first place. Right, exactly. Because no one goes to school for fleet management, chances are you were never formally trained on how to successfully lead a fleet. That's where the Fleet Success Playbook comes in. The Fleet Success Playbook is your guide to building a safe, reliable, and efficient fleet that provides exceptional service. Learn all about the 4 pillars of fleet success: stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management. Get nearly 100 years of combined advice on common challenges, practical solutions, actionable tips, and real examples from fleet industry experts who have been there and done that. Visit www.fleetsuccessplaybook.com. To request your free copy today. The other thing I really like to point out is you can have, let's say we already know our number one metric that we always say is availability, right? And you should be at 95% availability. That's the benchmark, right? We say that until we're blue in the face. One of my favorite quotes though, is if you don't know why you're winning, it's going to be temporary. And if you don't know why you're losing, it's going to be permanent, right? Right. And so, you know, and I'll say that again for the camera. If you don't know why you're winning, it's going to be temporary. If you don't know why you're losing, it's going to be permanent. And so if you're measuring availability and you're like, oh, look at this, I've done this. I've been in a, in a trade show. I'm speaking about it. And somebody's like, I asked the question, what's everybody's availability like? Anybody have over 95%? And I get all these hands that pop up and I'm like, y'all lying. We're like, come on. I know better. But sure, okay, fine. You're at 95%. And then I ask the question, why are you at 95%? And nobody has an answer.

Right.

Perfect. Well, call me in 6 months because you're not going to be at 95% for very long. Very long. Right. And the idea is that because they don't really understand, they might get lucky and they might, you know, end up on the right side of the scoreboard. But they're not going to be there for very long if they don't fix the fundamentals. Another story, right? So this weekend I'm watching the ASU football game, right? Sun Devils are playing UCF, University of Central Florida. And I was sitting here looking at, I'm watching the game. I'm like, man, we're going to lose this game. I don't know how we're up right now, but we're up, but we're going to lose this game. They are absolutely, we're not stopping them on defense. And you know, we're not doing very well on offense. Uh, but then all of a sudden, you know, we get a special teams return kick for a touchdown, right? We block a punt and return it for a touchdown. And then within 2 plays, we have a pick 6, right? So we flip, we score 14 points in less than 9 seconds. Is insane.

Fuck all the— that out.

Throw all the window out there, right? Like, you know, it doesn't matter that we're down in total yardage. Doesn't matter that we have been dominated in time of possession. Doesn't matter, right? I mean, like, and turnovers do that. Turnovers will flip the field on you. But at the end of the day, we won the game and there was only one metric that mattered, right? It was the scoreboard. Scoreboard. Yeah. And so the same is true for Fleet. There's really only one metric that matters. But you're not going to get lucky all the time. You're not going to get turnovers that turn into points. You're not going to, you know, have these magical special teams plays. Another thing that happened, UCF kicks a field goal, bounces off of two uprights before falling out of the field goal post. Right. So it's just hard to do.

Right.

But they didn't score a field goal, which would have been a huge difference maker in the game. Right. Right. So there's a lot of those kinds of things, but if we don't know why we're winning, it's, we might get lucky once or twice, right? Broken clock is right twice a day. But if we don't know why we're losing, we're never going to get out of that pit hole. Right. Right. I mean, guess what? Because it's temporary. If you don't know why you're winning, you're going to start losing eventually. And if you don't know why you're losing, like that luck will just run out and then you're going to be right. Looking for another job.

Yeah. See, and what's cool about that example to me, like if I told you that, if I said in advance, right, hey, you're going to win, but you're going to get dominated in time of possession, dominated in yards, dominate. You know, could you guess some things that are going to go your way, right? You're going to guess, yeah, that means I'm going to have some turnovers, right? They're going to miss a 3-pointer or maybe some extra, an extra points, right? They're going to have a few misses, right? You can guess some of the things that had to have been true for that to play out that way, right? Kind of a thing. And it's the same thing with us. Like we'll talk about availability and you'll say, hey man, but my PM compliance is horrible. And I'll say, okay, well then I'm willing to bet you're replacing your vehicles really quickly, right? Or at least on time, right? Because you're mitigating a lot of the bad that would have come out of that, right? And you know, what's your breakdown rate? Let me know that, right? Let's do, that's the next thing I'm going to, right? To make sure, is that availability legit or is it not? So to your point, there are ways to, you know, sort of to mitigate if we're bad in one area, we can be good in another area, right? And that's how we win the game, the ultimate. Right. We see that in sports all the time. Terrible offensive team dominating defensive team and they win the Super Bowl or vice versa.

Yep.

Right. So that same thing can be very true. You can be bad at PM compliance, but great at replacing the assets. Guess what? You're going to mitigate a lot of the negatives of the PM compliance because you're getting rid of the vehicle before the impact of that starts to play out.

Right, right.

So the same thing is true. Right. And but you got to know it to your point. You got to know it because if you have no idea, that's why you're winning.

And then all of a sudden we have an issue with supply chain or you don't get your replacement budget or, you know, like—

Which we saw happen, right?

And fleets kind of like, oh, I've got to go out of state to acquire vehicles now. Yeah. You can't buy them in California.

Right.

We're doing a whole nother episode on that, by the way.

Sure.

Inside here. But if you don't know why, right, all of a sudden something's going to change in your world and you're going to be upside down and you're not going to know what's coming. Right, right. Whereas if you know that your availability is entirely dependent on your replacement plan, then you make sure you protect that replacement plan with your life, right? Because that's the only thing keeping you in service right now.

Exactly.

So it's definitely— you have to understand why you're winning, what's feeding that success. But it doesn't matter if you don't know what matters.

Exactly.

At the end of the day, if you don't know what you should be tracking, then it really doesn't matter, which is why you have to get clear about what's most important right now. Obviously, we will argue till we're blue in the face that your number one should be availability, right? But then very shortly after that, once you've got your availability down, then there's going to be a lot of other feeder metrics, right? You have to figure out what's most important to your organization, to your stakeholders, to their customers, right? Like, what is it that's going to, you know, keep the shop running? Start on that. Productivity is a great one. You know, we've, we talked, we've got episodes on top metrics and things like that. Like a top 10 post, but you have to focus on what matters most right now.

Right.

and then that will feed everything else.

If you're an outsourced shop, productivity is not all that meaningful to you. Exactly. But you still care about work order turn times just like the in-house shop does, right? So again, you know, there'll, there'll be that overlap. There'll be the metrics that'll be, be relevant. In the end, it's all about keeping those vehicles on the road so that the people who need to use 'em can use 'em. Yeah.

If you're having budget overruns and you're, you're trying to figure out where it's coming from, is it a, a, you know, a, a CapEx issue or an OpEx issue?

Right.

If it's an OpEx issue, then is it a fuel thing? Is it a, and that M&R thing, right? Like what's driving the cap or the OpEx, right? And you just, you start breaking it down there. And that's like the objective could simply be, I want to get my budgeted OpEx under control. Okay. What are the feeder metrics for that? Fuel, you know, which is going to go miles per gallon, right? There's going to be several pieces of data you're going to need for those elements.

Correct.

And it's M&R. Well, now I want to know my productivity, my labor costs.

Correct.

What is my work order turn times? How many of these are under warranty, not under warranty, right? And then you go and you look at the whole thing, the total cost of ownership to try to figure out what's driving your budget overruns.

Right.

But the objective is I need to get back under budget.

Right, exactly.

So you just— you have to look at the whole picture to figure out what matters most right now.

Yeah. And it's so funny, remember, folks have heard us say this, but, you know, CapEx and OpEx, at least in fleet, I can't speak to other industries, it's a lot like E equals MC squared, right? What you put into one side, you're going to get out the other. So that's a great place to look. If you're constantly overwriting on operating and you've done all the digging and you can't come up with a solution, it could simply be I'm not spending enough on CapEx to keep my OpEx down, right? That's a, that's a real possibility as well. But again, we've gotten into that, right? Replacement planning, replacement execution. Your replacement program mitigates some of these issues. Yeah, yeah.

Staffing levels. I mean, there's so many things that go from there.

Yeah.

But yeah, if you got— we've already said it in this episode.

Yeah.

If you just get your replacement plan in place, you're going to fix a lot of other problems. Yeah, exactly. Fuel consumption will go down, M&R will go down, your CapEx will be up, but all the other residual effects of that, you're going to have less accidents because the vehicles are safer.

Right.

There's a million reasons why you need to get your replacement program in place. Yeah. Availability, number one.

Yeah. I'll throw a quick plug though. I had someone ask me a question recently that I thought was a good one because one of the metrics people look at a lot is average age.

Yeah.

And it's a reasonable metric to look at. And under consistent situation, it makes a lot of sense, right? You want to know what your median age is and you want to make sure you're distributing vehicles properly. There's a whole bunch of things. But here's the thing. If you're a growing company or a growing organization, meaning you're adding to fleet with some level of consistency for whatever reason, right? Your company's doing well, maybe your city is growing in population. If you're adding consistently year over year, be careful. Age will deceive you. Yes, it will, because those new vehicles, right, they will skew what your average age is and will make you think that you're doing a good job replacing vehicles as well. And it will be difficult for the folks in finance and leadership to comprehend that, right? So you really do got to zone in on this concept of the replacement backlog, which we've talked about before, right? Knowing exactly how many of your assets are past their life and how much that cost is and keeping an eye on that and keeping that under control is, it's the most under-exercised muscle in fleet, I believe.

Well, and it's kind of like this idea of like you have to take out the net new vehicles, right? You gotta subtract that out to figure out what the average age is. And if every year adding another set of net new vehicles, that's now impacting. And so looking at the replacement backlog is the simplest and easiest way to figure out how overdue you are with your replacement plan.

Right.

It's not gonna be the average age of your fleet. It's gonna be the replacement backlog.

Yeah.

And maybe even like, you know, okay, take it another step further. What's the average age of the replacement backlog? Yeah, that's a great, great— compared to the average age of the fleet. And that will tell you too, shoot, that is trending in the wrong direction. Um, and we need to get control of that. Otherwise it's gonna come back around and all of a sudden our availability's gonna tank and we're not gonna know why.

Right, right, exactly. So, and I worry about this. I really do. You know, we talk to fleets, hey, what have you learned from, you know, the pandemic and from the supply chain issues? What do you, oh, I've learned a lot. Okay, what are you doing differently? Crickets, you know, you're doing the same thing. I will tell you that if you got a really solid replacement program in place, it just would not have hurt you the way it hurt others, right? Because we've seen the data, we know the lifecycle analysis. Plus or minus a year just doesn't hurt you that much. But it's a growth, it's an exponential curve. And so 3 years out, man, you're hurting. You really needed to get rid of that vehicle. 10 years out, forget it. Right. And so this concept is just core to everything. If you're dealing with EVs, you know, my biggest fear, especially for government fleets, is they're under the pressure to go EV and they have to purchase EVs. They have such— most government fleets have such a tremendous backlog of assets that only got compounded with What do we do there? Right? Like, it's just such a mountain for them to climb. Uh, and, and they don't know it yet.

So, well, and being able to tell that story, I think a big reason why replacement budgets are, you know, they're hard to get, they're hard to come by is because we can't get management buy-in.

Right.

Right. And so you need something to be able to back your stuff up. Right. And it comes down to data. So if your objective is, it's a terrific objective, by the way, say, pay attention, write her down. Yeah. Um, if your objective is to get your replacement plan back in check, well then you know right away you're going to need data around average age of the fleet, right? What's my replacement backlog, right? What's the cost going to be to replace these vehicles? What are the costs if we don't replace these vehicles, right? Uh, you're going to have to start measuring all these things. That's the only way that you're going to get management buy-in is if you can tell the story. We have a whole episode on this, which is speaking in their language. You have to be able to speak in their language, which is Numbers, right? Numbers and financial. What's the impact to them by not moving, by not taking action, things like that. But you have to have the data. You gotta have a good system, right? We always recommend our system, but there's a million out there. You have to have good data. You have to have a good system that will tell your story with you and for you and give you the backup that you need to go and present to city council, the board of supervisors, your upper management. You know, if you're in a corporate fleet, uh, to be able to go up to, you know, the CFO's office and say, hey, we need to get this under control. Otherwise, XYZ, here's the consequences of inaction. Yeah. But a lot of fleet managers, we struggle with that aspect. Intuitively we know that we need to get this under control. Intuitively we understand.

Right.

But we're so overwhelmed by the amount of data and we don't know where to start. And it's honestly, it could just be as simple as if you need help figuring that out, call us. Call us. Call us, talk to us, go up on the NFA boards. I mean, there's a million resources and fleets are always willing to help each other out. But if you need somebody to help come and tell your story, I mean, that's what our consulting is built for. That's, we built our FMIS around telling the story with data, right? To give you this, you know, here, here's all the snapshots and the metrics you want. Now we're going to cherry pick those and put it together in a slideshow. You can go take that to management and, and you should be able to get that back. Yeah.

That's one of the things I like about our dashboards and our reporting features, right? We have that baseline or, you know, that benchmark plan there where you could see all of the ups and downs of the things that are due for replacement over the next years and the amount of capital costs you need to be prepared for. For, uh, we'll calculate backlog for you and, and so forth. But to your point, right? If you're not with RTA, this is not something that's insurmountable. You can do it. You can get help on it. Uh, give us a call. But again, telling this story is so key. It's, you know, I think because fleet managers are, we naturally have a little bit of hero complex, I think. And I think that, you know, we, we talk about wearing the firefighter's hat, uh, but we do it with pride. And so we put out fires all day long. And that's part of who we are, right? And so we get so caught up on that operational, and this is something you talk about a lot and you remind me to do a lot, and I appreciate is, you know, we're so busy working in the business, we forget to step back and work on the business, right?

Yep.

Replacement planning is a really good example of that, right? Like you can optimize this fleet and make sure that tech knows that and work on productivity and all of that is super important to a great running shop. Don't get me wrong, but man, if you could step back and get that replacement plan under control, it's going to help you in so many ways and it'll actually in the long term free up time for you to go do those other things that you really want to do and maybe put out less fires, right?

Uh, so I do think that is, you know, that's probably the number one symptom. Like if you are feeling overwhelmed by data is because you haven't spent enough time working on the fleet, uh, you're spending too much time working in the fleet. And so for you, you just can't get strategic. You can't think about what matters most. What do we need to focus on next? And if you're not doing that, The question I always ask my team, right, is, well, if not you, then who? Then who, right? And the odds are is if you look at your team, there's nobody else on your team that can do that job, right? Which is why it falls on you.

Yes.

And if you're doing somebody else's job, then, you know, football team analogy, right? You're not minding your gap. That's right where the running back's going to come right up and you're going to get blown up because you were out of the lane, right? You were off. You weren't. Paying attention to your assignment. Uh, you were trying to be a hero. You had dirty eyes looking in the backfield and you're out of line. You missed your gap coverage. Yeah.

So, and we get it. We get it. I get it. I'm guilty of it. God knows, but who's going to do all that other stuff? Someone's got to do it. I get it. I get it. But this will help you, man.

It needs to either not get done.

Right.

Right. We say delete, automate, or delegate.

Right.

Right. Delete, automate, or delegate. You gotta get into dad mode, we call it. Uh, but essentially it's this principle, which is, you know, you either don't do it. Or you have to figure out how to automate it so you don't have to spend as much time on it, or you need to delegate it to somebody else because it just— you can't be the one doing it, especially if it's not something that, you know, is going to actually move the needle. And it's not one of your "if not you, then who" jobs. Right, right. If it's one of those, then you have to do it.

Right.

The problem is we neglect the "if not you, then who's" for the easy, the comfort zone stuff, the like, I want to be it for everybody. I want to be the fleet czar. I want to do this, whatever. That's a good way. We ignore the if not you, then who's.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great call. So step one in data information overload maybe is remembering to step back. What do I need to do to work on the business instead of in the business? That gives you some clarity around what those objectives need to be. And then we continue from there. All right. Objectives tell me the metrics. Metrics tell me the data. Data tells me the policies and procedures I need. and maybe technology I need.

Right. Processes, right? Like that's where you go in and you start making changes. Okay, we need to collect that data element so that we can feed this so that that feeds that, right? Like, but you have to start with the end in mind to work your way down that value chain.

Right.

So, all right, well, that's gonna wrap it up for us for this episode. Um, as always, we love having you on the show. If you have any questions, anything that you want to, uh, see us cover, just email us podcast@rtafleet.com. Uh, we'd love to have you. If you want a copy of the Fleet Success Playbook, you can go out to fleetsuccessplaybook.com. we'll send you a free copy of that playbook anytime you need. If you've got a team that wants to read it, let us know. Uh, we're happy to share that knowledge with the world. Uh, but otherwise, until next time.

See ya, everyone.

We hope you enjoyed the show. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on LinkedIn, or leave a review. Want to learn more about our fleet management software, Fleet 360? Check us out at rtafleet.com. If you want to learn more about having your fleet evaluated by our consulting team, go to FleetConsulting.com.